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I can't find similar question so talking about it so I would like to create one. It is a bit long so I bold what I want to ask actually.

Someone had noticed Windows 8 is taking too much memory for the Cached, and the answer of the question is using some memory optimizers to gain back the cached ram.

However, the Cached memory is increasing again from time to time, so I have to run the optimizer again, I wonder why Windows is playing this kind of cat and mouse mechanism, some article mentioned that memory optimizers is no needed. I doubt if this theory is applied to some low end device like win8 tablet with 2GB ram. For example, without memory optmizer, I see the memory usage of my PC is running up to 96% and start lagging, after clicking the optimize button, the memory usage is dropped dramatically and it is not lagging.

I have done such test, below screenshot is before optimizing: enter image description here

After optimizing: (Nothing special over the mouseover description, just a mistake when screen capturing) enter image description here

Is memory optmizer really needed for Windows8 (or later) based modern PC? (including high end and low end)

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    run RAMMap when you have the high memory usage and post pictures: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx. What you did was crap, you wrote data to the pagefile and generated a high DiskIO. You should fix the real memory leak instead ;) Jun 26, 2015 at 16:58
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    Cache is good and you want as much of it as possible so Windows is designed to use as much of it as possible. Trying to reduce it is bad.
    – qasdfdsaq
    Jul 2, 2015 at 14:59
  • RAMMap is a great tool, the proper way to find "where all my ram go" and one can rest assure that Windows put all these RAM to good use. Caching is good, but 100% good? I'm not sure, Windows 8 is much less aggressively in caching files comparing to Windows 7.
    – lex
    Jul 3, 2015 at 19:17

1 Answer 1

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The article you linked to answers your question.

Memory optimizers are not only not needed, they are harmful. Free memory is no better than memory not installed in the device -- it has no effect on performance. Modern operating systems go to elaborate lengths to keep as little memory free as possible to gain maximum performance. You can clearly see in your screen shots how much worse the optimizer made things with much more memory wasted after the optimizer than before.

Since you are experience performance problems, there is probably something wrong. And the memory usage patterns you're seeing might be a clue to what's going on. But they're not the problem.

If you're thinking, "I want memory to be free now so I can use it later", get that out of your head. You can use the memory now and use it later. There's no trade-off to be made here. Using memory is a pure win. Modern operating systems transition memory directly from one use to another, making memory free only as a last resort.

If you want help figuring out what's wrong with your system, I suggest you make a new question and describe the problem in as much detail as you can. In particular, don't use the word "lagging" which can mean anything. Precisely describe what problems you experience.

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    +1. Windows makes an effort to use all the physical memory to avoid disk accesses. It will therefore keep files and programs in the memory cache even when they are no longer used, just in case. That memory is reused when needed, so is not a performance problem. The optimizer may have caused memory that is still in use to be swapped out to the page-file on disk, so adding a performance hit when these files or program-code pages are required later on.
    – harrymc
    Jun 29, 2015 at 19:27

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