Help my work computer not suck

I have a nice workstation, but not nice enough (see my other thread about needing something better). It's what I have for now.

It's weird. Sometimes it bleeds memory into the void. See the snapshot:

That's a lot of memory usage, but no programs are taking responsibility for that much memory usage.

I don't know why it does this. Sometimes a restart helps. I tried Malwarebytes trial to see if something malicious was happening.

I don't know anything about computers. I don't even really want to know. I just want it not to be absurd and pretend that 64 Mb of ram is somehow taking over a machine with 16 gigs available.

Help?

Check out the Resource Monitor instead of just Task Manager:

That might help you figure out where it's going.   Seems like some program has a memory leak, though, that'll probably be a developer fix, maybe an update to the latest version or something?

The "commit" column is how much memory that Windows has allocated to that program, and hasn't yet released it.  They have nice descriptions if you mouse over each of the column headers (e.g., "Commit (KB)").

You can also try killing services to see what stops the memory leak, though it's possible your IT department has something hidden running in the background (like Forcepoint or something) you may not be able to see/stop/whatever.

 

Brett_Murphy (Agent of Chaos) said:

You can also try killing services to see what stops the memory leak, though it's possible your IT department has something hidden running in the background (like Forcepoint or something) you may not be able to see/stop/whatever.

 

Our IT department is a guy upstairs who buys things, and two guys who show up in crocs looking like they slept under a bridge. I doubt they are that sophisticated, but I also don't trust them. How do I find out?

After restart

Can you run task manager in Administrator mode?  Also, you might try something like Sysinternals Process Explorer as an alternative to Task manager.

Sure:

That's after another restart after disabling a few services. Firefox has three tabs open, this tab, the download page for sysinternals, and a blank tab. MS Edge is not open.

While the memory usage currently isn't spiking, I still don't understand why it's taking large (49% right now) of my 16G of RAM if the items in the task manager only add up to like 3G.

Closing Firefox is worth like 5%.

Also it seems my meager 16G is really 13.7G, but the math still is weird. It's saying I am using 6.8. Where?

Under the file menu, did you select the option "Show details for all processes"?

The MSEdgewebview2 processes is due to things like Teams, etc.  A lot of the MSFT apps have moved to being a web application that runs in a special edge instance.

tuna55 said:

 

After restart

Looks like all the windows generic stuff lines up with my system (PhoneExperienceHost, etc), so I'm not seeing anything jump out from that list.   Your largest in that image is Outlook @ 564Mb, mine is 809, so it's probably not out of line. 

Some higher hits, for example Memory Compression is getting a workout on yours (532Mb vs <70 on mine), but that makes sense when I have 44Gb available still.    You're also seeing some hard faults (where it shuffles things from RAM to disk, that's what MemComp is doing for ya). 

I also have an inordinate amount of msedgewebview2 & msedge processes sucking up a bunch of RAM.  When I researched it before, it was due to all of the modern Teams/Outlook/etc. really just being a desktop view of a website.  Each "page" that it's keeping track of has its own process like opening a tab in Edge.   There's no escaping it.

How many RAMs do you have in your herd?  I've got 64Gb, and I don't often hit the limits, only when I have 4 or 5 large files open simultaneously in Mastercam.. 

Wxdude10 - Mike said:

Under the file menu, did you select the option "Show details for all processes"?

The MSEdgewebview2 processes is due to things like Teams, etc.  A lot of the MSFT apps have moved to being a web application that runs in a special edge instance.

No.

I did now. This is what that looks like:

In reply to WonkoTheSane :

Ugh, only 16, and 13.7 declared usable for some reason.

But why is it missing so much? Just manually adding the big hitters on the memory Pareto gives some 3 gb, while that should be 23%, it's showing like double that.

And yes, we use Teams a lot here. Any way to stop it from being a hog even though I use it often?

Sorry, I got interrupted on my reply and a lot of conversation happened in that half hour :)

I don't know of any way to make Teams performant, sorry! 

Edit:  I knew I remember reading about (and laughing at) that "new" teams would use half as much memory!  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/microsoft-teams-20-use-half-memory-maor-david-pur/

Windows 11 eats RAM like Homer Simpson eats donuts.
 

To me, 11 has been buggy and unstable compared to W10, but that has more to do with how it interacts with other software. Just running email and a web browser shouldn't blow it up. 

In reply to tester (Forum Supporter) :

I just checked mine that I upgraded from win 10 just a few days ago.  Yep I'm using about twice as much memory with the same load as before.

In reply to tuna55 :

Your missing memory is probably being used by your internal graphics card.

tester (Forum Supporter) said:

Windows 11 eats RAM like Homer Simpson eats donuts.
 

To me, 11 has been buggy and unstable compared to W10, but that has more to do with how it interacts with other software. Just running email and a web browser shouldn't blow it up. 

Came to say this.  Also if you are not running a dedicated GPU it will pull all spare ram for graphics. As well as windows. So in short if you are running an APU it is fighting with windows for the 16gb.  If you have a GPU windows is sucking up all spare RAM. 16 gb for a workstation is not really enough these days. 
 

For comparison I have a 4090 GPU and 128gb of system RAM in my work station and I hit the wall some times.   
 

If you are running an APU tell IT to get you a GPU.  Also upping to 32 gb ram would help. For workstations 32 gb is becoming the minimum.  RAM is cheep at the moments.  Snap in a couple sticks

Oh are you running single channel or duel channel RAM?  

Agreed, an extra 16 gigs is cheap.  Probably cheaper than your research so far by a good margin.  Looking into it some more makes sense, but there is a good chance with work stuff you are just using a bunch of memory.  If you find yourself needing more, get the appropriate hardware.

I checked my home pc, which admittedly could use a ram upgrade.  Win 11 on a fresh boot uses almost 5 gigs, however a big chunk of that is Steam and Discord, which are likely not in play on a work PC.

*I have not had any stability or bug issues with Win 11.

Almost 12 with Edge, Outlook, and a few other regular programs loaded.

You're using way more than 64mb.  Any time your memory use gets above about 80%, you're going to notice sluggish stuff.  You're at 98%.

I suggest going into the startup files and unclicking anything you recognize but don't use. That's an important distinction.  Don't just look at "systemp.blahblah" and unclick it, but if you see "Solitaire pro," yeah... ditch that.

Bottom line is that the combination of active processes adds up to occupying 98% of your memory, and that ain't good.

Well my spectacular IT department came over and put in 32G instead, so it's a little better now.

Followup question, because I didn't realize people still had these... Do you have a NVME drive in the computer? 

I was just onsite with a customer yesterday (doing CAM Programming) and their computer was CRAWLING..     Turns out it was a 8+ year old PC that was pushed onto them, with a 7200RPM Platter drive!   Like it was 2005!   They were also maxing out their 16GB of RAM.  That's on a computer that they're expected to use Solidworks and Mastercam on.  Ugh.   I broke down exactly how much money they were losing per year (on an assumed salary) using that antique. 

Once you exceed >60-80% of memory usage, Windows will start fairly aggressively caching things on the harddrive.   NVME drives are almost as fast* as RAM, so there's really not too much hit to doing it.   Platter drives are 100x slower than RAM, so there's a massive hit there.

*NVMe read/write speeds are in the 7GB/s range where as DDR5 RAM speeds are in the ~25GB/s range.   7200RPM harddrive speeds are at best in the ~270 MB/s!!!!

tuna55 said:

Brett_Murphy (Agent of Chaos) said:

You can also try killing services to see what stops the memory leak, though it's possible your IT department has something hidden running in the background (like Forcepoint or something) you may not be able to see/stop/whatever.

 

Our IT department is a guy upstairs who buys things, and two guys who show up in crocs looking like they slept under a bridge. I doubt they are that sophisticated, but I also don't trust them. How do I find out?

Sorry, others have already walked you through it. Glad you got more RAM.

tuna55 said:

Brett_Murphy (Agent of Chaos) said:

You can also try killing services to see what stops the memory leak, though it's possible your IT department has something hidden running in the background (like Forcepoint or something) you may not be able to see/stop/whatever.

 

Our IT department is a guy upstairs who buys things, and two guys who show up in crocs looking like they slept under a bridge. I doubt they are that sophisticated, but I also don't trust them. How do I find out?

this description of IT made me laugh outloud.