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I am completely confused on seeing the free memory available in Task Manager as 15MB. My system configuration is Core2Duo with 6GB RAM running Windows7 64-bit professional edition. At the time of taking this screen shot, the only application I was running was Chrome browser and I had disabled "SuperFetch" service in case if its caching data.

Please help me to understand why only 15MB of free RAM is shown in Task Manager.

enter image description here

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Because memory that is totally un-used is memory you wasted money buying, and a missed opportunity for the OS to cache something in RAM to improve your performance. You don't want to waste money or see your system slow down, do you? – DJ Pon3 Apr 12 '11 at 13:04
See this article Part 1 on windows memory Management, may give you some understanding...blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive/2010/10/28/… – Moab Apr 12 '11 at 13:51
Part 2....blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive/2010/10/29/… – Moab Apr 12 '11 at 13:52
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migrated from serverfault.com Apr 12 '11 at 11:27

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2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Helps to read.

  • Total: 6068Mb - I thinkyo agree here.
  • Cached: 5180: the OS uses 5180mb to cache disc items that were loaded.
  • Free: 15mb - currently not used memory.

Available: 5151mb: the amount of memory that is available for programs. Basically the cache will return data to be assigned to a program WHEN NEEDED. Until then the OS thinks it is smarter to use the memory for SOMETHING (file caching) than jsut have it lie around totally unused.

So, your available memory is 5180mb, not 15mb.

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@TomTom: Thanks for the explanation. What I came to know was that, if SuperFetch service is disabled the cache will no longer be there. Is this true? – AJP Apr 12 '11 at 7:12
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No. this is not superfetch, thisi s the normal file system cache. Superfetch is soemthing different (other purpose). Why do you bother? do you WANT the expensive ram to just sit there doing nothing instead of something marginally usefull? – TomTom Apr 12 '11 at 7:23
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The main difference is that Superfetch pre-populates the cache with items that you are likely to use, compared to things staying in cache after you've accessed them. – Matthew Steeples Apr 12 '11 at 7:56
Thanks to TomTom and Matthew Steeples for your comments. – AJP Apr 12 '11 at 9:13
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up vote 2 down vote

Windows 7 will cache the memory like that when there is other need for that memory, if an application requests a lot of memory the OS will release that memory from the cache.

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