Why Is the Windows 10 “system” Process Using so Much RAM?
If you’ve taken the jump and upgraded to Windows 10 , you might have noticed something odd: the System process sometimes takes up an insane amount of RAM, possibly over 1GB. This isn’t actually a bug, it’s a Windows 10 feature. Here’s how it works.
Before we explain what happens in newer versions of Windows, let’s talk about how previous versions of Windows handled memory usage. There is enough space in RAM to store data. If you fill up your computer’s memory, Windows dumps the least used data pages into a paging file that resides on your hard drive.
The downside to this method is that if you need to reuse the data from the paging file, it must get it from a much slower hard drive rather than loading it from superfast memory. While this is better than crashing the application, it would still be better if this data did not leave memory at all.
How Windows 10 handles memory management
Windows 10 still uses the paging file when needed. However, now that your computer’s memory starts to fill up, Windows 10 will start shrinking old memory pages so that they take up less space, similar to what happens when you create a ZIP archive from multiple files. So, for example, if you are running an application that you have not touched for a long time, instead of copying information about this application to your hard drive, Windows will simply reduce its size, but save it in memory.
The trade-off, of course, is that decompressing compressed memory requires more CPU cycles. Typically, however, the performance costs are much lower than if the system had to retrieve data from a hard drive (even from solid state drives). Thus, even with compression, these old applications are faster to pull out of memory than to load them from the paging file of the hard drive.
All the compressed memory that Windows 10 creates is stored in the system process. This is why it seems to swell over time. The longer you run your computer (and the more applications or browser tabs you run), the more data in memory Windows will need to compress.
Mac users have been using a very similar feature since 2013 , and even newer versions of the Linux kernel use a type of memory compression . Although it looks alarming in the Task Manager, this method of saving memory is not only better, but is already quite common among other operating systems.
What can you do about it
For starters, you don’t have to do anything about it. As we discussed earlier, unused RAM is wasted RAM . Closing apps to “save RAM” means that it will take longer to load them when you need them again. If your computer isn’t running slowly, you don’t have to worry about programs that use up a lot of RAM. This is good.
However, as we stated earlier, unpacking this compressed memory now uses more CPU cycles rather than just loading from the hard drive, so you can see a short-term performance degradation when switching to an application you haven’t touched in a long time. If this happens to you, there are several things you can do. But these are practically the same solutions that you always have:
- Add More RAM: There is nothing better for your system than increasing the total RAM. The more real RAM you have, the less Windows 10 needs to compress it.
- Uninstall unnecessary applications: half of the garbage received on your computer is unnecessary and requires resources. Get rid of everything you don’t need.
- Close applications or tabs you don’t need: the more things you leave running, the more memory will be transferred to the system process. Closing or pausing tabs that you haven’t touched for a long time and know you’ll never return can help your browser.
Ultimately, little has changed. The way you deal with high memory usage isn’t much different from what it was in previous versions of Windows – it’s just a little off-putting when you first see it in Task Manager. But don’t worry: the System process runs even harder to keep your computer running as smoothly as possible.