Windows 10: Lowest Possible RAM usage?

Adobe is trying to make sure people don't experience slowdowns so they make the buffer huge on purpose. Similar to what GPU vendors do with PSU requirements.

Reserving memory for applications that do not need to be ran/are useless/etc slows down productivity. It allows for wasteful services and programs to continue existing in the background, and this is fundamentally inefficient. Thus, I'd like idle RAM usage to be down to 1GB or 1.5GB ideally. In addition, that is from CS5. CS6 uses GPU hardware rendering.

Instead of arguing semantics you might suggest which services to disable if I want more idle RAM, what windows features to turn off, what startups to disable, etc.

 

Black Viper Black Viper | www.blackviper.com

 

You could disable things but that won't gain you any measurable let alone noticeable performance.

Windows 10 has very efficient memory management. But efficient use of memory does not necessarily mean using as little as possible. What it really means is using what you have to gain the best performance. They are by no means the same thing. The former idea was obsolete more than 20 years ago but unfortunately that is the idea that so very many people have. If you are willing to open your mind to other ideas I will gladly explain further. Otherwise I see little point in continuing with this thread.

 

Thanks! +rep.

Got any more suggestions?

 

Add another 16GB of RAM.

 

I vote this as the best reply of the month!!! Again, Ram On!!!

 

Shouldn't we be looking for highest memory usage ? Idle states don't matter much for memory, temperatures etc. Anybody looking to lower memory usage should be looking at resident and autostart programs as well as drivers and memory leaks. Turning of (in BIOS) unused HW can save few bytes too. That may also save few CPU cycles.

 

Agreed.

 

Unused HW? like what? I'm using all my AICs lol.

 

Agreed!

If I remember correctly, Windows processes crash dumps via the pagefile first; therefore, a pagefile must exist to accommodate the crash dump process. With that said, a fixed 400mb size should be adequate to process even the larger crash dumps so they can be read and evaluated from the permanent crash dump folder location at a later time. Other than that, I see no real use for a pagefile (provided you have an adequate amount of RAM). I have been running (essentially) without one since Windows XP without any issues. I have also noticed event viewer logs indicating a crash dump cannot be processed when the pagefile size is set to "0" (eg, no page file). Unfortunately I can't remember the Event ID. To the best of my knowledge, the requirement to have a small pagefile to process crash dumps is still valid.

 

Hi folks

Windows like most other OS'es is perfectly capable of managing RAM for best performance --there's little point in a user trying to optimise this.

Virtual Memory and demand paging algorithms have been around from as far back as the late 1960's and early 1970's with IBM's mainframe systems VS1 and OS/MVS so assuming your system has sufficient RAM the best solution is to leave this alone.

There's over 50 years experience of people enhancing these types of algorithms so I doubt whether any casual user tweaking would do anything other than probably DEGRADE the algorithms. !!!

What a USER can do is to ensure that not too many applications run concurrently, HDD's are the fastest available with the biggest cache sizes and applications behave properly. If you have things like Photoshop or Video editing stuff put scratch files on fast HDD like SDD's.

You can shorten start up time (but if your OS is in an SDD the improvement is so minimal you won't probably even notice it) is to only ensure services you use (or the OS requires) are started at boot.

IMO the biggest improvement most users can make to their systems (always assuming there's sufficient RAM --should be 4GB or more these days even on a small computer) is to go for the FASTEST HDD's you can afford and ensure these have a LARGE cache. If you must still use spinners get 7200 RPM ones - even laptop HDD's. slightly more expensive but performance is well worth while.

HDD performance is the most overlooked area - I've seen people upgrade to an i7 CPU just to get OFFICE to run faster !!! when a better HDD even on an I3 Celeron would have yielded a better result. !!!

Having the OS on an SSD is the best solution.

Cheers
jimbo

 

There's one thing that can be confusing. Some programs may throw "Not enough free memory" error while its apparent that there's plenty. It comes down just as some general type of error for lack of better words for it. It may be problem with program itself look at memory already addressed by something else. In some cases it can cause a BSOD with memory problems.

 

32 bit applications can only address 4GB of memory, even though you may have much more. So if the app itself starts using up memory, it will get out of memory conditions after only 4GB of usage (less actually, in most cases, but not to split hairs).

 

Found a culprit.

Why is Cortana's process running even though I have her disabled? (via settings and GPEDIT.MSC)

If I end her task she reappears almost instantly. Considering using my firewall to block her, although that's kind of a crappy solution.

 

OP - I am sorry to be a bit harsh here.


There is a reason why you are a junior member - you do not have enough experience on this forum yet.


You have been told many times here that you are not understanding the memory management and yet you persist in trying to solve a problem that you think is a problem but is not! Indeed you would make things worse.


Your post about Cortana absolutely proves my point.


Cortana is in two parts ie the core search engine, and the vocal user interface. You can disable the vocal interface but not the search engine part. People have removed Cortana completely and SCREWED things up - no search etc.


So it is time you listen to the advice of people here which basically says leave things alone. If you cannot do that, go to another forum and stop wasting the time of knowledgeable people trying to advise you.