I have windows 7 with 4GB of RAM. When the system starts from a fresh boot I start with about 33% usage. However, if I walk away with my PC idle for a few hours, or over night, my PC typically climbs to the high 80s or even over 90% usage (once, it got as high as 98%!).
The biggest commit is usually SVCHost.exe at around 500MB. My sidebar.exe process also tends to climb to about the same number.
This is a new development since upgrading to Win7 SP1, and I'm not finding much info about it on the internet. Has anyone else encountered this problem?
Edit
It is causing severe performance issues when I come back to the PC. I have to reboot to get the memory back.
Edit 2:
Tagged as "service-pack". This issue did not occur until SP1 was installed, so I'm wondering if that may be the root cause.
Best Answer
It's only a problem if that memory is unavailable for other tasks when called on. Just because it's used now doesn't mean can't be released quickly when needed, and in fact leaving the memory unused would be the real waste.
As a side note, this is another difference in the way that Windows and Linux use memory. On a linux system, this would be a little more worrying because swap is just used as a last resort. Nothing is swapped unless absolutely necessary, and so Linux would have to first take the time to write used RAM to the swap partition before it could be reclaimed for other programs. Windows, on the other hand, likes to keep all RAM paged all the time. This way, if it needs to use RAM to use for another process it is already paged to disk, and so it can be reclaimed much more quickly. It's a tradeoff - Linux is faster in this respect for RAM that will never be paged/swapped, and Windows is faster in this respect for those times when you need to swap quickly.