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My Windows 10 64bit PC has 16GB of physical RAM:

C:\>wmic MEMORYCHIP get BankLabel, DeviceLocator, Capacity
BankLabel  Capacity     DeviceLocator
BANK 0     17179869184  ChannelA-DIMM0

Also under About your PC it says:

Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.7 GB usable)

But in Task Manager my memory shows as 83% full. Once in a while some applications get automatically closed because of out of memory issues. So I digged in to check what uses so much RAM. The biggest offender was Firefox with about 800MB of RAM. But that's just not that much. Then I did a tasklist /FO CSV > tasks.csv to sum up all the memory usage, and the result was 6.4GB, which is about 83% out of 7.7GB (assuming that 0.3GB are always reserved for video stuff).

This suggests that even though Windows sees the full 16GB, it only uses 8GB. Or, it uses 8GB for some secret stuff it doesn't want to show in task manager.

Any suggestions on how to investigate this further?

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  • Have you disabled or otherwise limited the page file size?
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Sep 13, 2019 at 13:13
  • @Mokubai the paging file is limited at 800MB by corporate rules. So yes, and that's likely the reason why applications close, but this still doesn't explain the missing of 8GB of RAM
    – Andrei
    Commented Sep 13, 2019 at 13:25
  • It isn't "missing" it is just that programs are over allocating RAM but not physically using it, this is a common practice and is usually handled in virtual memory by the operating system. The fact that your virtual memory is artificially limited is the problem.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Sep 13, 2019 at 13:30
  • @Mokubai I see, so if paging file would be "dynamic", then the programs that would over allocate, would over allocate in the paging file, and likely never get to actually use that part, but since they can't, they just crash. Did I get it?
    – Andrei
    Commented Sep 13, 2019 at 13:34
  • Yes, exactly. Their requests are honoured by the operating system effectively allocating space in virtual memory and backing it with the page file. That the pages may never physically be used or even written is irrelevant, the backing store needs to be available. Linux allows over-allocation on the assumption that many programs never use all they claim, while Windows assumes that they might and refuses to over allocate memory. By blocking the page file from growing they are not allowing efficient use of the VM system. Your corporate IT people have goofed.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Sep 13, 2019 at 13:37

1 Answer 1

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Is it system or hardware reserved in task manager? If you have hardware that has shared memory like iGPU, it can reserve RAM to use as iGPU memory. Or you RAM may be installed in an unsupported configuration. Without more details about the hardware itself (how many DIMMs, what motherboard, whats the DIMM capacity, what other hardware is in the machine) or log files it's really impossible to tell.

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  • I already posted the ansewr of wmic, which says it's only one stick, and I also posted that the full 16GB are seen by Windows. If the ram would be improperly installed, it wouldn't be shown as available in windows.
    – Andrei
    Commented Sep 13, 2019 at 13:27

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