Windows 10: what is normal swap usage?

I have 8 gb ram
my rainmeter system monitor says
cpu 5%
ram 33%
swap 34%

is that swap normal?
I don't have any heavy applications open, and haven't done hardly anything on the computer since restarting.

:)

 

what is normal swap usage?

8gb ram

cpu: i-5 6500

I am running only light programs, and did a restart an hour ago.

my rainmeter system monitor says

cpu 5%

ram 36%

swap 35%

why is the swap so high? I have plenty of unused ram.

 

what is normal swap usage?

it was subsequently explained to me that by default, rainmeter's system monitor defines "swap usage" as ram usage + swap usage.

so it doesn't seem I have a problem.

 

I would disable it entirely as I have done. Swap or pagefile was initially created many years ago for computers with little memory (such as 512Mb) to be able to run programs that required more memory than the computer actually had. I would say that any computer newer than 5 years should not need it at all.

On a side note, I'm worried that your computer specs say you have no PSU. This is impossible as all computers need power *Biggrin

 

thanks. I updated my system specs. I guess I was too lazy to fill out the PSU...
I have no problem disabling the pagefile, as 8 gb is more than I even know how to use, but is the high swap usage a sign of some problem?

 

According to rainmeter docs, by default "swap usage" actually stands for the sum of RAM usage and swap file usage. So, your readouts indicate that most of the data is currently in RAM and only a small amount has been pushed to swap file.

In any case, there's no such thing as "normal" or "not normal" when it comes to swap file usage. The more "dormant" memory pages you currently have in your virtual memory ("dormant" stands for "occupied, but not currently used"), the higher swap will usage you will observe. This is perfectly normal. As long as your system is running smoothly, without swap thrashing, you are fine.

 

thanks for the extremely helpful and detailed info. that really clears things up!

 

That is not true.

Swap files are natural part of any system that can run multiple processes simultaneously. The purpose of swap file is to store "dormant"/"sleeping" processes/code/data, thus freeing more RAM for actively running code and actively used data. This principle immediately applies to any system with finite amount of RAM, regardless of how large that amount is.

Of course, if you only run some simplistic applications with very small memory footprint, then from their point of view modern RAM sizes might be seen as virtually "infinite". On such systems one can disable the swap file entirely. But I certainly believe most of us use our computers for more serious applications.