# Why is my memory at 71% while im using 2gb/8gb  ram



## Killermonk (Apr 9, 2020)




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## FreedomEclipse (Apr 10, 2020)

Do you by any chance use Chrome?



http://imgur.com/OPbwlbd


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## X71200 (Apr 10, 2020)

What are you running that consumes the RAM, and is the system virus-free?


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## newtekie1 (Apr 10, 2020)

Because your user account is use 2GB, but there is a bunch of stuff that runs under other user accounts. Basically everything Windows runs in the background is run under a different user account than your account.


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## Killermonk (Apr 10, 2020)

FreedomEclipse said:


> Do you by any chance use Chrome?
> 
> 
> 
> http://imgur.com/OPbwlbd


no, i  use  opera  gx



newtekie1 said:


> Because your user account is use 2GB, but there is a bunch of stuff that runs under other user accounts. Basically everything Windows runs in the background is run under a different user account than your account.


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## AsRock (Apr 10, 2020)

Win10 will release it when a application needs it.


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## Killermonk (Apr 10, 2020)

AsRock said:


> Win10 will release it when a application needs it.


oh  so it's  superfetch?


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## joemama (Apr 10, 2020)

read the RAM usage from the other pages, I think the user doesn't include the RAM taken by the system and stuff


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## Killermonk (Apr 10, 2020)

joemama said:


> read the RAM usage from the other pages, I think the user doesn't include the RAM taken by the system and stuff


it's the same


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## Vya Domus (Apr 10, 2020)

The 5.6 GB in use are 70% of the total 8.0 GB. What am I missing ?

Not everything shown in that process tab accounts for the memory used.


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## AsRock (Apr 10, 2020)

Killermonk said:


> oh  so it's  superfetch?



Not 100% sure, but the system is using 10.8GB, but a bunch of it is from page\swapfile leaving 2.3 GB actual memory for faster access.

If you run a program that requires higher memory that's available windows will move as much to swap\pagefile so the program runs at it's best.

You could always check within the resource monitor for more info.  Just to check if some thing isn't hogging memory but it looks good from i see.


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## windwhirl (Apr 10, 2020)

Vya Domus said:


> The 5.6 GB in use are 70% of the total 8.0 GB. What am I missing ?
> 
> Not everything shown in that process tab accounts for the memory used.



More like it never sums up. I never quite understood how Task Manager understands used memory... Or more precisely, how it translates from "working set", working private set, shared set, committed, paged, non paged, etc., to RAM usage.


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## Vya Domus (Apr 10, 2020)

windwhirl said:


> More like it never sums up.



Realistically it would never happen, the processes tab only shows how much memory is used privately by each process. The memory that is used however also contains memory pages from recently used processes/threads so there is no way the total active processes could add up exactly to the amount actually used.


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## Bill_Bright (Apr 10, 2020)

That 100 next to your user name  is the number of processes you currently are running. That's a quite a bit (I currently have 64). Click on that little arrow (>) by your user name in that Task Manager window to expand the list and see what it using your RAM.


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## Valantar (Apr 10, 2020)

Killermonk said:


> View attachment 150971


That only shows user accounts, a lot of windows processes are not run under a user account at all (windows is still running if you log off, after all).


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## R0H1T (Apr 10, 2020)

Killermonk said:


> no, i use opera gx


Opera is chromium based, unless you're using version 12 or something?


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## Valantar (Apr 10, 2020)

R0H1T said:


> Opera is chromium based, unless you're using version 12 or something?


Chrome doesn't use crazy amounts of memory unless you either hoard tabs like you think the internet is about to run out or you never, ever restart your PC/browser. Just set the browser to remember your session when it is closed and restart either once in a while, and you will be perfectly fine. I've used Chrome every day for significant amounts of time on systems with 8GB of RAM and had no issues.


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## Bill_Bright (Apr 10, 2020)

Valantar said:


> Chrome doesn't use crazy amounts of memory unless you either hoard tabs like you think the internet is about to run out or you never, ever restart your PC/browser.


Ummm, that's not true. First, we shouldn't have to restart out computers - ever! At least not to free up resources. It should only be necessary when some Windows Update, or perhaps a start-up or security program update requires it. I may go a couple weeks or longer without restarting my computer - generally, I just let it go to sleep. If you have to regularly restart your computer to free up resources, there is something wrong with your system as that is NOT normal. At least not with W7 and newer. 

Second, of course what you think "crazy amounts" and "hoarding" means is relative only to you. I could easily have a dozen or more tabs open with multiple sessions spread out across my monitors. For example, just a bit ago I was researching prices for 12V 9Ah SLA batteries for an UPS and had 4 different sites open (plus a Bing results page for a 5th) in different browser sessions (not tabs, but whole sessions). 

Is that hoarding? I don't think so. And besides, I do that regardless which browser I am using. 

That said, when I am done using my computer, I always exit all programs, so my browser does get restarted - but it may only be once a day. I am sure my usage scenario is pretty common too. 

The problem, IMO, with Chromium based browsers is the number of processes it opens and then keeps open. I currently have this page open and that's it. No other sessions and no other tabs. So why does Task Manager show 5 processes running, consuming 5.3MB up to 53MB for 111.3MB total? 

I just opened another tab to amazon.com and now I have 9 processes and 204MB total. Closed the Amazon page and instead of going back to 5, I have 6 still running. Open a new tab to newegg.com and now I have 10 processes and 235MB total used up. If I close the Newegg tab and go back to this page/tab only, there's still 8 processes and 215MB used!!  Why didn't it at least go back to 5 processes and 111.3MB? 

Chromium based browsers manage memory poorly. They are NOT nearly as bad as some programs, like some security programs, but definitely not good. Heck, even Internet Explorer only opens up one process when I go to amazon.com and is lighter on resources than Chrome.  

And for the record, I am not a big add-ons or extensions fan. All I have is uBlock Origin installed so we can't blame add-ons.

Chrome can be so stubborn at freeing up resources (even after exiting the program) that I created a "Taskkill" shortcut for Chrome on my desktop - just to ensure all Chrome processes have completely terminated without having to restart Windows or the computer.  If anyone else wants to do this, just create a new shortcut on your desktop with the following "target": 

C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe /F /T /IM chrome.exe​
This is nothing new with Chrome, BTW. Sadly, it has not been fixed.


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## Assimilator (Apr 10, 2020)

Use something like Sysinternals Process Explorer to see the actual allocations per process.


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## Valantar (Apr 10, 2020)

Bill_Bright said:


> Ummm, that's not true. First, we shouldn't have to restart out computers - ever! At least not to free up resources. It should only be necessary when some Windows Update, or perhaps a start-up or security program update requires it. I may go a couple weeks or longer without restarting my computer - generally, I just let it go to sleep. If you have to regularly restart your computer to free up resources, there is something wrong with your system as that is NOT normal. At least not with W7 and newer.
> 
> Second, of course what you think "crazy amounts" and "hoarding" means is relative only to you. I could easily have a dozen or more tabs open with multiple sessions spread out across my monitors. For example, just a bit ago I was researching prices for 12V 9Ah SLA batteries for an UPS and had 4 different sites open (plus a Bing results page for a 5th) in different browser sessions (not tabs, but whole sessions).
> 
> ...


I think you are reading what I wrote _way_ too strictly. First off, you are actually doing _much _more than what I suggested - "never, ever restart[ing] your browser" is to me certainly _quite a lot_ _less _than closing it every single day like you do. As for restarting the PC, I obviously agree that it _shouldn't_ be necessary - and I certainly don't do it unless I either have a reason to like an update or it's been a long, long time - but if you're heavily stressing poorly optimized software in some way that forces it, that is nonetheless one of the better ways of fixing it. It's not like a reboot takes much more than a minute on a modern PC.  As for tab hoarding, I was referencing the people I typically see complaining about Chrome RAM usage, which from my experience seem to be people who seem to mostly have a minimum of 4-5 sessions with a dozen or more tabs each open at all times - though quite a few of them also like to humblebrag about having literally hundreds of tabs open at once. Your use case certainly doesn't seem to fit that description, and frankly I find it rather strange that you apparently seemed to think you did.

As for Chrome/Chromium managing processes poorly ... well, I have no idea about the inner workings of any of this, and it's not like I work for Google, so your post mainly comes off as an annoyed rant directed at someone who has nothing to do with the thing you're annoyed at, but never mind that. I would guess those residual processes are there for some reason, such as allowing you to restore a recently closed tab or window quickly (ctrl+shift+t and ctrl+shift+n are certainly well used for me at least). My Firefox certainly doesn't seem to be much better, even though it's a completely different browser. While there are fewer threads - 12 threads for the 17+7 tabs I currently have open, but FF is also consuming about 3.1GB of RAM on my system. And outside of this forum tab only one of them has been visible or active in the past few hours. That means that on this 16GB system I currently am sitting at 68% RAM utilization with just Firefox, Outlook, OneNote and Task Manager as the open applications (though with a generous heaping of background processes, including a lot of work-mandated stuff). And I'm perfectly fine with that. Why? Because both Windows and the applications I am using are smart enough to free up memory when needed. If I were to launch a game right now, I wouldn't be maxing out my RAM. 

Which kind of brings us back to the OP's question: Windows 10 caches a lot of frequently used data (inlcuding applications) in unused RAM, which might make RAM usage look overblown when it shouldn't be. I wouldn't worry about it unless you are either noticing RAM-related slowdowns or you can identify some application that's eating heaps of memory when it shouldn't be.


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## Bill_Bright (Apr 10, 2020)

Valantar said:


> I think you are reading what I wrote _way_ too strictly.


It's a technical site. What you say should be "technically" accurate just to avoid misunderstanding due to you not being clear and precise for the OP's specific scenario. 

My *bold underline* added in the following quote to illustrate my point.





Valantar said:


> As for restarting the PC, I obviously agree that it _shouldn't_ be necessary...
> ...*but if* you're heavily stressing poorly optimized software


Well, I can always add "but if" or "what if" statements to justify just about any claim I might want to pose. For example, I might say everyone needs a hardened steel reinforced roof on their house even though it will cost an extra $25,000. You might come back and say you find that rather strange I think that. But I could then come back and justify my statement by saying, "but, what if" a meteor fell out of the sky and hit your roof? Or what if an airliner decided to purge their toilets and blue ice crashes through your roof? It has happened so it could happen again. Does that make it likely? Of course not. So trying to justify a previous claim by after-the-fact adding an unlikely "but if" or what if statement is rather silly.

And to your point, you were specifically talking about Chrome and (as we now learn, with potentially 100s of open tabs). Are you now suggesting Chrome is an example of one of those "poorly optimized software" since you suggest it cannot deal optimally with that many tabs? 

If you are going to say something in a technical forum, know what you are saying! We cannot assume everyone reading can read our minds to know exactly or technically what we mean. 


Valantar said:


> and frankly I find it rather strange that you apparently seemed to think you did.


Which illustrates my point about being silly and that you need to be technically accurate or precise in the first place when you say something in a technical forum, or else you leave the interpretation of what you mean totally up for grabs AND misunderstanding. For sure, I would agree that 100s of tabs would be "crazy amounts" because I don't believe any "normal" personal could keep track of all those. But I do know I can keep track of a dozen, or even maybe two dozen.  But I also believe since some people do run with many dozens of tabs open and Chrome should know how to properly manage the resources it uses. After all, Google has the resources for the best programmers and for thorough beta testing of just about every scenario a user would put it through. So it should be properly optimized software to deal with that scenario too.


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## Valantar (Apr 11, 2020)

Bill_Bright said:


> It's a technical site. What you say should be "technically" accurate just to avoid misunderstanding due to you not being clear and precise for the OP's specific scenario.
> 
> My *bold underline* added in the following quote to illustrate my point.Well, I can always add "but if" or "what if" statements to justify just about any claim I might want to pose. For example, I might say everyone needs a hardened steel reinforced roof on their house even though it will cost an extra $25,000. You might come back and say you find that rather strange I think that. But I could then come back and justify my statement by saying, "but, what if" a meteor fell out of the sky and hit your roof? Or what if an airliner decided to purge their toilets and blue ice crashes through your roof? It has happened so it could happen again. Does that make it likely? Of course not. So trying to justify a previous claim by after-the-fact adding an unlikely "but if" or what if statement is rather silly.
> 
> ...


Well, it's been a while since I've seen a post that full of bad-faith arguments, unreasonable interpretations and assumptions, or other general unpleasantness. I mean, previous threads have shown aplenty that you for some reason like to antagonize me, but for you to jump on this in this manner (when my initial response wasn't even addressed to you) just tells me loud and clear that you want to argue with me for no other reason than to argue with me.

First off, to this being a "technical site" and what I say therefore having to be "technically accurate": not only is that utter BS (is there a ban on opinion here that I have missed? Or a requirement for strictly accurate technical descriptions?), but it also handily skips over the fact that your interpretations of my posts are _entirely unreasonable_ based on my statements. When I say


Valantar said:


> hoard tabs like you think the internet is about to run out


and you for some reason read that as applying to someone who


Bill_Bright said:


> [has] a dozen or more tabs open with multiple sessions spread out across [their] monitors.


or when I say


Valantar said:


> [who] never, ever restart [their] PC/browser[s ]


and you somehow think that applies to people who


Bill_Bright said:


> go a couple weeks or longer without restarting [their] computer


than I really don't know what to tell you. Did you get the impression that my taken-to-the-extreme wording was ironic or sarcastic? I would hope not, as the post itself should make that plenty clear. As you are taking pains to point out, this is a site for tech enthusiasts, and assuming that having a couple dozen tabs open at one time equates to "hoarding tabs" is thus an entirely unreasonable assumption on your part. I would also say that restarting your PC every few weeks aligns reasonably with _not_ "never ever, restarting your PC" - wouldn't you?

So, when I say you're reading my post way too stricly, I do not mean that you are reading it way too _literally_, which it seems like you thought I meant. A _strict_ reading is not a _literal _reading. I would instead say that your reading goes _far_ _beyond _what I said, taking every chance at interpreting my statements as extreme, strict and otherwise limiting on the user (or more broadly just contrary to your opinions). Interpretations like that are a core tactic of making a bad-faith argument (assuming that my intended meaning of what I wrote was not what the words say or some reasonably close meaning to that, but some far worse version of them), which reflects rather poorly on you. It would be much appreciated if you stuck to what I actually said going forward.

Regarding your "but if" argument: sure, if you want to go there, it can (as with pretty much any addition of nuance to any question) be extended into the absurd. The difference between what I am saying and your response is that my statement was a reasonable and well-estalished low-to-medium-effort, zero-cost method for dealing with the well-established real-world fact that _technology doesn't always behave as we want it to_. Your extension of this, on the other hand, took a "problem" so rare as to be nonexistent and applied a high-cost and high-effort solution to it. See a difference? But more to the point: having idealized approaches to what your actions and practices is utterly worthless if you are then too rigid to adjust and deal with reality as it happens to you when (not if) it fails to conform to those ideals. All I said was that if that helps in the OP's use case, they might want to consider the odd restart. Of course ideally this shouldn't be necessary, but some times it is, either through poorly made software, poorly optimized or unintended interactions between software, OS bugs, or a host of other reasons - and one then has the choice between either no longer doing what is causing it (if it can be identified at all, and even then that's a big ask for anything useful) or, as I said, considering the odd restart. And again, your own usage habits _far_ outstrip what I suggested, yet you are complaining that what I suggested is unreasonable? That doesn't add up.

As to your question of whether I include Chrome in "poorly optimized software": considering that my initial post was about how overblown people's complaints about Chromes RAM usage are, I would say it's rather obvious that I don't particularly think so, right? (Though it would seem like you do?) Of course "poorly optimized" is a broad term, and ultimately depends on the usage in question - I doubt any web browser is explicitly optimized for efficient RAM usage with hundreds of open tabs. And IMO that is perfectly fine, as that's an extreme edge use case where one can't expect things to work perfectly, and users should then be prepared to accept the consequences of that (though many don't, and instead complain loudly and repeatedly, leading to people having misleading impressions like "Chrome will eat your RAM"). It should also be rather obvious from my example of my own Firefox browser that I don't see this as a Chrome problem - or even a problem at all - but rather a consequence of using a modern browser on modern web pages in a modern OS, where RAM usage is flexible and opportunistic, with the underlying OS responsible for managing RAM as needed.

As for your last statement, getting back to the "I should be clearer, this is a technical forum" line: this isn't a _technical forum_. It is a _forum for technology enthusiasts_. Do you see a lot of discussion about schematics, code, design documents and specifications, etc. around here? 'Cause I sure don't. This is not a forum (solely) for debate between technology experts in strictly technical terms (of course that _can_ absolutely happen here too, it's just rare), which it would need to be to qualify as a "technical forum" in any reasonable understanding of a term like that. The only qualifying criterion for taking part in a forum like this is being interested enough in the topics discussed here to create a profile and join the debate. Heck, even topics like this one, which would seem to be a "technical" topic as it's about PC troubleshooting, is largely dominated by experientially based methods, described in straightforward language, with little explanation of how and why they work (and if they do). That certainly doesn't qualify as a technical discussion to me, and I certainly hope it doesn't for you. Discussing the practical applications of technology and the problems this can lead to is not the same as having a technical discussion.

And lastly, just to get back to the topic of Chrome and RAM: I think you're entirely right that Chrome should know how to properly manage the resources it uses, and that Google has the necessary resources to make sure it does so. (I also entirely agree that I don't think it's possible for the vast majority of people to keep track of that many tabs - but that doesn't stop people who have that many open from complaining about Chrome's RAM usage!) Our difference of opinion lies in the result: you seem to think Google hasn't done this. I think they've rather made a different judgement, prioritizing responsiveness and thus user experience through _not_ clearing memory from unused tabs early, by allowing for faster tab switching and reopening of closed tabs (as well as leaving background threads for account synchronization, managing page caches, etc.). I would also guess that part of the basis for making such a call is that a) quite few users have usage habits this extreme, so optimizing for them in ways that would hurt the user experience for less heavy users doesn't make sense overall, and b) the relatively reasonable assumption that if you're doing something that requires hundreds of open browser tabs at once, you can probably also afford to adapt your tool (computer) to the job at hand by buying more RAM. To me, at least, that is quite reasonable.


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## j0taDasFestasPT (Apr 11, 2020)

Never use 2 different memorys and dont be rude with someone whos trying to help you for free you are not theire boss


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## Valantar (Apr 11, 2020)

j0taDasFestasPT said:


> Never use 2 different memorys and dont be rude with someone whos trying to help you for free you are not theire boss


I dont think anyone here is being rude to someone trying to help them, the OP hasn't posted since post #9.


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## newtekie1 (Apr 11, 2020)

Killermonk said:


> no, i  use  opera  gx
> 
> 
> View attachment 150971



And your point?  Go to the Details tab in Task Manager and check out the UserName column.


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## EarthDog (Apr 11, 2020)

Stop looking at it by user.....


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