I run Windows 10 on a 10 year old htpc with 3gb ram. Leaves enough memory to run a few background services and kodi with zero problems.

Exactly. People get mad when things on their system are using the memory they purchased. The only problem is when it's actually using the memory and Windows starts dying because other programs aren't freeing up enough memory.

Same thing for chrome - often people say "chrome eats your RAM" but it's just being as efficient as it can be - if your OS asks it to free ram, it will and 8GB of webpages can go down to 4GB at the expense of getting rid of cached "back" pages and other cached memory.

The problem is, that at least in my experience chrome never does that. Which is why I recently had only 5g "available" (not free), and it was all swap, because Chrome had been a degenerate example of resource mismanagement on all of my computers since it was first released. I have yet to see Chrome free memory in way other than murdering the render process myself or closing the tabs and hoping it wasn't a shared process one, at least on Linux.

I'm curious, how does the OS tell Chrome to free memory? Because as far as I know, there's no API to check if another program needs memory.

On Windows 10? I closed everything except Firefox (and this HN tab), which is taking up 600MB of RAM, and now it's at 4.6GB of RAM. Before with two instances of GoLand, Slack and Discord open it was over at 8GB of RAM.

On a Windows 10 VM set to 2 GB of RAM, Windows idles at about 1.1 GB.

On a 16 GB Windows it uses about 7.5 GB. All of that seems to swap out or go away somewhere if I get busy with Visual Studio.

On a 64 GB Windows it seems to idle at about 9.6 GB used. Of course, this one isn't a purely work machine and has Steam, Origin, Ubisoft's thing, etc, etc.

So Windows 10 is pretty variable. I imagine it has something to do with running various services in parallel.

What quantity are you measuring that's 7.5 GB... and what else do you have on that machine? I quit Chrome on my current machine which has a bunch of other stuff and has no less RAM than yours, and even then I was left with <4GB of anything I could regard as usage. It can't possibly be just Windows itself idling at 7.5 GB?

Except my system has 16GB and it idles at 4GB. My old system with 8GB idles at 4GB even my system at home with 16GB idles at 4GB. I dont understand why it would idle at 8GB.

Yeah, on Windows 10. You probably have a lot more running than what would be running "out of the box"...

4gb does seem excessive. Win10 is using closer to 2gb right now on my system. Chrome and Firefox, both doing very little, are taking 1gb together by comparison.

I'd imagine it caches more if you have more ram

I've got 256GB and a fresh install of windows use about 4 with a few things running on startup(mostly just the amd+nvidia drivers). There is indeed some scaling with availability but with diminishing returns after probably 8/16gb of available ram.

What I find more interesting is that windows still compresses and swaps on startup even with that much ram available.

Disable swap (pagefile) when you have that much ram, or even when you only have 8 or more. You lose hibernate but that's fine by me. Modern cpu and ssd cold boots pretty fast, especially if you have debloated things similar to this script.

Many of the things that are pitched as beneficial, like indexing everything and caching the indexes and keeping all kinds of services alive to "quick start" other things in case you happen to want them, hibernation or sleeping instead of cold boot, etc, these are all cases of adding more crap to counter the harm from previously adding other crap.

Instead of adding foofeature you don't really need, and then adding foofeatureaccelerator to try to disguise the overhead of foofeature, you can just remove both foofeature AND foofeatureaccelerator, and everything is better.

Less total software to break or misbehave or serve as a security opening. Smaller disk footprint. Fewer running processes. Less ram/disk/net resources consumed. Less telemetry. Simpler total system for you to manage, and maybe actually have a hope in hell of grasping more of what all is going on with one human head. More of your resources available for the apps and services YOU actually want, whatever they are.

Whoever wants Pandora, they can totally have it without it coming pre-bundled. If I want Pandora, I would rather install it than find it already built in. In fact, I DO want Pandora, but in fact, I use a 3rd party open source unofficial player. So even though I use it, it's still wrong for it to be built in.

If you use UWP, don't disable swap. Ever. They are 100% reliant and you'll have problems, even if you have a lot of RAM.

Reason? UWP apps will always suspend if you minimize, for example. They move that to swap. It was basically made for swap.

Thanks for all the advice!

This is my compute "cluster" and I don't usually have windows running on it, just tossed it on there do some bios modifications to my compute cards.

I just thought I would provide some insight to the conversation!

You don't lose hibernate by disabling swap... they're entirely separate.

I've tested with a lot of RAM.

I have a cheap HP convertable laptop/tablet with 2GB of RAM, Windows 10 works fine on it.