Memory not releasing after scrolling through 2TB hard drive

Pretty much what the title says.


Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 x64


I have 1.51 TB of movies on a 2TB hard drive. View is set to details, aka, title, date, type, size, etc.
It's a long list of movies. I use VLC media player to watch the movies.
The problem occurs when I scroll through that long list of movies, and my computer is trying to fill in all the details. This runs up the Physical Memory usage % in Task Manager. It can reach 40%.



The problem is that after I'm done scrolling through the list etc., the Physical memory usage % is not released in task Manager.
Only a reboot will return the Physical memory usage % to it's normal range between 13% and say 19%.


I have 16GB of physical RAM installed in the computer. I've tried page file sizes from 2MB to 24MB.

I'd like to be able to keep it on "details" view, w/o driving up the Physical Memory Usage %.


Any suggestions?

Based on the information provided I see no reason for concern.

It appears that the memory usage is due to the file cache. This contains portions of files so that if they are later accessed disk access is avoided. This is a good thing. Releasing the memory immediately would defeat the purpose of the cache. As long as there is plenty of available memory, and with only 40% usage of 16 GB that is certainly the case, there will be few limits imposed on the growth of the file cache. The file cache will be automatically trimmed back if there is a need.

Note that Task Manager will tell you nothing of the file cache. The memory labeled as "Cached" is something quite different.

I understand that. I will give it time and make sure it eventually releases on it's own.
I don't understand why it didn't do this, say 8-9 months ago, but now does.


I've also read that I can disable caching on my storage drive, and wonder if that might not be a good idea.


The problem only occurs when I'm am scrolling through the list of my movies. And this "file caching" doesn't seem to remember that I scrolled through the same list, 2-3 hours before, which would seem to be the reason for the caching in the first place.


Every time I close the window where I had scrolled through the list, Windows seems to forget I did scroll through, and needs to cache the same action again.
This is what causes the Physical Ram usage %, to keep increasing ad infinitum.




Would I suffer any, if I did disable caching on my storage drives? Since it doesn't seem to work anyways?