Greetings,
I have an issue where Windows 10 runs out of virtual memory long before my physical memory fills up. What causes this, and what can I do about it?
Check out the screen shot: My conputer gradually fills up virtual memory, even thought here is plenty of physical ram. This causes app crashes long before the ram is used up.
Maybe try to increase the size of your swap file. What is it currently set to? Auto, or manual?
Even though you have plenty of RAM there are certain ‘things’ which will also descend into swap.
It is set to 0 because I have 32GB of ram, and SSDs
Also I should say that the applications I use don’t change much, but virtual memory usage creeps.
Yeah this has been a bad plan since forever really. People keep turning off their swap for some reason. Not a good idea.
Many programs in Windows over-allocate RAM. Windows does not do like Linux and overcommit. If a program allocates 16 GB of RAM it is guaranteed access to 16 GB of RAM. It is only assigned physical RAM as it uses it and the rest is held in available in swap.
I really wouldn’t worry about your SSDs. Unless you make a habit of running out of RAM and going into swap storms it will use very little of it.
I have a Linux server with 32 GB of RAM and a 4 GB swap partition on a Samsung NVMe drive. The drive is 3 years old and claims 7% of its lifetime has been used up. I don’t think swap is an issue.
And my Windows desktop has an Optane drive and default Windows swap settings. Here’s the SSD Toolbox on it (you can see it’s about 20 terabytes in 2.5 years):
Yeah it kinda makes sense, but the 32GB is never fully allocated. Even with clearing the ram with a program, virtual memory is still in high use.
By design Windows pages an insane amount, even leaving ram unused.
But if you see it uses a lot more virtual, and only topping out at half the Actual ram, reseat the ram- it might be detecting it, but unable to address it…
Well I reseated my ram and mage a page file. Both don’t help. I did a ram test and can allocate ram to all 32GB of memory. Any other thoughts?
What programs do you normally run? Could be something making a load of temp files.
Are you using hibernation?
Only Chrome and it isn’t using that much ram. Star Citizen is what ends up crashing because it runs out of virtual memory.
No I am not using hibernation. I get this issue even on a fresh reboot.
How much page file did you set. I had a similar crashing issue with GTA V, with 4gb of page file it would really struggle and eventually crash, with none it would not run at all.
This sounds like some kind of strange memory leak, in which case we would have to do a bunch of digging to figure out what.
@Lord_Tao did you ever get to any proper solution?
I have a simliar same issue and my page file is quite big, but it rarely gets used.
No I didn’t. I just had to increase the pagefile size. I still have no idea why there needs to be virtual memory to be used BEFORE physical is used up.
