Reduce "Metafile" memory usage?

Posted by Jay Conrod on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Jay Conrod
Published on 2011-01-17T18:19:04Z Indexed on 2011/01/17 18:55 UTC
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My work computer (Windows 7 64-bit) spends a lot of time swapping memory when I switch between programs. This surprises me since I have 4 GB of RAM, and the programs I use aren't particularly RAM hungry (Outlook, Emacs, p4win, Firefox, various build tools). I downloaded RAMMap, and it shows over a gigabyte of memory used by "Metafile".

From the Sysinternals blog:

Metafile is part of the system cache and consists of NTFS metadata. NTFS metadata includes the MFT as well as the other various NTFS metadata files. ... In the MFT each file attribute record takes 1k and each file has at least one attribute record. Add to this the other NTFS metadata files and you can see why the Metafile category can grow quite large on servers with lots of files.

So I understand what the "Metafile" data is... I work on large builds comprising hundreds of thousands of files (none are that big, but they add up to several gigabytes). My question is how can I reduce the amount of memory used by "Metafile"? I'm not actively using all those files at once, so why does Windows need to keep info in RAM? Restarting my machine every time I sync a new build is really annoying.

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