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I was recently looking at this question: Why is the total memory usage reported by Windows Task Manager much higher than the sum of all processes' memory usage? when my task manager was doing just that. It sort of led me to the right answer as to why there was so much being used, but what I didn't know was why Windows kept crashing all my programs when I was only using 80% of my memory according to the task manager.
So I went to the performance tab, where I found that apparently, 31.6 and fluctuating out of 31.9 GB of memory was committed for some reason, and whenever it reached 31.9 was when my programs almost crashed. Restarting the computer did nothing for committed memory, and neither did restarting programs.
Failing that, I looked at the Resource Monitor for more in-depth information, but that baffled me further. Committed memory for ever process was rarely higher than working memory, and when it was it wasn't by much, so adding all that together would be only about 7 to 9 GB. Adding Committed to Working was still only half of what was apparently committed. I actually ended up adding all the >5000 KB numbers to get only about 3000 MB.
Just for extra information, my physical memory usage according to the Resource Monitor is 113 MB in Hardware Reserved, 2993 in In Use, 3742 in Modified, 506 in Standby, and 790 in Free. 1365 MB is available according to the bottom stash, 4273 cached, 8079 total, and 8192 installed.
I'm stumped. How do I find where all this committed memory is coming from? I didn't have all this extra until suddenly a few days ago, so it can't be anything important--I'd like to get rid of it if I can.
Jonathan Spirit
Posted 2015-01-08T23:24:20.523
Reputation: 101
Have you checked for malware that might be hiding itself form Task Manager? It seems like a full boot-time virus scan would be helpful, particularly because this is a recent occurrence. BTW, even 80% memory usage might be causing excessive swapping of memory to HDD, which is orders of magnitude slower than RAM... are you sure it's a crash, rather than just an incredible slowdown? – DrMoishe Pippik – 2015-01-09T04:44:17.593
taskmgr is crap, for detailed memory usage drill down use RAMMap: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx
– magicandre1981 – 2015-01-09T05:37:22.267@DrMoishePippik It doesn't slow down at all--it just crashes all my apps, and sometimes my display, too, causing me to have to restart my computer. But actually, for the first time, restarting worked, and now the committed memory and usage is way down again. – Jonathan Spirit – 2015-01-09T15:16:49.080
have you tried RAMMap? – magicandre1981 – 2015-01-12T17:54:29.403
He hasn't even posted a screen cap from Task Manager. But with 3 GB modified, likelihood is that he has no pagefile. He needs one. – Jamie Hanrahan – 2017-02-20T21:29:30.387