IE is using 2.5gb of memory, that seems a tad excessive...?

[jxm]

I've been having problems with my PC where sometimes when I have a lot of apps open is will slow to a crawl, and sometimes it will nearly freeze up. eg. when pressing alt-ctrl-del to get up the task manager the screen goes black for a minute or two before it comes up with the blue screen to select task manager from, then another minute or two to get back to the desktop and get task manager running - ie. reeeeally slow!

When it does this task man reports the cpu as around 90% idle, so not a cpu issue, but I eventually traced what I think it the problem to the free memory. If I open the resource monitor and look at the memory I can see the 'free' memory go right down to zero. I don't know why it does that when there is still 2-3gb in 'standyby' but that's what it does. And when I see the free memory hit zero the system slows up, and if I shut IE down the free mem goes right back up and the system is fine - so pretty sure that's the problem.

Looking down the list of what's hogging all this memory (on a 6gb PC) iexplore.exe is listed 8 times, with most of the instances using 100-200mb each, but one using a whopping 500mb! I have 1 copy of IE running with 13 (now 14) tabs open - hardly excessive.

So what's causing the massive memory usage??? And is that normal?

 

[Faladu]

13-14 tabs IS a little excessive and if running 13-14 video clips and/or flash heavy pages, yeah you'd be taking a huge performance hit.

 

[jxm]

Well I wouldn't say 13 tabs was excessive, and they were just fairly standard looking websites - no videos/flash other than the occasional ad.

More to the point why is windows sitting on 2gb of 'standby' memory when there is 0 free??? You'd think it would allocate a big chunk to 'free' memory so there's was always at least some free... what the hell use is it to me in standby?

 

[Ztruker]

Try it with IE Add-ons disabled, see what the memory usage is.

 

[LMiller7]

It is normal and desirable for free memory to be very low or even zero. Windows was designed to work like this. Standby memory should be high. Standby memory is available for use by any process as needed, just like free memory, but until then it serves as a kind of cache. Free memory is wasted memory and Windows does it's best to minimize it.

 

[Britton30]

Well, yeah having 13 browser tabs, YouTubes, etc. will use memory. that's why it is there, to be used and keep your system running smoothly as possible. As LMiller7 stated, Standby Memory is available for use. It contains cached data and code that is not actively in use, it can be shared.
If all you memory is flagged as In Use, then there may be a problem.

Your specs say you have XP, so none of this may be relevant.

 

[cluberti]

The question is, are the tabs left open for long periods of time, or are they actively being browsed? If they're being left open for hours or days at a time, this could be expected behavior. Ultimately, while web-based apps are good, IE is a browser (any browser behaves in some way like this, ultimately), not an app, at least at it's core. IE can't run garbage collection on a page until there's a browse event (browsing to a different web site, or closing of the tab) so pages that continuously run javascript that use memory, or have memory leaks, will eventually take down free memory (usually via standby as well, as these pages are technically idle and go into the standby list). If you've done anything like disable the paging file, or set certain registry settings, your system can't actually clean that up effectively and you will run into severe paging or even, in rare scenarios, crashes.