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I'm surprised recently by the fact that my OS complain about "lack of memory". So basically, I open and run many applications. I have installed 32GB RAM (Corsair) and as you can see in the screen shot, my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 recognize only 31.7GB. To me that's fine, because I understand the reason of not having the full 32GB.

However, what I don't understand is that Windows suddenly give alert to me that I'm low on memory, when I've only utilized 50% of it or just 15.9GB of RAM. I have 2x NVidia GTX 1070 8GB with SLI enabled, so I'm pretty sure that my RAM is not being used for graphics ability. The worst part is that, my applications really malfunction when I'm only using near 16GB of memory. When I closed some of the applications and reduce memory usage to below 15GB, then everything work perfectly again.

So does anyone understand what is really happening here? Could you help me?

Here's a screen shot of task manager. For sure Windows is able to detect the whole 32GB. But right now, I'm not opening many applications.

Task Manager Screen Shot

Windows 7 Memory 31.7GB Usable

user3009097
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1 Answers1

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From the Task Manager screenshot, it is visible that your commit charge limit is ~32 GiB. That implies you have disabled the page file or set it to a very low size. The page file is indispensable to make efficient use of physical memory. That’s because most programs reserve more memory than they will actually use (this is called “commit charge”). Windows does not allow “overcommitting” (making promises it may not be able to keep), so all reservations must be backed by physical memory or the page file.

In the screenshot, you can see that while only ~9 GiB of memory is used, 12 GiB are reserved in total.

Allow Windows to manage the page file size or, if you truly want to, invest some time to find the amount of memory your programs reserve and set that as the fixed size.

user219095
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