What's using all my ram?!

Nothing seems unusual, but my memory usage is suddenly ridiculously high. Scanned using malwarebytes yesterday, nothing came up then.

 

How many processes are you running? Look for a process with a huge physical memory number.

 

Can you just open Task Manager and sort by Memory usage in Processes tab

 

When I checked task manager, firefox was the largest consumer using ~150,000K. Anyway, it's back to normal now (and firefox is still using the same amount), so I don't know how to check what it could've been.

 

unused ram is useless ram. Unless you have a rogue program that you KNOW (not suspect) is causing a problem then it probably isn't a problem.

Win7 is pretty good about grabbing as much ram as possible for OS tasks then releasing it for program/user tasks. Don't forget that one way for programs to set themselves up is to pre-commit 'memory' at startup. Lots of web browsers do this. Remember also that 'memory' commit numbers aren't necessarilly coming out of Real Ram. Your entire memory pool includes paging space too.

 

"Unused RAM is useless RAM" not true, people need to stop spreading this.

Unused RAM can be used for caching. RAM that's being used actively by a program that doesn't need it is NOT helping your system.

If you're on Vista/7 that "unused" RAM can be put towards caching.

 

Win 7 never wastes ram, usually at least half my ram is cached. But in this case something hidden was actively using a tremendous amount. Is there any log to check if this happens again?

 

You might want to review what 'unused ram' might mean......

 

It's not true to the extent people think it is. If you have a ton of "empty" RAM, your Operating System will do its best to fill it up with cached files.

If you have a program hogging it all it can no longer cache as much.

For an OS like XP, yeah, empty RAM is absolutely useless. For an OS like Windows 7 you don't want a program to hog it all.

So while "unused RAM is useless RAM" is true in some sense, that's no excuse for sh**ty programming that leads to memory leaks.

edit: To put it more simply... you can absolutely have wasted RAM.

 

keep dancing........

 

...

k

The whole "free ram is useless ram" came around with Vista's prefetching. People were going nuts because the OS was using up all of their RAM.

The fact is that an OS is not an application. Applications have very little excuse for using so much RAM. The OS can use it to buffer or reduce disk I/O... programs could too, but most of the time they're just poorly programmed and have memory leaks.

This saying has spread around far more than it should have and people who don't understand it are giving poorly programmed applications a free-pass to continue being poorly programmed.

edit: There's a clear distinction between RAM held by the OS for prefetch and RAM held by a program. If all of your RAM is going towards prefetch it's a simple matter to clear it to make space. If a program is holding on to "garbage RAM"... it's not simple at all and you'll simply get an OOM.

edit2: And just because I feel like absolutely killing this argument that's been perpetuated by the internet....

Windows 7 WILL make use of RAM that programs aren't using. That's just how it is. Modern OS's will prefetch aggressively. If you have some POS program using up a ton of RAM do not excuse it by saying "oh well your RAM wasn't being used anyway"... protip: it was being used... the OS was using it, probably a lot better than some leaking program.

 

And that is PRECISELY where the whole notion of unused ram is wasted ram came from. Prior to Vista (i.e. XP) the OS did not make use of the unused RAM and so there was often empty unused RAM. Folks made all sorts of tweaks to their system to maximize this unused RAM thinking that meant their system was running as lean as it could. Then when Vista came out these same folks damn near had a coronary because suddenly it looked as if all their precisous tweaks were futile and all the memory was being used all the time. They didn't understand the concept of prefetching at all. They thought that Vista was being wasteful because it was indeed consuming all thier memory. Out of this argument betwen XP proponents and Vista fans came the term "unused memory is wasted memory".

You are adding a twist to this by making the assumption that those of us who use this term somehow don't think that the OS use of this memory falls into the category of used memory. We don't think that at all. No one will argue with the fact that applications that consume more memory than needed should be avoided. No one is using the term to give these apps a free pass.

Gary

 

No one? I absolutely beg to differ. I see it all the time.

Especially in a topic where someone thinks an application is using all of their RAM and someone else says "unused ram is wasted ram."

so... yeah... gonna have to stick to my first point -- the saying is overused and almost never understood