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RAM Usage There aren't any processes being run that use RAM I'm the only active user with just 3,5GB of RAM being used but my system tells me that 50% of my RAM is being used and my Firefox tabs are crashing as a result.

Somehow my system shows that over 14GB's of RAM is being used on something that doesn't seem to be visible in Task Manager, Resource Manager or something like Process Explorer.

[1]: https://i.sstatic.net/mSbzr.png

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Every modern operating system does this. You cannot save RAM for later. RAM is a use it or lose it resource. So modern operating systems go out of their way to use as much RAM as they possibly can. Any RAM not used now is opportunity forever lost.

If you're thinking, "I don't want to use my RAM now, I want to save it for later", that is unreasonable. You can use the RAM now and use it later. There's no trade-off to be made here.

RAM that is not required by processes is used in the following ways:

  1. It's used to cache recently-accessed disk data. In your case, that's probably around 16GB.

  2. It's used to kernel data structures like filesystem metadata so that they don't have to re-generated when needed.

  3. It's given the processes that don't need it but can still benefit from using it.

  4. It's given to drivers that don't need it but can still benefit from using it.

There may or may not be any connection between RAM usage and your firefox tabs crashing. But using RAM for anything that might provide any possible benefit however slight is preferable to forever wasting the opportunity to use that RAM.

David Schwartz
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