I have Windows 7 installed on the computer with 2GB RAM. Recently I've been running out of memory quite often while running all the same tasks; the windows would display warnings and so on. However total RAM used by all the programs is less than 2GB. As I investigated the issue I have found that even on the clean startup - the diagnostic startup in msconfig, which only runs essential services and no user startup - Windows somehow uses 800-900MB of RAM right from the start. Here are screenshots demonstrating the issue:
RamMap screenshot:
Poolmon screenshot:
After approximately five minutes of runtime there is an unexplained 500MB drop in memory usage. Nothing seems to change. The total usage is around 450MB which is still quite high, or is it normal? When I boot up the system with standard settings (loading all the services and so on) the drop after five minutes is around 300MB, which still means 1GB memory is used on startup with only about 300MB being used by user programs.
After searching around I have found the following possible reasons for this happening:
- Windows' SuperFetch uses memory to load programs faster - not the case, since I have explicitly disabled it
- Memory leak in a driver - doesn't seem to be the case, as nothing in the poolmon screenshot above shows significant usage. Please confirm, maybe I'm reading it wrong.
- Windows is somehow using this memory for speed-up purposes - this doesn't seem to be the case either because, as far as I read, it's supposed to give memory to applications when needed and yet it doesn't. I run out when the total memory used by each program is around 1.3GB, while the total memory used is almost 2GB.
I don't know if it's at all relevant, but the pagefile is currently 756MB in size despite the fact that I explicitly set it to be 2048MB as initial and maximum size. I have sufficient disk space and the pagefile increases in size sometimes.
Could someone clarify what is going on and possibly point me in the direction of how to solve this?