Windows dynamically takes more memory.

[Gat Pelsinger]

I've noticed that the more memory you have, Windows will just take more of it when idle. I saw a guy with 128GB of ram and Windows was idling at 15 GB of use. When LTT did that 2TB of ram video, Windows was idling at 26.9 (nice?) GB of usage. I want to know, what the hell Windows even has left to load besides the whole root directory in memory? And is there any way to manipulate this perhaps?

[Eigenvektor]

It caches things like recently/frequently loaded programs etc. to speed up future starts off these.

 

I don't know if this can be modified, but there should be no reason to. Windows will make that memory available when needed by a running application. So there's no drawback to it using more. Quite the opposite actually; more things can benefit from faster access.

[okkee]

23 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

I've noticed that the more memory you have, Windows will just take more of it when idle. I saw a guy with 128GB of ram and Windows was idling at 15 GB of use. When LTT did that 2TB of ram video, Windows was idling at 26.9 (nice?) GB of usage. I want to know, what the hell Windows even has left to load besides the whole root directory in memory? And is there any way to manipulate this perhaps?

not too sure if this is related but it seems to be answering how windows uses ram https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/tbwmq3/why_is_windows_10_taking_so_much_ram/

and https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/what-is-superfetch/

 

[OddOod]

I idle at 18-20GB on my 32GB main rig. Windows just likes to keep recent stuff handy and it's been eons since Chrome had to reload a page for me

[Gat Pelsinger]

11 minutes ago, OddOod said:

I idle at 18-20GB on my 32GB main rig. Windows just likes to keep recent stuff handy and it's been eons since Chrome had to reload a page for me

18-20 GB idle? I don't think you understand what I mean. Windows will never load that much in only 32 gigs. You surely will have a lot of stuff open in background.

[Alex Atkin UK]

31 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

It caches things like recently/frequently loaded programs etc. to speed up future starts off these.

 

I don't know if this can be modified, but there should be no reason to. Windows will make that memory available when needed by a running application. So there's no drawback to it using more. Quite the opposite actually; more things can benefit from faster access.

Even with a fast SSD, it speeds up load times in games where you are fast-traveling to places you haven't been in a while (so the game removed the assets from RAM) but you had been earlier (so Windows kept them in the cache).  Should also reduce asset/texture pop-in.

 

Its why I always go for twice as much RAM as people recommend.   In a NAS it makes an even bigger difference as it can cache writes, directory structures, etc.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@okkee I don't think it is SysMain (Superfetch). It is a more higher level service which only allocates memory as standby memory, which is NOT counted as used memory.

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@okkee I don't think it is SysMain (Superfetch). It is a more higher level service which only allocates memory as standby memory, which is NOT counted as used memory.

It does not count as "used" because it is only used as a cache that will be dropped when more memory is required elsewhere.

[da na]

Almost all of my laptops have 4GB RAM, I idle at around 1.3gb memory usage on those, just on Windows 10 Pro with no debloating except disabling updates. But my workstation with 64GB, well, I idle at close to 7. Pretty interesting.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@Eigenvektor

 

Ya so exactly, it is not sysmain that results in higher memory usage. I wonder which element of windows does exactly take all that memory. Drivers? Kernel? Services? Core components? If you know of an advanced program you can use, can you check?

[Eigenvektor]

34 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

Ya so exactly, it is not sysmain that results in higher memory usage. I wonder which element of windows does exactly take all that memory. Drivers? Kernel? Services? Core components? If you know of an advanced program you can use, can you check?

I would assume the kernel does. Not on Windows, so no, I can't. The one program I know of that can provide a more detailed breakdown would be RAMMap