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I recently updated a 9900k system with 32GB to 128GB of RAM. After getting rid of useless drivers, at startup, Windows 10 enterprise x64 uses 2.6GB of RAM. After upgrading to 128GB, the memory used is 6GB after startup.

The processes listed in task manager are the same, but I did not pay much attention to other types of memory (committed, cached, etc). I suspect there is always a certain amount of memory that goes on swap/virtual memory on the drive.

Is it normal that the kernel scales the usage of memory with the available memory?

How can I measure such things? with some powershell command? Is there some algorithm used behind? Which?

EDIT

I also have constant 800MB of swap/pagefile (but no c:/pagefile.sys, likely not needed), and two NVME Evo Plus 1TB+2TB for the system.

EDIT

superfetch is now SysMain, and deactivating it does not change the RAM usage, I see approximately the same RAM usage after startup (5-6GB).

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  • superuser.com/questions/209541/…
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Dec 15, 2020 at 21:35
  • @DavidPostill I dont' know if it's relevant. I have contant 800MB for swap, before and after upgrade. Maybe a "swap usage probe" would help here.
    – Soleil
    Dec 15, 2020 at 21:44
  • I am going to guess the OS needs to store the page table somewhere?
    – u1686_grawity
    Dec 15, 2020 at 22:09
  • @user1686 c:/pagefile.sys if any, and hidden.
    – Soleil
    Dec 15, 2020 at 22:16

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Yes, this is very normal behavior.

The idea is this, if you have so many memory to spare, windows will use it to cache operations in order to predict what you're going to do next so that it launches faster and snappier. It will do so only with memory that is spare, so the moment you are running a memory intensive application, it will delete the predictions from memory first, then start to move memory to swap.

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  • Is it superfetch? Do you have documentation/commands to get to know more about this?
    – Soleil
    Dec 15, 2020 at 21:31
  • I'd have to search for it. Its stuff I read up a while ago doing research for pagefile and how it works.
    – LPChip
    Dec 15, 2020 at 21:32
  • Can we see Superfetch as some kind of adaptive ramdisk? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologies
    – Soleil
    Dec 15, 2020 at 21:38
  • If you have an SSD then Superfetch will be effectively disabled. Disk caching on the other hand will simply only evict items from the cache when it runs out of memory.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Dec 15, 2020 at 22:16
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Usually Windows tries to keep as much memory free as possible for you to use it. If Windows recognizes that you've got a lot of free memory space, it'll use it to preload and to cache things to boost the performance.

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  • Well, do you have services names, MSFT doc to support that?
    – Soleil
    Dec 16, 2020 at 2:24

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