What ate all my memory?!?

These numbers are not making sense to me.. All of my processes total <2GB ram being used (if you add up the #s in the list), yet my system shows over 5GB being used.

I also see like 3GB being cached.. not sure what that is... Where is it all going?

The 3gb of ram being cached is perfectly fine. It's just windows assigning ram to services on your machine. Just think of it as ram on demand.

There's a few services you can stop from automatically starting that should improve some of your ram usage issues. Type "msconfig" into search and select the "startup" tab and uncheck some of the processes you don't need to automatically start.

It caches programs(and stuff) you use frequently so they open up faster. Its doesn't slow down your ram at all really to operate it like that. If you really don't like it, I think you can disable it. I think its called superfetch in vista, not sure about Win 7.

Well, I have 8gb of ram, so I'm not too worried about the numbers above, I just didn't quite understand how so much ram could be gone.

From what it sounds like, is that there are a couple different ways ram is utilized.

The first batch of ram is used for all the processes.

Then Win 7 magically comes up with a # of ram it wants to hold (called cache), that is used to just speed things up.

Whenever the processes use more ram, or more processes appear, that magic # earlier, will decrease as needed.

If that's correct, then that's a good thing, the fact it uses ram that would just normally be wasted, instead, it uses as much as possible to speed things up when it can.

So the memory used from processes + cache = real # of ram used

Merlin2000 said:

Well, I have 8gb of ram, so I'm not too worried about the numbers above, I just didn't quite understand how so much ram could be gone.

From what it sounds like, is that there are a couple different ways ram is utilized.

The first batch of ram is used for all the processes.

Then Win 7 magically comes up with a # of ram it wants to hold (called cache), that is used to just speed things up.

Whenever the processes use more ram, or more processes appear, that magic # earlier, will decrease as needed.

If that's correct, then that's a good thing, the fact it uses ram that would just normally be wasted, instead, it uses as much as possible to speed things up when it can.

So the memory used from processes + cache = real # of ram used

Exactly. Its been doing this since Vista. What is cached are programs you use frequently, like if you use Firefox, its always gonna be loaded into the ram so it starts up faster.


Hopefully its not caching games into the ram like vista did. lol.

For the record OS'es have been cache'ing for a long time.

The only difference is now windows (with superfetch enabled) will try and predict what should be in the cache at certain times and load it into cache before it is needed.

That's awesome.. I'm glad my ram isn't just sitting around waiting to be used. I never saw this on XP, definitely an improvement!