Windows 7 Using 5gb+ ram idle

[blaze85]

I just installed windows 7 ultimate x64 and noticed that its using over 5gb of my 6gb of ram, on idle! I have no idea what's going on. Any idea? Thanks

 

[Bolbi]

There's an article over at BetaNews that explains some changes to the Windows kernel made from Vista to Win7. I quote the relevant portion below:

Here's another counter-intuitive notion: It's more efficient for a system to use as much memory as possible -- not to fill it with data, necessarily, but to populate memory pages with something. In an illustration for his part of this morning's workshop, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Landy Wang showed a Windows 7 Task Manager panel where a machine with 8 GB of DRAM, running just a handful of regular processes, ended up with 97 MB free, or completely "zeroed." And that was a good thing.

"A lot of people might think, 'Wow, 97 megabytes doesn't seem like a lot of free memory on a machine of that size,' said Wang. "And we like to see this row actually be very small, 97 MB, because we figure that free and zero pages won't generally have a lot of use in this system. What we would rather do, if we have free and zero pages, is populate them with speculated disk or network reads, such that if you need the data later, you won't have to wait for a very slow disk or a very slow network to respond. So we will typically take these free and zero pages as we come across them, and pre-populate them with any files you might have read before, or executables we think you might run in the future -- we will get that in advance, so you don't have to wait when you click on something. It's already in memory, but you shouldn't take this low counter as implying that we're using a lot of memory."

Then Wang paused before adding, "We really are using a lot of memory, but we think we're using it in a smart way that you really want us to be using it in."

When another program wants the RAM that Windows is using in its speculation, Windows readily gives it up. Unless you are experiencing serious slowdowns, I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[flaminggerbil]

Personally I'd still be concerned about 5gb being used, there's something up with that. Using 5 times the memory of Home premium cannot be right.

Is it peaking to 5gb or is it consistant when idle?

 

[Scotteq]

Give it the three~finger salute. Management console - "Show Processes from All Users". Sort by memory usage to see what is using how much.

 

[blaze85]

It was consistently sitting at just over 5gb. From the first response, so even if its sitting at 5 gbs that sorta like cached memory then? something like vista's superfetch?

 

[easymoney9]

Pretty much normal. I'm using Vista 64 with 8gb ram and at this moment I have 73mb free. I have seen it at zero on a couple of occassions!

 

[xrodney]

Comeon, when you have 73 mb free doesnt matter that rest is used.
I am using W7 and have 2GB ram used by programs, 69MB Modified data, 5.5 GB standby (cached date that can easily be overwriten without need to save anything to disk) and 500MB free.

If you try start new program that have data chached it will be faster as it doesnt need read from disk, if it doesnt have data cached, and there is no free memory it will just use part of cached memory without any impact on performance.
Its actually smart that its using all available memory this way.

 

[sminlal]

It was consistently sitting at just over 5gb. From the first response, so even if its sitting at 5 gbs that sorta like cached memory then? something like vista's superfetch?

There's tons of ways to indicate "memory usage" in Windows 7. It would help a lot if you told us exactly what you're looking at that says "5GB"....

 

[easymoney9]

I agree xrodney.

 

[blaze85]

Problem is solved, after installing the some of the automatic updates from windows, memory usage has dropped significantly according to the built in resource monitor and everest. don't know what was in them but they did something.

 

[Bolbi]

Problem is solved, after installing the some of the automatic updates from windows, memory usage has dropped significantly according to the built in resource monitor and everest. don't know what was in them but they did something.

Wow! I'm interested in learning why it changed. Do you know which update it was?

 

[blaze85]

I'll have to look into it because it was so weird. According to my update history i think it changed after i installed these:
ATK - system - ATK0110 ACPI UTILITY
Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB974332)
Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB974431)

 

[Bolbi]

I'll have to look into it because it was so weird. According to my update history i think it changed after i installed these:
ATK - system - ATK0110 ACPI UTILITY
Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB974332)
Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB974431)

Hmph! I'm not a programmer so I don't understand all of the technical details of those updates. However, here's what I found:
KB974332 improves application compatibility. Check out this article and see if you use any apps listed there.
KB974431 is a stability and reliability update. It fixes several issues (detailed here), but I don't see anything that would likely cause excessive RAM usage.
Any programming experts have a clue?

 

[elfwrath]

Hi there. I have the same problem, except the fact that it only does it when I install something big, like a game. The memory builds up progressively until it gets full, and then it starts to lag badly. Even after the setup is complete, it's still full and continues to move really slow. Any ideas? Thanks
PS: I also have the mentioned updates but it doesn't help

 

[Bolbi]

Hi there. I have the same problem, except the fact that it only does it when I install something big, like a game. The memory builds up progressively until it gets full, and then it starts to lag badly. Even after the setup is complete, it's still full and continues to move really slow. Any ideas? Thanks
PS: I also have the mentioned updates but it doesn't help

Did you read Scotteq's post above? Before troubleshooting, we need to know what's causing the problem. I wonder if this happens only on high-RAM systems. My laptop runs Win7 64-bit with only 3 GB of RAM, and I've never had this problem, even when installing large programs. I really don't think the amount of RAM would cause such wildly different behavior, so this leads me to believe that third-party software is causing the problem, maybe AV? Try disabling your security program and then doing a big installation. (You might also want to disable your network connection at the same time to prevent any security breach while the AV is off.)

 

[elfwrath]

I've read the post. No AV software. I'm running the 64bit on 4 GB. I don't know what's going on with it. It was working fine with the RC and Beta. However, those were on 32 bits. Maybe it's something related to 64 bits? Not sure how to open the console that he mentioned... plz help

 

[Bolbi]

I've read the post. No AV software. I'm running the 64bit on 4 GB. I don't know what's going on with it. It was working fine with the RC and Beta. However, those were on 32 bits. Maybe it's something related to 64 bits? Not sure how to open the console that he mentioned... plz help

Actually, I don't know why he refers to the Management Console (accessed by Start>Run>"mmc", BTW). I'd open Task Manager, go to the "Processes" tab, then "Show processes from all users", and sort the resulting list of running processes by "Memory (Private Working Set)". See what's grabbing the most RAM, or if there's anything unusual (e.g., 100 processes named "explorer.exe"; yes, that happened to me once, though it was my fault).

 

[elfwrath]

Nope. Nothing crazy in Task manager. Everything looks the same and the RAM keeps filling up like crazy.

 

[cjl]

Which program is using all the RAM? It should show up in task manager.

 

[blaze85]

When this was happening to me i checked in the console and their was no programs really using alot of ram. Could this be a problem with Win 7 using ram to populate the cache when a new program is installed?

 

[elfwrath]

The program which uses the most RAM is svchost.exe, but it only shows 140MB, plus other smaller versions of it, but it doesn't add up to 4 GB in total. It's absurd.

 

[sminlal]

Again, when you say "RAM keeps filling up like crazy", where are you seeing this? What program are you using, and what is label of the RAM measurement you're looking at? A screenshot would help, too...

 

[elfwrath]

Sorry, I don't visit the forums that much... Basically I read all the RAM measurements in Task Manager. In the performance tab, the RAM is full to 4GB but in the processes tab there is no way there is that much RAM into the processes (all users). I thought maybe it was a Task Manager glitch, but the laptop slows down considerably too and I have to wait a lot for small processes like opening the browser and explorer (suggesting a lack of free RAM I think).

 

[Bolbi]

Did this start as soon as you installed Win7, or was it after installing another program or update? Also, on a hunch, what sort of video card do you have? (And are there any integrated graphics chipsets on the motherboard?)

 

[elfwrath]

From what I recall, I didn't actually start as soon as I installed Win 7, which might also lead me to your thought of being a third party application conflict, but I can't figure out which application might do this. The only one that I haven't had this far and I have it now is SolidWorks 2009. Unfortunately, I can't delete and install it again cause I don't have the disc anymore. My graphics is GeForce 9600M GS.