Windows 10: Why is Windows 10 compressing memory when I appear to have plenty available?

Why is Windows 10 still compressing memory when I appear to have plenty available?https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/why-is-windows-10-compressing-memory-when-i-appear/bc149ba8-e852-499c-be34-0d81226d7253

:)

 

Why is Windows 10 compressing memory when I appear to have plenty available.

(edit: updated hyperlinks)

I do a lot of scientific/engineering computing simulation with bespoke and memory hungry applications. Perhaps not memory hungry in a 8tb supercomputer sense, but memory hungry in the 'more than word/email/youtube and even chrome' sense. Historically my
worksets have occupied anywhere from 4-30 gb of RAM.

Since the anniversary update I have experienced significant performance issues with my machine, and while investigating I noticed that windows appears to be fairly aggressively compressing memory. For example, when opening a particular model I experience
this:

imgur.com
If task manager is to believed (and I know it might not be, as the notion of memory is quite nebulous) I am using 11.5gb of memory, 4.7gb of which is compressed. However there is effectively 17.5 gb free.

Some notes about this:

• This behaviour is not consistent. Sometimes when I open the same model I do not have any compressed memory
• Because of the above I am fairly certain that the memory set does not uncompress to more than 24 gb (even this is a high order)
• I have attempted to disable what I can of memory compression as per How to disable Windows 10 memory compression?
• I've noticed that at times my system seems very unwilling to go above ~16gb of RAM usage. Even if I were to open multiple copies of the same model, the memory usage will ramp up to 16gb, and then start very aggressively compressing instead of using the
  available memory.
• When I use the sysinternals process explorer I can often see the 'System/Memory Compression' process using an entire core at times when my system appears to be sluggish/nonresponsive
• My system:
  • Freshly formatted 10 days ago (updated previous install to anniversary but had performance issues. attempted a flatten-and-reinstall to see if that would help)
  • Windows 10 Home (meant to install professional but probably chose wrong option in installer)
  • 1607 14393.187
  • Lenovo W540 laptop with 32gb of ram
    • This is an optimus system (hybrid intel/nvidia graphics)
• My behaviour (this is mentioned because some of it is uncommon and my merit of being an edge case has been historically problematic in other areas):
  • Suspend/resume a lot as I move between home/various areas of work
  • Multiple high resolution monitors
  • Use multiple Lenovo docks (home/work)

As mentioned I have been experiencing significant performance issues with my machine since the anniversary update. My suspicion is that this is due to changes in memory compression policy as I have often noticed the CPU churning and fans spinning up at times
when system appears to be acting sluggishly. However I have not been able to confirm this as I had not been monitoring memory compression prior to the anniversary update - it is entirely possible that similar compression behaviour was occurring prior to the
update but working fine.

I've tried reading about W10 memory policies and compression but haven't been able to find a lot on the internet that is goes into specifics. If someone could answer my question, explain what is going on here, or otherwise provide some resources for me to
research in greater detail it would be appreciated.

 

Why is Windows 10 compressing memory when I appear to have plenty available.

Anup Karkal's suggestions did not resolve my Windows 10 memory issues.

Is it possible to confirm at least that there was a memory compression behaviour/policy change in the Windows 10 anniversary update? If so do Microsoft consider this an issue they are looking at or as far as they are concerned is it all good?

 

Why is Windows 10 compressing memory when I appear to have plenty available.

Hi,

We certainly want to get this taken cared of.

To resolve Windows 10 memory issues, we suggest you refer to the suggestions provided by Anup Karkal on July 27, 2016 in this Microsoft Community

link.

Let us know how it goes.