Why does windows use almost all the ram?

hsehestedt said:

I sometimes work with large numbers of open pages in my browser, but I'll manage then by creating groups or collections. That way I don't necessarily need to have them all open at the same time, but I can rapidly and easy open an entire group.

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Just wondering, would the size of the CPU have anything to do with the amount of memory used when having so many tabs opened
in a browser?
I just opened 10 tabs in Firefox and have a few programs running plus the background stuff and the memory used was just about 6GB
of 32.

No, I don't believe that the CPU should make a difference in the amount of memory used.

hsehestedt said:

No, I don't believe that the CPU should make a difference in the amount of memory used.

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I upgraded from an AMD X6 16GB to i3 12100 with 32GB mostly because of my tab addiction. Difference was like night and day from both the CPU and extra ram.

martik777 said:

I upgraded from an AMD X6 16GB to i3 12100 with 32GB mostly because of my tab addiction. Difference was like night and day from both the CPU and extra ram.

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Have a look (read)

hsehestedt said:

No, I don't believe that the CPU should make a difference in the amount of memory used.

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The CPU will use more of it's power if you have more / faster RAM from what I have read.
There's lots of questions / debate about this and I for one, never thought about it until this
thread. So, if you have a good CPU and add more/faster RAM then, the CPU could have the
ability to use more / all of it's power depending on which program(s) you use.
Thanks for your answer.

I'm going to reverse my earlier response. I can think of one scenario where the CPU would make a difference in the amount of RAM used: Multi-threading. In other words, say you switch from a dual core CPU to a CPU with 20 threads and you run an app that is well suited to run many threads. I could conceivably see the very same app using more RAM in that scenario as it runs many more threads.

martik777 said:

Desktop is totally clean lol

We all think and process differently. I have a lot of interests that I am active with daily. If I put them in bookmarks they are too hard to find or I'll forget them. I've cut back from 4 browser windows and 300+ tabs!

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Your exactly like my roomate. dude has 3 or 4 browsers open and each one probably 1 to 200 tabs in each and stuff like Steam games open, watching a movie on one screen and playing a game on the other screen then he faffs and moans about his PC being slow..OMG like really dude..but yeah each human has his on way man. Im not knocking you i just had to comment cause of it reminding me of him..lol.

imanlien2020 said:

... 3 or 4 browsers open and each one probably 1 to 200 tabs in each and stuff like Steam games open, watching a movie on one screen and playing a game on the other screen

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Who in the actual feck does that, anyway!?!?!?

Edwin said:

Who in the actual feck does that, anyway!?!?!? View attachment 65507

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Multi-taskers. My son used to play online poker on 4 monitors with 4 games per monitor, betting many $1000's simultaneously, mentally keeping track of the odds at each table. It was incredible to watch.

martik777 said:

I have 32GB and it is using 28gb with 2 browsers open using 7GB between them (chrome and canary)

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So, did you get satisfactory answers to solve your query ?

hsehestedt said:

I'm going to reverse my earlier response. I can think of one scenario where the CPU would make a difference in the amount of RAM used: Multi-threading. In other words, say you switch from a dual core CPU to a CPU with 20 threads and you run an app that is well suited to run many threads. I could conceivably see the very same app using more RAM in that scenario as it runs many more threads.

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I never thought about this because , since 2010 I have had core i7 and 16 Gigs of RAM so, my PCs never had sluggish responses
to my queries. Am now running i9 and 32 Gigs. It seems that whatever I throw at it , it will complete it's tasks. The reason I asked
in the first place is because the OP has an i3 and 32 Gigs. I was thinking that , the i3 might have been the bottleneck but.seems
I was not quite accurate in my thinking.

Flashorn said:

I never thought about this because , since 2010 I have had core i7 and 16 Gigs of RAM so, my PCs never had sluggish responses
to my queries. Am now running i9 and 32 Gigs. It seems that whatever I throw at it , it will complete it's tasks. The reason I asked
in the first place is because the OP has an i3 and 32 Gigs. I was thinking that , the i3 might have been the bottleneck but.seems
I was not quite accurate in my thinking.

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I3 is not a bottleneck at all. It rarely goes above 10%. Even if I restore 100 tabs it only takes a few seconds. The old X6 took over a minute. The i3's single thread speed is on par with the i5 and i7, no need to upgrade unless I start video editing or similar.

No, there was no satisfactory answer as to why windows 11 consumed most of my ram. Feel free to close this.

martik777 said:

I3 is not a bottleneck at all.

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And that is where I was wrong. So, no satisfactory answers in any of the responses?
What is still not clear?

Maybe this will help:

martik777 said:

I tend to forget links I save in bookmarks so I leave the tabs open.

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Then you have no organization in the way you save them. Both history and bookmarks are searchable if need be.
The way you use your computer is your business, but one has to use common sense and develope smart computing habits to get the most out of one's computer's resources. Many of us here have workhorse machines, but most of us compute smart so we have no need to push them to their limit nor add more ram.

glasskuter said:

Then you have no organization in the way you save them. Both history and bookmarks are searchable if need be.
The way you use your computer is your business, but one has to use common sense and develope smart computing habits to get the most out of one's computer's resources. Many of us here have workhorse machines, but most of us compute smart so we have no need to push them to their limit nor add more ram.

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Trust me I've tried. I have numerous interests catalogued in 1000's of bookmarks long forgotten. The open tabs I use to remind me of current interests and activities that need action in a 1-2 month timeframe. If I bookmark them I will forget about them.
It's not really a resource issue because there is no percetable performance impact with the resources I have now.

I have cut back from 4 browsers and 4 monitors to 2 4k monitors and 2 browsers so there may be some hope for me.

Same 2 browsers open with ~200 tabs open + Firefox and tonight my RAM usage is 14.8GB (5GB for the 3 browsers) , very strange.

This was the typical RAM usage before I posted this thread a couple days ago. Maybe a Canary update or win11 update fixed it?

martik777 said:

Same 2 browsers open with ~200 tabs open + Firefox and tonight my RAM usage is 14.8GB (5GB for the 3 browsers) , very strange.

This was the typical RAM usage before I posted this thread a couple days ago. Maybe a Canary update or win11 update fixed it?

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Last windows update on my notebook says July 12.
Don't know about Canary.
I once tried Chrome and it left 1 Gig of temps files after a couple days of usage.
Uninstalled and never looked back. Firefox after two weeks is about 200 MBs.
I use Vivaldy as a backup for Firefox. It's from the makers of Opera and is a
pretty darn good one as well.

Flashorn said:

Last windows update on my notebook says July 12.
Don't know about Canary.
I once tried Chrome and it left 1 Gig of temps files after a couple days of usage.
Uninstalled and never looked back. Firefox after two weeks is about 200 MBs.
I use Vivaldy as a backup for Firefox. It's from the makers of Opera and is a
pretty darn good one as well.

Vivaldi Browser | Powerful, Personal and Private web browser

It’s a web browser. But fun. It comes with a bunch of clever features built-in. It’s super flexible and does not track you. Get the Vivaldi browser for desktop, mobile, and your car!

vivaldi.com

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I like Vivaldy! Workspaces look promising already organized a few to reduce tab clutter. It is lightning fast, clean and simple!
Set up 2 windows and it reopens with everything saved. Need a session backup just in case it loses it' windows/tabs

hsehestedt said:

I'm going to reverse my earlier response. I can think of one scenario where the CPU would make a difference in the amount of RAM used: Multi-threading. In other words, say you switch from a dual core CPU to a CPU with 20 threads and you run an app that is well suited to run many threads. I could conceivably see the very same app using more RAM in that scenario as it runs many more threads.

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No, an app that is─or that could be considered to be─well suited to run many threads is going to rely on shared memory between threads so as to avoid using more RAM than the required/recommended spec that (due to it actually matching what's intended by the design of the software in question), should be engendered by it being well suited, anyway to begin with.

But, different hardware combinations cry for different optimizations in software (and also in hardware). If, for example, a process has to keep lowering its CPU utilization to let the storage device or I/O catch up on time, then as long as the inherent conditions of this specific type of bottleneck can't be changed rapidly in any way that could be a more feasible method/approach/strategy, it might make sense to let additional memory be allocated by the process and/or other processes that can pass on the data (i.e between that I/O resource and it) with some actions─and that can be either temporarily or more permanently─like increasing the alotted cache size in memory, re-tuning the buffer depth and choosing larger pools of data that reside in memory, etc.. These complex variables can change at runtime so they can be monitored (and results can be analyzed, and can be analyzed on multiple different time scales over both short-term and long-term periods) in both hardware and software so various optimizations can, and are, engineered to attempt to uplift performance, with the added inclusion of uplifting it also dynamically on-the-fly.

Then again, in a typical/modern multi-tasking environment you also have to factor in performance of other processes that belong to other apps running on the system. They can be paused/resumed or some of them can be, BUT... in situations where pausing them also means that a part of the memory that they currently have in use will be freed up first so other tasks will have more available memory to work with, resuming them also means that some data might have to be loaded into memory again after. So, switching back to such a specific task can still be instant, but such a task might or might not─depending on factors─be a little less responsive and/or resource intensive during the first few moments from recovering in some ways (either gradually or boosted, that may also depend) after the switching event that causes the task to be resumed.

Heavier multi-threading also tends to increase software complexity level a lot. Which, in turn, makes it harder for software devs to build an app with better optimization/customization features, i.e., ones that don't use up all the RAM long before people can go to the pub on the corner to get a tab.

glasskuter said:

Then you have no organization in the way you save them. Both history and bookmarks are searchable if need be.
The way you use your computer is your business, but one has to use common sense and develope smart computing habits to get the most out of one's computer's resources. Many of us here have workhorse machines, but most of us compute smart so we have no need to push them to their limit nor add more ram.

Click to expand...

So, I've been working on my tab clutter tonight and have discovered readings lists in chrome and workspaces in vivaldi. I think some of these features will help get me more organized. Thanks