Windows 8.1 low memory warnings

I had 16GB installed and the pagefile disabled and never had any problems. I've currently borrowed 8GB to run my backup PC, so I've enabled the pagefile on C, set to System Managed and it currently shows Recommended 4593MB, Currently Allocated 3072MB. There's another 11GB free on C: at the moment.

However, I'm occasionally getting popups from Windows telling me that it's low on memory and I should close this or that program and sometimes I've had Chrome crash completely on me due to this. HwInfo64 shows me that currently there's 10388MB Virtual Memory committed and 814MB Available, 6757MB Physical Memory Used and 1366MB Available.

Surely Windows should be expanding the Pagefile if it's running out of Physical Memory and shouldn't be prompting me to close programs or crashing them should it?

Sounds like your HDD is full. 11gb isnt much for a floating pagefile.

Z

It's clearly not full if there's 11GB free and it's only using 3GB for the pagefile anyway at the moment.

I'm a little confused by your post, are you running into these issues with 16gb of RAM, or with 8gb? (or, with 24? It's unclear to me). My best guess is that you had 16gb, dropped down to 8gb, and then you started running into issues, so you re-enabled the page file? In any event, your pagefile should be an absolute non-issue. With 16gb (or even 8gb) of RAM, there's no reason the system (under normal circumstances, for most users) should ever consume pages on disk unless an application specifically requires it.

My guess is that you've either got malware, a memory leak in some application, or both. Of course, if you're intentionally running some extremely memory intense programs then that's a different story.

Yeah, I had 16GB and have to dropped down to 8GB for now.

The main program I'm using that is consuming the RAM is Chrome, as I have a lot of tabs open in it. I can't easily establish just how much RAM it's using, as it has a separate entry for each tab in Task Manager but before I closed down a few tabs yesterday, it was struggling and crashing with the Windows low memory error even with very little else running. Later, after I'd reduced the number of open tabs, I only got that warning when I was also running a program called Helios and it didn't crash, just popped up the warning and closing Helios apparently freed up enough to prevent it recurring (the Used/Free memory figures in my first post were taken just after closing Helios).

What I don't understand is why Windows isn't expanding the pagefile if it's running out of physical RAM and needs to. I may well be able to avoid the problem occurring by setting a fixed-size pagefile of 8GB but it should expand automatically and it's a bit annoying that it seems to be broken.

Do you have a lot of extensions loaded in Chrome? If so, that could be a cause of a memory leak that's chewing up all of your RAM. Try running it without any extensions and see if your RAM usage improves.

You can paste this into Powershell to get the total RAM being used by Chrome, in megs.

Chrome displays all usage stats in chrome://memory-redirect which includes total usage right at the top.

Neato, had no idea about that!

Thanks for the advice how to find the total RAM used by Chrome.

The warning seems to popup when the Virtual Memory is almost completely allocated, regardless of how much physical RAM is available. For instance, I just had it with only 89MB Virtual Memory free (10.9/10.9GB Allocated) but 1GB of Physical RAM free.

If physical memory is near full (>80%), it tries to use virtual memory instead. Otherwise all new memory requests have to be through virtual memory, which could cause some massive slowdowns. If you are using that much virtual memory, you need to add more RAM into the system.

thideras said:

If you are using that much virtual memory, you need to add more RAM into the system.

Click to expand...

Or find out what's eating up 7gb of RAM on his system plus 10gb of page space... there's no reason Chrome should be using that much RAM unless it's loaded down with poorly written extensions. I just cranked up 41 tabs on Chrome and I'm still under 2gb used. Something else has to be going on here.

Wow. If that is just Chrome something is Very Wrong.

I suspected Chrome but with 36 tabs open, it's only using about 3.3GB. I've been monitoring it with the chrome://memory-redirect/ page open and haven't noticed it change drastically. I can see that Flashblock and Lastpass extensions are only using 40MB and 80MB respectively. Currently Task Manager shows 8.8/10.2GB Committed, 2.3GB Cached and 2.5GB Physical RAM Available. Resource Monitor shows 2477MB Standby, which is also what it shows for Available and 0MB Free (when there is any Free amount, it adds this to the Standby amount to give the Available total) and HwInfo also shows 2477MB Available.

I did close a few apps running in the background (including MSI Afterburner, Backup Maker), so if there's nothing particularly wrong with these results, I'll have to turn my attention to those and see if any of them is using excessive amounts of RAM.

EDIT: I just wanted to add that I don't think it is ever using 10GB of pagefile. I haven't seen it grow over 3-4GB, despite having 11-12GB free space on the partition, so it appears to be a problem with it not growing the pagefile when needed and throwing up low memory warnings (and crashing apps) as a result, rather than it requiring a total of 18GB.

If it's win8.1 64bit they made a patch after they found Desktop Windows Manager had a memory leak.
Just make sure you have all the win updates including optional ones and see if it sorts it out.

I had low memory issues with 8gb installed... Can't recall all the tweaks I implemented but eventually cured it's random nonsense

Yeah, I'm fully patched.

I manually increased the pagefile to 5GB, as it didn't seem to be growing by itself. I still just got a low memory warning and it showed 12.4/12.8GB Committed. Chrome is using about 6GB (7GB Virtual Memory). I closed a few systray apps and got Committed down to 11.6/12.8GB but In Use still shows 7.2GB as it did before I closed those apps.

I'll probably have to just try reinstalling Windows. I had another problem where it would BSOD with a Pointer Reference error trying to copy files between two USB3 HDDs (I had to use my other AMD PC to do it in the end), so hopefully reinstalling will fix that as well.

Over the years of experimenting with Pagefies, I've concluded that there has to be a *really good* reason to mess with them or else some programs and sometimes Windows itself "goes crazy" if Pagefiles are modified.... It has been a while, but I remember messing with them in multiple ways and concluding that the instability this causes is not worth any modifications to it. The instability is definitely not evident at first but eventually shows up and so I would not touch Peagefiles unless there is a very good reason for it...

c627627 said:

Over the years of experimenting with Pagefies, I've concluded that there has to be a *really good* reason to mess with them or else some programs and sometimes Windows itself "goes crazy" if Pagefiles are modified.... It has been a while, but I remember messing with them in multiple ways and concluding that the instability this causes is not worth any modifications to it. The instability is definitely not evident at first but eventually shows up and so I would not touch Peagefiles unless there is a very good reason for it...

Click to expand...

That's all very well but if you'd read my post, you'll have seen that I originally had it on Auto and I was getting these low memory warnings and it didn't seem to be growing the pagefile beyond about 3GB, hence why I've tried increasing it manually.

Sorry, I think I stopped reading after the first few words which said "I had... pagefile disabled".

That is suicidal for Windows stability in the long run, unless you stick to limited specific usage of a pagefile disabled machine.

The fact remains that something on your system is using 7GB of RAM that's unaccounted for. Disable your page file, or set your page file to 100GB, either way it should never have to page because your system should not be using 7GB of RAM at idle. A clean format and reinstall is the quickest way to combat this and to get rid of whatever is on your system that's chewing up RAM. Something is wrong and it doesn't have anything to do with your page file settings.

c627627 said:

Sorry, I think I stopped reading after the first few words which said "I had... pagefile disabled".

That is suicidal for Windows stability in the long run, unless you stick to limited specific usage of a pagefile disabled machine.

Click to expand...

No worries. I can't really agree that it's suicidal for stability though. My usage was neither limited nor specific, I played a wide range of games and used a lot of different programs with 16GB and the pagefile disabled and didn't have any problems. I know that there's some very RAM hungry apps that would probably crash like that though and I recall at least one game from the past that wouldn't even launch with the pagefile disabled, regardless of how much RAM you have, so I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Anyway, I don't know if Chrome has a problem but it does seem to push the Committed up much further than it should, i.e from 1.6GB to 11GB+, even though Chrome says it's only using about 6GB and 7GB Virtual. At the moment, it shows about 4.5GB Memory and for Virtual, Private ~5GB, Mapped ~3GB, whilst Committed is only 9.3GB, so it's come down a bit after closing some tabs but I didn't close that many, so it might have been rebooting that changed it. Although I did close and restart Chrome several times before rebooting and I would have thought that would have done the same (as far as Chrome's memory use is concerned) as rebooting.

I'll have to retest once I've installed a clean Win8.1 (on a separate partition) and see if Chrome has the same effect then.