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Windows 11 standby list and memory compression

Anonymous
2022-04-09T02:06:00+00:00

I have an issue with Windows 11 Pro (and Windows 10 before this) but I'll focus on 11 as this is even more frustrating as RAMMAP doesn't work on Windows 11.

I have 32G RAM, which is great. However my standby RAM usage is increaseing all of the time, on my older machine it seems a large part of this came from Outlook caching my entire pst files (I have several).

Anyway, the point. When this happens it consumes the rest of my RAM, slowly but surely.

Then when the RAM becomes full, suddenly memory compression kicks in and consumes processor.

Then (not entirely sure this is completely related but its definatley corelated) the entire system starts to slow down.

So the question now. Why would I require memory compression when I have 16G free RAM? I feel like the standby list should be limited to the point where memory compression is not necessary. However I have zero visibility of this and zero ability to control it.

I have a high end machine, i7-11800H with separate GPU. Turning this on fresh makes me feel like I havea high end machine. Running it for 1 day makes me feel like I'm wasitng my money on any machine running Windows. This sounds like a gripe but I have never been closer to switching to MAC as I am now. Please help.

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Performance and system failures

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  1. @CmdrKeene 90,621 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2022-04-10T01:26:19+00:00

    I would agree with you, that doesn't strike me as normal. Although you're definitely not the first person to have issues with this bogging down the system.

    Do you happen to use sleep or hibernate at all, and if so does this seem to happen after resuming from those low power states?

    While I wait for your next reply I'll also mention some general steps you could try:

    a. As a temporary measure, disable your system paging file, restart, then return to the options and set it back to "automatic paging file" and restart once more. Several users have found this fixes this from occuring.

    b. If this issue results primarily after sleep/hibernate, it could be something you can solve with updated storage controller drivers from the system manufacturer.

    c. You could consider disabling compressed memory entirely. From an administrator-mode PowerShell window, type Disable-MMAgent –MemoryCompression and press enter to disable it (restart your computer afterward). If you wish to turn it back on later, the command Enable-MMAgent -MemoryCompression will do that (reboot afterword).

    I would normally recommend leaving this on (when it's working properly at least). The most typical issues with it are hardware or driver related, but turning it off is not going to cause any harm. It's even off by default on Windows Servers.

    PS. I'm just a sample size of 1 person, but since I happen to have the same amount of RAM I figured I'd share what my utilization looks like during typical work for me.

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-04-10T01:05:47+00:00

    As below this is shoing 52% used. But my question is why do I have 2.3G of compressed memory?

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  2. @CmdrKeene 90,621 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2022-04-10T00:25:54+00:00

    Standby ram is not considered used ram and is not included in the calculation of "used RAM", so one thing to check first is what % of RAM is shown to be in use at the time the issue occurs? Is it truly showing 85, 90, etc% used?

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