Windows – Discrepancy between memory in use reported by the task manager and memory used by programs

memorywindowswindows 7

My task manager

As you can see it displays I have 2.27 GB in use, over half of my physical memory (4 GB):

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My list of processes

Processes are ordered by memory

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As you can see the total amount of memory used by processes is around 1.2 GB. So what's using all that memory?

What's really annoying is that it doesn't seem to be used by cache or similar. If I need to allocate that memory, it won't automagically become available: it will start swapping, and everything starts to be incredibly slow.

What's that memory doing?

Best Answer

It's probably "SuperFetch"(see good posts here,here,here) that's caching memory.
A quote:

...And this brings us to the question of what to do with RAM. I have 4GB of main memory in my main desktop machine, and I would find it a total waste if the operating system did not use it to make my computing experience smoother. Isn't that why I got 4GB of top-quality RAM in the first place? To make my machine faster?

This is exactly what SuperFetch does. It's an intelligent mechanism that uses the RAM in a machine to its fullest potential to make computing a smoother experience....



UPDATE
Also, give RAMMap a try. It'll show you a whole lot about how memory is allocated in your system.

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