4 ms·
I'm not sure about the claim that Win10 itself uses a bunch of memory. On my machine with lots of stuff installed, almost all of the "Microsoft Corporation" pro
by kevingadd 6y ago
I'm not sure about the claim that Win10 itself uses a bunch of memory. On my machine with lots of stuff installed, almost all of the "Microsoft Corporation" processes running are lightweight in the 2-10mb range. Many of them could be evicted or swapped out. A few of the heavy ones are suspended UWP apps, which the OS will kick out if memory is limited.
The three outliers are MsMpEng (windows defender AV), SearchIndexer, and Explorer. The last one makes sense given how much stuff it's tracking (all my open windows, my open folder views, tray icons, etc) though I feel like it should definitely be lighter.
SearchIndexer and MsMpEng use a ton of RAM and I don't know why, that feels inexcusable. Maybe it's mostly cache pages that are reported wrong and will be evicted if memory is low?
Out of all of those, though, they predate win10 by a while. The same stuff would've been running on 7. So I'm not sure that things have gotten worse - I suspect it's all about the third-party software installed on the machine, and people have tons of third-party software installed now.
(And if you need to, you can disable Defender and SearchIndexer. Maybe you should.)
In the end most of my memory is going to third-party software (Firefox, qBitTorrent, Dropbox, Steam, LINE - all 400mb or more) or optional services I have turned on (Windows Update's "delivery optimization" will sometimes chew up a bunch of RAM if you have updates waiting to install - it seems to be caching them in memory to distribute them to other machines on your network. I wouldn't be surprised if this will get thrown out in limited memory scenarios, but make sure it's turned off!)
Every Electron app you have open is probably 400+mb on Windows at best, and often worse. (Electron on mac uses different APIs, which may help?)
Maybe the reason all these new M1 laptops feel great with 8gb of RAM is that mac users don't need to install as much third-party software, and Electron apps use less memory on OS X? I don't think most macs have a virus scanner installed, for example.