Windows, why 8 GB of RAM feel like a few MB?
- by Desmond Hume
I'm on Windows 7 x64 with 4-core Intel i7 and 8 GB of RAM, but lately it feels like my computer's "RAM" is located solely on the hard drive.
Here is what the task manager shows:
The total amount of memory used by the processes in the list is just about 1 GB. And what is happening on my computer for a few days now is that one program (Cataloger.exe) is continually processing large quantities of (rather big) files, repeatedly opening and reading them for the purposes of cataloging. But it doesn't grow too much in memory and stays about that size, about 90 MB. However, the amount of data it processes in, say, 30 minutes can be measured in gigabytes.
So my guess was that Windows file caching has something to do with it. And after some research on the topic, I came across this program, called RamMap, that displays detailed info on a computer's RAM. Here is the screenshot:
So to me it looks like Windows keeps in RAM huge amounts of data that is no longer needed, redirecting any RAM allocation requests to the pagefile on the hard drive. Even when I close Cataloger.exe, the RamMap reports the size of the mapped file as about the same for a long time on. And it's not just this particular program. Earlier I noticed that similar slowdown occurred after some massive file operations with other programs. So it's really not an exception.
Whatever it is, it slows down the computer by like 50 times. Opening a new tab in Chrome takes 20-30 seconds, opening a new program can take up to a minute. Due to the slowdown, some programs even crash.
So what do you think, is the problem hiding in file caching or somewhere else? How do I solve it?
