Is the new Insider build of Windows 10 taking too much of your RAM? Don't worry

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Kardo Kristal

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Fire up the Task Manager and you may see 'System' taking too much of your precious RAM? In our example, it's around 650 MB and, at times, this number spikes to as much as 1.5 GB. That's a large amount of system memory. So, is Windows 10 just really inefficient? No, not really.

Microsoft started optimizing the OS and the amount of memory Windows consumes with Windows 8, bringing it down significantly compared to Windows 7. Given that the same OS was expected to run across PCs and RAM-starved tablets, this was a much needed improvement. Following in that vein, Microsoft has made certain changes to the way Windows 10 handles RAM with the new Insider 10525 build.

Basically, the reason you're seeing such high usage of memory is that, instead of writing pages to your hard drive after they've been unused for a long time, Windows now compresses them, while still storing them in the physical memory. That's what the 'System' usage shows in Task Manager. In Gabe Aul's words:

In Windows 10, we have added a new concept in the Memory Manager called a compression store, which is an in-memory collection of compressed pages. This means that when Memory Manager feels memory pressure, it will compress unused pages instead of writing them to disk. This reduces the amount of memory used per process, allowing Windows 10 to maintain more applications in physical memory at a time. This also helps provide better responsiveness across Windows 10...This is visible in Task Manager and the reason the System process appears to be consuming more memory than previous releases.

So, next time you see the system taking too much memory, don't worry; Windows is more efficient than ever. Compressing data stored on RAM is a technique becoming increasingly more prevalent and OS X and Linux already use some form of a 'compression store'. With this improvement, not only are you able to work faster but can hold more data simultaneously. That's a win all around!
 

kiric96

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i dont think it is a good idea, most of the people here (including me) have a pc with no more than 2gb of ram, and we cant afford a system process eating 500 or 600 mb of RAM, its makes pcs unusuable, if microsoft thinks or believes that this way is going to make the OS faster, they are wrong!!! an OS is intendended to help you do your daily stuffs, is not intended to eat all of your ram... i wont use w10 if they keep in this way
 
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i dont think it is a good idea, most of the people here (including me) have a pc with no more than 2gb of ram, and we cant afford a system process eating 500 or 600 mb of RAM, its makes pcs unusuable

so you should stay with win7 , each OS follow the development of hardwares available at its time. Don't believe the "hardware requirements" described at the OS , it is just marketing tricks to keep customers.
 
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kiric96

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so you should stay with win7 , each OS follow the development of hardwares available at its time. Don't believe the "hardware requirements" described at the OS , it is just marketing tricks to keep customers.

hardware requirements clearly states that the system will run under 2gb of ram, besides microsoft claims that if your pc can run windows 8 it will run windows 10 with no problems... with windows 8 this isssue was not a problem...
 
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hardware requirements clearly states that the system will run under 2gb of ram, besides microsoft claims that if your pc can run windows 8 it will run windows 10 with no problems... with windows 8 this isssue was not a problem...

Exactly what i said; marketing tricks. Be able to run an OS doesn't mean your OS will fly.

i bought a 2gb minilaptop with win8 installed, yes it run Win8 but when i open a simple window, i have to wait 2-3 seconds. and i dont say i load a video...
 
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kiric96

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mean your OS will fly.
will fly? i dont expect my pc to be a NASCAR car, we are talking about ram not about CPU (surely your pc delays to respond, due to it processor). If they say that any program would run under a minimal requirement then it should run under those specs...
 
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done

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will fly? i dont expect my pc to be a NASCAR car, we are talking about ram not about CPU (surely your pc delays to respond, due to it processor). If they say that any program would run under a minimal requirement then it should run under those specs...
agree with you
that was vista's problem they delivers computers with 1 gig of ram when the OS is eating 1gig people left with no memory to use. thats why vista had a bad name as slow.
 
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will fly? i don't expect my pc to be a NASCAR car, we are talking about ram not about CPU (surely your pc delays to respond, due to it processor). If they say that any program would run under a minimal requirement then it should run under those specs...

do you always believe commercials ? it is like games, you have "minimal requirements" and "recommended requirements" but MS only say the minimal one.

If you want a minimum of comfort with any Windows OS , no delays/lags/hangs , you should have at least twice the RAM requirement and a higher cpu. it was always like that since win98/xp.

a friend has the same laptop than mine but with 4gb ram instead, his system isn't slow as mine.
 
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kiric96

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do you always believe commercials ? it is like games, you have "minimal requirements" and "recommended requirements" but MS only say the minimal one.

If you want a minimum of comfort with any Windows OS , no delays/lags/hangs , you should have at least twice the RAM requirement and a higher cpu. it was always like that since win98/xp.

a friend has the same laptop than mine but with 4gb ram instead, his system isn't slow as mine.
emm did you get my point???? well being honest i downgraded my pc to windows 8.1 and it is running just fine, no lags/hangs etc... so with windows 10 it is expected to be like that no? after all it has windows 8 kernel inside... however the point here is that system process will eat all your memory leaving you with no choice to run a program... remember, it is true that RAM was intended to be wasted by the user not by the OS you are using...
 

Enju

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emm did you get my point???? well being honest i downgraded my pc to windows 8.1 and it is running just fine, no lags/hangs etc... so with windows 10 it is expected to be like that no? after all it has windows 8 kernel inside... however the point here is that system process will eat all your memory leaving you with no choice to run a program... remember, it is true that RAM was intended to be wasted by the user not by the OS you are using...
You don't seem to understand how the memory managment in Windows works, in the newest build instead of writing and reading from your slow pagefile on HDD/SSD they will keep data in your RAM in a compressed format (called zram in Linux) but if any application requires the RAM it will be deallocated by the memory managment and your new process can use it. It isn't making your computer slower or more unresponsive but instead the opposite.
 

kiric96

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You don't seem to understand how the memory managment in Windows works, in the newest build instead of writing and reading from your slow pagefile on HDD/SSD they will keep data in your RAM in a compressed format (called zram in Linux) but if any application requires the RAM it will be deallocated by the memory managment and your new process can use it. It isn't making your computer slower or more unresponsive but instead the opposite.

you dont seem to understand my point, lets put an example, as an emsisoft user, everybody knows that emsisoft dumps signatures to the disk, with this new feature instead of writing the DD it is stored in memory, so imagine 220 mb of signatures loaded in ram all the time, no matter if windows compress the files or not... ram usage is almost always at 300-500 MB so, then if you wanna use another app, you dont have a choice to do so... just imagine, i use netbeans, mozila and word to do homework with windows 8.1 this wasnt a problem but with windows 10 i can barely use my pc with only netbeans since memory is always at 60% even when idle
 

Enju

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you dont seem to understand my point, lets put an example, as an emsisoft user, everybody knows that emsisoft dumps signatures to the disk, with this new feature instead of writing the DD it is stored in memory, so imagine 220 mb of signatures loaded in ram all the time, no matter if windows compress the files or not... ram usage is almost always at 300-500 MB so, then if you wanna use another app, you dont have a choice to do so... just imagine, i use netbeans, mozila and word to do homework with windows 8.1 this wasnt a problem but with windows 10 i can barely use my pc with only netbeans since memory is always at 60% even when idle
Windows doesn't load or keep the signatures in RAM it's the desicion of the programmer if they want to use this feature, MS is only using this for their own services and applications. Also reading signatures from disk is the biggest resource hog you can get, disks are the slowest medium in your computer... If you can't afford to get all signatures loaded into your RAM you should think about switching your software. Using all your RAM is by far the easiest way to get the most out of your computer, every empty MB of RAM is wasted performance.
 

kiric96

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Windows doesn't load or keep the signatures in RAM it's the desicion of the programmer if they want to use this feature, MS is only using this for their own services and applications. Also reading signatures from disk is the biggest resource hog you can get, disks are the slowest medium in your computer... If you can't afford to get all signatures loaded into your RAM you should think about switching your software. Using all your RAM is by far the easiest way to get the most out of your computer, every empty MB of RAM is wasted performance.
you sure?

huge ram usage of system process with EAM on win 10 - Emsisoft Anti-Malware

i do understand that reading signatures from disk is the lowest method, but since i have only 2gb of ram i cant afford a program that is eating 200 (like eam when memory optimization is off), as i stated before there is no sense to have 60% used by your OS
 

Enju

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you sure?

huge ram usage of system process with EAM on win 10 - Emsisoft Anti-Malware

i do understand that reading signatures form disk is the lowest method, but since i have only 2gb of ram i cant afford a program that is eating 200 (like eam when memory optimization is off), as i stated before there is no sense to have 60% used by your OS
It doesn't matter if Windows uses 60%, as soon as any application requires more Windows will dump everything it can into your pagefile...
Also
Which is your personal problem though. Just because you don't like your memory to be used 95% doesn't mean that using 95% of your RAM to make sure your applications stay responsive isn't the right thing to do.
even Fabian told you exactly the same thing as I did and you still keep on complaining... read a bit about memory managment on Windows and you will hopefully understand why it's good to use all your RAM. ;)
 

kiric96

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It doesn't matter if Windows uses 60%, as soon as any application requires more Windows will dump everything it can into your pagefile...
Also even Fabian told you exactly the same thing as I did and you still keep on complaining... read a bit about memory managment on Windows and you will hopefully understand why it's good to use all your RAM. ;)

to use all your ram? see the screenshot from the emsi forum and you would see... well point here is that with windows 10 memory is at 60% idle but with windows 8.1 is at 35% more ram you have free, more ram you can use to do your stuff. I do understand how memory works but i dont like this new "feature"
 
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