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Question

High Memory Usage

by Mar 26, 2014 12:02AM PDT

Ocassionally my computer will become so slow it's almost unresponsive, when I check task manager it says 7.2 of 7.9GB of ram is in use. Even rebooting it, it will come back with high memory usage, sometimes rebooting it, it goes back to normal

Most of the time it is normal and fast, I can have Chrome open and have 10 pages open and usage is about 1GB, but what causes this to happen occasionally when I'm just surfing the internet?

I have Win 8, Intel 4670K, Z87, 8GB DDR1333.

Discussion is locked

7 Posts
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Answer
The discussion on Chrome and RAM is well done.
by Forum moderator Mar 26, 2014 2:52AM PDT

Depending on what's in the tabs, it does use RAM over anything else and it's still possible for scripts to bog down the machine in those tabs. Not much has changed over the years on this topic. You might want to scan the PC and reset Chrome but given only the clues so far I'd read the old discussions about Chrome and RAM. That's not a bug!
Bob

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yep
by 1stplatoonkilla Mar 29, 2014 8:23AM PDT

No I'm saying even with NOTHING open or running it will say almost all my ram is in use. I'm running Avast and it's a pretty fresh install of windows.

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And?
by Jimmy Greystone Mar 29, 2014 10:28AM PDT

And? Seriously. An OS should be trying to use every last scrap of free RAM at its disposal to improve the performance of the system. It's a concept known as caching and it's been a best practice for OS design theory for quite some time now. The Windows NT line (of which Windows 8 is part of) has been doing it since its inception to some degree or another. Rather than get data off your HDD which is many thousands of times slower than your RAM or even a SSD which is still easily hundreds of times slower than your RAM, it stores what it figures you're going to need in RAM. So when the CPU requests that data, it goes over the significantly faster FSB link compared to first being read into RAM from the HDD or SSD.

You'll have to be a bit more specific as to what apps exactly are consuming the most RAM shortly after boot.

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Answer
Just back. My laptop resumed from sleep on 8.0
by Forum moderator Mar 29, 2014 9:02AM PDT

And with firefox open claims to be using 2.1GB of 16GB RAM.

So how about looking at task manager and sorting the processes by RAM use? What's at the top?
Bob

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task manager
by 1stplatoonkilla Apr 1, 2014 12:01AM PDT

Yeah that's the thing, under task manager nothing is using more than 60MB.

The thing is this only happens like every couple day's. I can't find anything runnign that would do that.

When it says most of the ram is in use, the comptuer is unusable, basically you hit cntl/alt/del and it takes about a full minute for it to open. If you click something it's like 30 seconds before it attempts to open.

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OK at this point I can't guess where you are
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Apr 1, 2014 1:48AM PDT
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Answer
Here's a screenshot
by Mar 29, 2014 9:53AM PDT
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