Windows low on memory, kills programs, plenty of memory

Hi I'm on win7x64 w 16gb memory and 8gb vram and I'm not doing complex photo editing or etc just normal stuff like excel, net browsing, occasional streaming. Lately I've been getting the low on memory warnings and even it kills processes, goes back to win basic theme etc. I see no indication on performance tab that it's overloaded memory or even close. I do use a vpn not sure if that is the problem or not. Anyone have any experience here?

 

Have you check if Task manager or HWINFO detects 16GB RAM with 2x sticks. You can wipe the gold contacts of RAM and re-check if the issue is solved!

 

Thanks for the reply. Yeah hwinfo says 16gb ram. I was reading online that waterfox might be the problem as that's one of the biggest memory hogs I see in task manager so I've started using firefox as my primary browser again. Some of the add-ons/plugins for that and other browsers seem to have huge memory leaks/hogging from what I read so I disabled a couple of the plugins.

It also happened during live streaming so that may be the issue as well. Another thing is that I had a custom virtual memory setup in the performance section, I clicked on automatic but have not restarted yet. I'll report back if I still get that warning now thanks

PS: is there any premamod still available for a 980m? Seems to be a totally dead/locked website etc, even just an unlocked vbios so I can use MSIAB to up the core/memory would be fine, I'm not touching voltage etc I had an unlocked svl7 vbios for my k4000m that worked fine, no voltage touched by me.

 

I had a similiar issue when playing games that ate lot of ram and needed bigger pagefile.
I also had a custom pagefile size as you probably have (?) so i reverted it back to automatic and haven't ran into that issue anymore.

I guess some apps just need bigger pagefile sizes to work properly..

Edit:

Mine is just a guess based on the experience i had with that error. If someone with knowledge knows more about this, tell us!

 

Yeah pretty sure it was the pagefile I had set to 8gb custom. When I went in and set it to auto which is 16gb auto but 24gb recommended? wierd, haven't had any problems since then.

 

I also had this weird huge pagefile like you for no reason. That's when i decided to change it to a different value (which gave me out of memory issues in some games) but now i'm back to auto as the huge pagefile bug seems fixed (either by some update or idk).

 

It's using 16.3gb on auto. I guess the "recommended" 24GB is just in case but not sure why it doesn't just use the 24 if it's recommended weird. Really annoying to lose 16gb on my 120 msata OS drive though. Would it be a problem to put the pagefile.sys on one of the other drives in my laptop? Those are much bigger.

 

It's weird man, i had the same huge 16gb pagefile on auto before, but now it's not happening anymore. Damn Windows 10 lol

It won't be an issue to move the pagefile on another drive, are they SSDs though? I'd suggest keeping it on a SSD since it will handle it really quick compared to any HDD (i have a SSD+HDD config so i rely on the ssd)

 

There are program memory usage where memory of a kind can be allocated to the maximum, and you'll still have plenty of memory free and pagefile space available. But it sounds like this may be a combination Windows 10 behavior + app usage.

And, there are situations where a program has a memory leak and will allocate all of available memory eventually.

Yes, you can go into the pagefile configuration and add additional pagefiles on each drive. I make them fixed sized instead of auto allocated to save creation time - create it to the maximum all at once instead of bits at a time - but you can start with auto and see where the usage goes - then make a fixed pagefile the size of the usage + a bit for other app usage.

I try to leave C free - without a page file - to not contend with program and data access on that drive. Do the same for any other drive you read / write to frequently. Use the "archive" drives for the largest pagefile if your apps can be fast enough with slow pagefile.

If the app needs a fast pagefile use an SSD only -- I've done that for more than 10 years on drives that are still running fast and without errors and they are snappier with the pagefile on the SSD.

Note that a problem app may not exhibit the problem when run as administrator, which might be worth a try.

Some apps that rely on a pagefile being there may have settings that reduce the usage - so do some googling on that app's settings when you find a bad app.

 

Well as far as space used my 1tb hdd would be better but my 240gb ssd in there could handle it, I try to maximize the newer heavier game installs on that though that's all it's for. My 120gb OS msata only has like 22gb now with that pagefile.sys on there but I only put small less than a 1gb programs on there so I guess I could live with it.

Yeah that would be nice to find which app it is, but I assume it's Waterfox since when I got those low vmemory warnings it was usually waterfox, might have something to do with streaming in that browser with multiple windows open. I did research it before and it pointed to some of the plugins for that I've got 3-4 of them largely privacy and adblock.

 

If you have frequent app crashes or BSOD Win 10 sets PF to 1.5x RAM or even equal to installed RAM.