Why does my RAM use 13/16GB on a fresh Windows 11 restart?

29 points by lurknot 2 years ago | 8 comments

I'm very confused. The processes in the task manager do not add up to 12GB. maybe 4 at most.

The other stats in task manager for memory say:

In use (compressed) - 13 GB (371 MB)

Available: 2.5 GB

Committed: 15.0/27.0 GB

Cached: 2.5 GB

Paged Pool: 400MB

Non-paged Pool: 410MB

LinuxBender 2 years ago |

I believe more details would be required to answer your question such as a list of the auto-started programs that may be either running or suspended by default. Process Explorer part of Sysinternals Suit [1] can provide more details especially if more columns are enabled and if Process Explorer is running as an Administrator account. One can sort by committed memory and look at the state of both the background services and programs that auto-start. Even the default task manager should show some of this.

The auto-started/suspended programs can be configured to not auto-start. If this is the Home edition some things may be hidden or harder to turn off unless one runs O&O's ShutUp 10 [2] which also runs on Windows 11 and there are some settings within Edge to turn off auto-starting and pre-loading some widgets required even if one does not use Edge.

[1] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/

[2] - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

scovetta 2 years ago |

Just a couple troubleshooting idea that come to mind:

- Which memory column are you looking at? (differences between private, committed, shared, working set, etc.)

- Are you running WSL, virtual machines, or anything like that?

- Is your account an administrator on the box?

- Try Resource Monitor instead of Task Manager - there's a lot more memory information there

36933 2 years ago |

This might be a shot in the dark, but I had this exact same problem a while ago. The cause for this was a running hyper-v vm I never turned off.

breckenedge 2 years ago |

Probably pre-warming.

darkclouds 2 years ago | |

yeah.

To OP. Back in the XP days, hw was slow, so M$ started logging the most frequently used programs used at startup and started caching parts of the PE file to speed up the loading process. Other tricks included moving parts of the program to the outside of the spin disk as more data is read per revolution, and other tricks.

Profiling the use of the OS and finding ways to speed up the experience to compensate for slow hw has been ongoing since.

So its probably just profiling your machine, and indexing any documents you have to make the search facility in windows work better for you. The more it stores in ram, the faster windows can run for you.

However it could be a glitch, they also happen as well.

Sysinternals can help you gain insights to help you decide whether this ram usage is a good thing or not. And if you feel really bold, a bit of CPU instruction set logging could also help give some insight as to what is going on.

pestatije 2 years ago |

nowhere does it say they should add up...where did you get that idea? there is a help page where all those numbers are explained...specifically, committed memory is not the same as process memory

justsomehnguy 2 years ago |

/r/techsupport

And your committed clearly says 15GBs.

Meph504 2 years ago |

kernel-mode based memory allocations don't show in user-mode application reporting. Anything allocating memory such as kernel-mode device drivers, etc.. will make it appear that there is something amiss, but as many others have said its pretty normal.