I am facing a strange issue since 21H1. I have 8gb physical ram installed but somehow windows insist on using "virtual ram" for certain programs resulting in below situation. This is causing various annoying issue where I encounter "windows ran out of memory error" despite having more than enough physical ram available. is this normal behaviour or some win 10 bug? I guess this needs some testing in Vms so tagging some experienced users I knowhere, please tag others you think who might help. @Enthousiast @abbodi1406
Just an annotation to this (and maybe a thing to check); It is not sufficient to have enough available RAM (having actual free, unused RAM is wasting resources), but it also must not be too fragmented. Programs, especially demanding ones, need chunks of RAM in continuous blocks of certain minimum size, they cannot make use of the hundreds to thousands of tiny bits of space that may be available. So, Windows may start trashing to disk much sooner than expected, if no continuous RAM block large enough to cover the size asked by the program is available.
While the whole "internet" is parroting the contrary, the reality is that: free RAM = Immediately available. It's zeroed and most likely contiguous = best RAM for the desktop role launching many different apps, huge ones like games that are rather un-cache-able (while a server goes for background services tuning). stand-by RAM = Immediately discardable, but NOT Immediately available, and most likely fragmented. It requires zeroing to be used, and that operation is no longer as fast as it can be due to CPU vulnerabilities mitigations. Having the RAM filled with garbage by Windows was never great - more miss than hit, like keeping previously played media files, previous installers and other temporary files (and telemetry recordings) and way less useful things, like user browser dll's and other daily programs resources. This zealous caching with a bias for ms stuff feels like an abuse and wasting of resources in the era of SSDs and upcoming Direct-Storage anyway. Microsoft does have a vested interest to make it appear as not an issue, because they work tirelessly to bloat this dreadful OS with their services. Disregard that dev-turned-talking-head Raymond Chen. It gets worse when Microsoft fks up, for example the entire span of 1703 to 1709 to 1803, they borked a memory allocation flag that resulted in improper clearing of stand-by RAM, and causing stutters in games. They might have done it again. I find lots of garbage under latest OS build stand-by RAM lists, nothing improved. You are never gonna have actual free, completely unused "virgin" RAM more than a hundreds of KB, because Windows is not completely stupid and will start zero-ing it in the background, so the "internet" premise is false. Peak performance is when you have enough RAM, you don't disable the pagefile because you're not stupid, and you keep microsoft's garbage in-check if you don't have 16 (or should I say 32) GB or RAM to accommodate it. ATM I have <1MB of actual free RAM, 2GB of free = zeroed RAM, 7GB of stand-by RAM, out of 12GB. With my shell, total commander with plugins, editors, librewolf, monitoring tools running. That's almost decent for work, without reg tweaks, just disabling Edge, OneDrive and MSN+Bing stuff. But when gaming, it is sub-par.
@BAU any idea/trick to minimize this issue while using chromium based browser on latest win 10 versions as this does not happen on win 8.1 latest updated version?
chromium rigid security model and architecture goes hand-in-hand with windows's own tendency to waste ram plus security mitigations. And you can't tweak anything significant. That's why I've mentioned I use a firefox-based portable browser - I can tweak the cache and other things that lower ram usage, but it comes with it's downsides (all websites being optimized for chromium, so I sometimes have to deal with annoying quirks). So, I got nothing. Download moar ram?
I prefer not to spend on 8gb ram just to run browser continuously(this issue needs me to restart pc/browser once in a few days). Do you think increasing page file size would help, earlier it was around 2gb & when I increased it to 3gb it delays the issue by some days(it is also cheaper as it just need me to move some stuff from system drive to my other drives to make space)?
"incognito mode" is snake-oil.. you're making your browsing more difficult for no real privacy benefits. Client-side stuff is borderline useless these days, all the pesky cdns colluding against end users happens out of sight, server-side. No wonder your ram usage explodes.
@Enthousiast Where to get the old insider preview ISOs? Like: 19041.84 ISOs, Techbench dump no longer works. Code: Windows10_InsiderPreview_ChinaOnly_x64_zh-cn_19041.iso *e55de9c8fffbcde4c0f1efa1daa9830b8271116b Windows10_InsiderPreview_ChinaOnly_x32_zh-cn_19041.iso *9b08eacdcd44e2c6cced0f992d7ef97f3bd0afa7
What tweaks do you use to lower ram usage? In recent versions of firefox it no longer allows to reduce the number of processes in the settings. I always try to use Firefox but switch back to Chrome due to its excessive ram usage. Furthermore chromium based browsers render pages much faster. The use of ram has improved a lot in recent versions of firefox but it still loses to Chrome if you use few tabs, which is my scenario. With many tabs it seems that Firefox ends up consuming the same thing or a little less than Chrome but I'm not sure. I particularly prefer Firefox but Chrome's better performance always prevents me from using it. Google always changes things and forces features, it annoys me. Like the new side panel icon that can no longer be removed. But I always prioritize performance over cosmetics.
I know, actually my main reason for using incognito mode is to limit my tendency of never closing any tab unless I have checked out all the links/info on the page which over time ends up with me having 100+ open tabs in browser.
Has this been happening for a long time? It could be a Chrome bug (it's what I use, and it can be present in other chromium-based browsers) because I recently had the same problem even though I had few tabs open, but it only happened once.
It only happens on win 10 since I started using 21H1. Basically my win 10 is somehow preferring to allot virtual ram using page file instead of using available physical ram.