Why is my memory usage so high?

[sokfil]

My PC has been using a lot more memory than it's supposed to recently. I have 8GB of DDR3 memory. All memory used by my apps combined is less than 1GB, and Windows, as much as I'm cocerned, isn't supposed to use more than 1.5GB. Resource monitor says that my PC is using 5GB. It also shows that there are about 3 hard faults per second. I've tried several memory checking programs, but it doesn't seem like anything is broken. I also don't think that any virus would ever need 2.5GB of memory. I'm running Windows 10.
Thanks!

 

[Jwpanz]

What does it say in your resource monitor? You should be able to see what processes are consuming so much RAM.

 

[TechyInAZ]

Is this "In Use" memory or "Standby" Memory? Both combined can easily reach 5GB which is completely fine. Standby memory is simply data that is cached and isn't being used. It will transfer this to the hard disk if the system needs more memory.

 

[sokfil]

What does it say in your resource monitor? You should be able to see what processes are consuming so much RAM.

But I'm not. I combined everything and it does not exceed 1GB, and no app is using more than 300MB.

 

[sokfil]

Is this "In Use" memory or "Standby" Memory? Both combined can easily reach 5GB which is completely fine. Standby memory is simply data that is cached and isn't being used. It will transfer this to the hard disk if the system needs more memory.

I cleared all the standby memory and memory usage was lowered by about 5 percent.

 

[TechyInAZ]

Honestly I wouldn't worry about it unless your getting noticeable drops in performance. Windows 10 does it's own thing with memory, if there's more of it, it will use it up somehow.

 

[sokfil]

Honestly I wouldn't worry about it unless your getting noticeable drops in performance. Windows 10 does it's own thing with memory, if there's more of it, it will use it up somehow.

I forgot to mention that this was actually the initial reason why I started searching for a solution. I was getting performance drops in totally different games and just when there was a lot of multitasking going on in Windows.

 

[Jwpanz]

Since you checked the resource monitor and could see nothing consuming so much RAM I would look toward a possible malware infection. Forms of malware have the ability to work in the background yet be invisible in task manager. Many Trojans are capable of this.

Run a malware and virus scan using Malware bytes and your preferred virus scanning tool. If you don’t have one and don’t want to pay then you could use Avast. I’m a fan of Webroot but it’s your choice.

 

[sokfil]

Since you checked the resource monitor and could see nothing consuming so much RAM I would look toward a possible malware infection. Forms of malware have the ability to work in the background yet be invisible in task manager. Many Trojans are capable of this.

Run a malware and virus scan using Malware bytes and your preferred virus scanning tool. If you don’t have one and don’t want to pay then you could use Avast. I’m a fan of Webroot but it’s your choice.

I've scanned my computer with Kaspersky and it hasn't revealed anything. Again, I don't think any virus/trojan would ever need so much memory.