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I recently upgraded my laptop from 12GB RAM to 24GB RAM (Win10). One of the reasons is to run two virtual machines (both 8GB RAM, both Linux using VMware Player) at once. After the Upgrade, though, everything seems to consume more memory (especially browsers, but also the system as a whole). After a bit of usage I am idling at 6-8GB RAM used with everything closed.

The RAM is not properly freed up even when I power on both said machines at the same time which leads to loads of swapping.

Before I was running one VM with 6GB using Firefox and even other apps a lot, and could even run the VM with 8GB (then I had to close Firefox though). This makes me think the increase in RAM makes the system use more of it. Is there any way to mitigate this?

I understand that unused RAM is wasted RAM in general, but in my specific situation, this behavior seems very counterproductive.

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  • You really spend only three words describing the actual problem, "loads of swapping". Can you give us some more details? How much swap is being used? When do you see the swapping? When launching new applications? During general use? Or what? Is switching between applications slow? Is using normal applications slow?
    – David Schwartz
    Commented May 19, 2020 at 18:54
  • Once I power on the second 8GB virtual machine, my RAM i eaten up within a few minutes (RAM usage of VMs usually ramps up a bit at start), I have no memory left, normal usage becomes really laggy, and my hard drive is at 100% constantly (due to using the pagefile). Launching new applications, and general I/O operations become slow too. Typical usage would be said 2 VMs and a browser.
    – Torben545
    Commented May 20, 2020 at 10:25
  • Are you 100% sure that disk I/O is due to using the pagefile? I think it's quite likely that your three OSes (two virtual, one the host) are just doing a lot of disk I/O. The reason so much RAM is being used is to try to minimize that disk I/O. Do you have a decent SSD or are you using spinning disk? (More details in your question would help. You're asking us to troubleshoot a complex problem with minimal information.)
    – David Schwartz
    Commented May 20, 2020 at 15:47
  • I'm thinking it must be the pagefile, because it is always the disk, where I have it on. I have a 1TB HDD, a 128GB SSD and a (new) 1TB SSD. The host OS is on the 128SSD, the VMs are both on the 1TB SSD. I have put the pagefile on all 3 of the drives, and it always shows the activity on that very drive. Also, everything becomes way worse when the Pagefile is on the HDD, because it is a lot slower, especially with a pagefile. I also checked pagefile usage in the performance monitor, it is around 3GB in that setup (shows 25% with a 12GB pagefile).
    – Torben545
    Commented May 21, 2020 at 8:25
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    That's very odd. You seem to have some unusual problem as what you're describing is not typical. It may be worth running this test: Remove the pagefile so only RAM is available. Let the machine run until you start to see performance issues. Then use RAMMap to see what the memory is being used by. It could even be a bad driver or something odd like that.
    – David Schwartz
    Commented May 21, 2020 at 15:53

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TBH I'm not aware of a Windows way of limiting RAM except what is described here in this question. Basically that is also what I would try. You are probably right that every application is now taking more memory as there is now more available but not infinitely more. So the only way might be limiting memory consumption for the most consuming processes.

There might be a better way but this is a good starting point :-). Also I would check the detailed RAM usage under the Windows Resource Monitor (run or search resmon) of your processes.

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