Question What's causing high RAM usage?

[Hepsic]

My pc slowed down lately, games that used to run smooth now lag, even just having multiple Chrome tabs open shows shuttering from time to time. There are probably many reasons for that I guess, one of the first thing that took my attention is the RAM usage.

In the task manager it always shows up as nearly full:

Spoiler

I don't get how I have 8GB yet it's already full with just Chrome and Discord open (first and second processes in the image above) + other small background random things.

I previously also did a userbenchmarck test: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/67400357
that I guess had no problems in using my ram during it?

 

[thestryker]

Having only one stick of DRAM installed can cause all sorts of weird issues to crop up as your CPU only has access to half the memory bandwidth it was designed around having. This is probably not the cause of whatever you're noticing different, but it certainly isn't helping anything.

It does seem like what you're experiencing is probably Windows hitting the virtual memory. I'd suggest doing the cleanest boot you can by disabling starting with Windows on anything you don't need and seeing if anything appears differently than before. You could also check resource monitor to see if anything is using large amounts of memory.

 

[Hepsic]

Having only one stick of DRAM installed can cause all sorts of weird issues to crop up as your CPU only has access to half the memory bandwidth it was designed around having. This is probably not the cause of whatever you're noticing different, but it certainly isn't helping anything.

It does seem like what you're experiencing is probably Windows hitting the virtual memory. I'd suggest doing the cleanest boot you can by disabling starting with Windows on anything you don't need and seeing if anything appears differently than before. You could also check resource monitor to see if anything is using large amounts of memory.

That helped a lot, I didn't really do the cleanest boot possible cause after hiding microsoft processes there were some processes with "intel" and "nvidia" in their names that maybe are helping out my components?
I also unistalled my antivirus wich maybe isn't a gret idea
But now it goes smoth again, prolly gonna do some scans with malwarebites or software like that

Prolly a nice thing do do would be buy two new bank of ram + reinstall windows, thanks for the help

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

I also unistalled my antivirus wich maybe isn't a gret idea

That's fine if you're running Windows 10. The built-in Windows Defender is all you need.
Third-party AV software can be a real drag on system resources.

 

[Hepsic]

Just to understand how this works a bit better, now with a similiar workload under wich I did the screens in my first message I got this:

Spoiler

In the first image I'm in the user tab of task manager, I just noticed it existed, so from that I can see the total ram that I'm using, but the actual ram in use seems to be 4GB

Can I interpret this as the system using 3GB of ram while all the processes that arent of the system using 1 GB?
Cause seems a bit strange for a part of it to not be accounted in my user tab

 

[SkyNetRising]

Prolly a nice thing do do would be buy two new bank of ram + reinstall windows, thanks for the help

Workload shown in your 1st screenshot requires 21GB of physical ram.
That means upgrading to 2x16GB (32GB total).

I don't get how I have 8GB yet it's already full with just Chrome and Discord open (first and second processes in the image above) + other small background random things.

Chrome alone can eat up 6-7GB (or even more, depending on number of tabs opened).

 

[Hepsic]

Workload shown in your 1st screenshot requires 21GB of physical ram.
That means upgrading to 2x16GB (32GB total).


Chrome alone can eat up 6-7GB (or even more, depending on number of tabs opened).

Thanks for the info, if the problems that are arising are expected for these numbers then I can be less worried about hardware problems or of software/virus kind of things

 

[geofelt]

Intel is reasonably tolerant of mixed ram.
I would look into buying a second stick of ram with the same specs as the first.
CPU-Z will tell you what you have now.

If you are gaming, keep other apps like chrome and discord off.
Windows keeps unused code in ram in anticipation of quick reuse.
It will always look moderately full.