Extremely little free memory, I don't think this is normal...

carwiz said:

That isn't a "normal" system. You either have some large processes running like video editing, graphics rendering or a pot load of stuff running. I wouldn't call that "normal". If it is for you, you need more memory. Free memory is what Windows uses first when starting new tasks. If there's not enough available, Windows starts shuffling Standby to the pagefile to make room. And paging means hardware I/O--The slowest of all events on the system.

If you don't have such items running, you have memory leaks.

Believe what you want but you are wrong! Available memory is what Windows uses first.

I will!

I suggest you do a little research.

http://brandonlive.com/2010/02/21/me...-in-windows-7/

What I stated was that having no free memory was not a problem. Available memory = cached + free allows the system to make use of the memory when needed and no system degradation occurs if free memory is 0 as long as there is available memory.

You said a system is not normal if free memory is small or zero. I disagree.

That isn't a "normal" system. You either have some large processes running like video editing, graphics rendering or a pot load of stuff running. I wouldn't call that "normal". If it is for you, you need more memory. Free memory is what Windows uses first when starting new tasks. If there's not enough available, Windows starts shuffling Standby to the pagefile to make room. And paging means hardware I/O--The slowest of all events on the system.

Aside from the somewhat high memory usage the screenshot by pbcopter in post #4 is not abnormal or even unusual. Free memory is very low, as it should be. It is consuming power and contributing nothing to system performance. It's only value is the potential to be assigned to a process or system use where it can then make a contribution.

When available memory is plentiful, and with 11863 MB that is certainly the case, the memory manager will allow processes to use whatever RAM they want. This is a good thing. Memory was meant to be used, not sit idle. And at 4.36 GB usage out of 16 GB total usage would be considered light.

The memory situation in post #4 is virtually ideal. It could hardly be better.

When a process needs memory the memory manager first goes to free memory. It is idle and waiting to be put to work. When free memory is insufficient then it is time to go to standby memory. It is fully available and can be used at any time for any purpose with no disk access required. There is certainly no shuffling of standby memory to the pagefile. Only in the event that both free and standby memory is completely drained is there a need for more active measures.

When given the opportunity the memory manager will attempt to deal with a low available memory situation before it becomes a problem. It does this by trimming process working sets, memory that hasn't been recently used being the first to go. This is a complex process and I will not attempt to describe it here. In the event the the process needs access to memory that was trimmed it can normally be accessed with a soft pagefault with no disk access required.

As for the screenshot in post #9:
I would not consider this normal at all. With over half of the 8 GB RAM free this is far too high. There are unavoidable situations where this will occur but it is not something you should desire. It was situations like this that prompted the development of technologies like Superfetch.

Edit: In Vista and later.
Available memory = Standby + Free
Cached memory = Standby + Modified. Oddly, the file cache is not included.
This was determined by observation.