Windows 10 as much as 22Gb cached in standby.

[yeeyoh]

I was just wondering if anybody else has noticed windows 10 cached a hug amount of their ram in 'standby' ?
I notice this yesterday, my computer had less than 1Gb of 'free' memory but had over 22Gb of ram memory taken up by 'standby.

[Daggoth]

It's caching that much because you have that much RAM available for caching.
It's unironically a feature, windows holds things in ram that you're recently used or that the OS thinks is going to be used, so that if/when you need it again, it's already loaded.
Cached data is immediately dumped if a different active process needs the space, so it doesn't affect anything.

[yeeyoh]

Originally posted by Daggoth:

It's caching that much because you have that much RAM available for caching.
It's unironically a feature, windows holds things in ram that you're recently used or that the OS thinks is going to be used, so that if/when you need it again, it's already loaded.
Cached data is immediately dumped if a different active process needs the space, so it doesn't affect anything.

Thanks from a couple of brief reads on the web I got this general idea.... Still seems strange to leave such a bare minimum of ram free ... Like when I'm playing a game that demands a lot of ram does it just free up enough ram for the game (or program) keeping the rest in standby or does it at least free up a little 'wiggle' room.
I find computers work better when there is ram to spare, when you really think of the electronic component to it all it does make sense because ram does have to be read and written to which doesn't work as well if all the ram is 'stuffed' with content.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Free being low versus Cached is not a big deal.
Cached can simply get eaten up as you use your PC more and more without a Reboot because you have that much RAM; plain and simple; nothing is wrong there. Free RAM will free itself up by removing cached data if needed.

If you don't like it this way; disable Hibernation which in-turn disables Win10/11 style RAM-cache.

CMD (Run As Admin)
POWERCFG -H OFF
Press Enter and then Restart Windows.

If the cached amount still gets too high for your liking, simply reboot.
What also can dump all the cache quickly is doing a Full Optimize on your SSD; such as with Piriform Defraggler. Rebooting Win10/11 also is not a huge deal because you can enable options in the OS that preserve open folders, browsers during the reboot process so you do not have to start with a blank desktop and open everything up again. However I don't recommend doing this with open apps; such as Steam and things of that sort.

[Daggoth]

Standby data is effortlessly dropped if other processes want ram (presuming everything's working properly). As in, a program says "gimme 2gigs of ram", windows will drop 2gb of standby and go "here you go" within microseconds.
For practical purposes, standby ram is as accessible as empty ram. Empty ram doesn't provide any benefit and in fact slows relative performance by not having things pre-loaded into ram.
You close a game, open it again an hour later, it goes "I need all these resources" and windows goes "got ya covered champ" and puts the cached ram items back into play instantly instead of dragging it back off the disk.

[Daggoth]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

If you don't like it this way; disable Hibernation which in-turn disables Win10/11 style RAM-cache.

Disabling hibernation has literally no effect on the standby cache. I've got hibernation disabled and am quite happily caching 20+GB of standby.
Disable hibernation so Windows removes/doesn't create the hibernation file on your hard drive, but it has no effect on the ram once awake.

[Philco7a]

Go to settings, update/security, delivery optimization. UNCHECK "allow downloads from other PC's".

Microsoft is using everyones computers globally as servers to transmit updates around to save Microsoft money. They are literally putting other peoples update files on your PC

[Illusion of Progress]

Yeah, I had about ~55 GB cached yesterday the last time I had Task Manager open. I had ~40 GB or more used a bit earlier than that but I guess most of it got pushed to cached RAM as some of it sat idle for a while (but was still open) and i saw use dropped to around 10 GB when the cached number grew.

Kind of interesting to me since I thought cached was "treated as willing to overwrite" so I guess since it was so long since I used it, Windows might be aggressive in marking it unneeded and is willing to forgo it since it could load it back from storage if it does get overwritten, but I never knew it did this with open content. Guess if it's is idle long enough it can.

Originally posted by yeeyoh:

Still seems strange to leave such a bare minimum of ram free ... Like when I'm playing a game that demands a lot of ram does it just free up enough ram for the game (or program) keeping the rest in standby or does it at least free up a little 'wiggle' room.
I find computers work better when there is ram to spare, when you really think of the electronic component to it all it does make sense because ram does have to be read and written to which doesn't work as well if all the ram is 'stuffed' with content.

Yes it does though. You're presuming that RAM that "has content" and RAM that "has no content" are different in terms of how fast they can be written to when it's not like that at all. RAM content is an arrangement of 0s and 1s and you can write to it the same either way. Unused RAM is wasted RAM and Windows Vista (IIRC) introduced this behavior and it's been there since.

What is true is that RAM that is full with little free may slow a PC down, but that's not what the situation you're observing is. Cached RAM is treated as "empty if needed, but there if it happens to match something that is needed to speed up response instead of fetching it from storage". In other words, your extra RAM beyond what you need is put to use by retaining some old content in case it's needed again to speed up response.

[Haruspex]

Originally posted by yeeyoh:

Still seems strange to leave such a bare minimum of ram free ... Like when I'm playing a game that demands a lot of ram does it just free up enough ram for the game (or program) keeping the rest in standby or does it at least free up a little 'wiggle' room.

That cached RAM is freed instantaneously when needed. From your perspective as an end-user, you can consider cached memory effectively to be free memory.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Here is where many people read their RAM usages wrong in Windows.

Windows has these entries:
Total
Cached
Available
Free

What is listed as Available is what is actually free un-used RAM.
What's listed as Free, is actually just RAM that has not been Cached yet.

[SuperIronOut]

Copy and paste the following in Command Prompt, which will need to be run as an Administrator. Hit enter after each one and wait for each process to complete individually (do not include the "-" this is just to indicate a separation of commands) -

- %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.dll,CleanupTemporaryState

- %windir%\system32\lpremove.exe

- DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

- DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

- %ComSpec% /c cleanmgr.exe /sageset:65535 & cleanmgr.exe /sagerun:65535

- %windir%\system32\cleanmgr.exe /autoclean /d %systemdrive%

- powercfg /hibernate OFF

Once complete, a full system reboot needs to be performed, you can do so without closing Command Prompt by typing -

- shutdown /r /f /t 0

Your cache/page file will be reduced significantly, if not completely, and I've also included a few in there to free up some disk space for your benefit.

[yeeyoh]

Originally posted by SuperIronOut:

Copy and paste the following in Command Prompt, which will need to be run as an Administrator. Hit enter after each one and wait for each process to complete individually (do not include the "-" this is just to indicate a separation of commands) -

- %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.dll,CleanupTemporaryState

- %windir%\system32\lpremove.exe

- DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

- DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

- %ComSpec% /c cleanmgr.exe /sageset:65535 & cleanmgr.exe /sagerun:65535

- %windir%\system32\cleanmgr.exe /autoclean /d %systemdrive%

- powercfg /hibernate OFF

Once complete, a full system reboot needs to be performed, you can do so without closing Command Prompt by typing -

- shutdown /r /f /t 0

Your cache/page file will be reduced significantly, if not completely, and I've also included a few in there to free up some disk space for your benefit.

Thank you, I'll have to look into these commands a bit further.
Back in the day there were Tweak Guides for windows xp and windows 7, services that could be turned of etc. etc. Windows 10 released with a promise that it would turn off unused services etc. That did not turn out to be the case... It amazes me how much resources an operating system can use up.
Thanks also for all the info about my cache not really being in use, it does make me a little more relaxed about it. Presently I have about 21Gb in standby and 718mb "free"

[Illusion of Progress]

Originally posted by yeeyoh:

Thank you, I'll have to look into these commands a bit further.
Back in the day there were Tweak Guides for windows xp and windows 7, services that could be turned of etc. etc. Windows 10 released with a promise that it would turn off unused services etc. That did not turn out to be the case... It amazes me how much resources an operating system can use up.
Thanks also for all the info about my cache not really being in use, it does make me a little more relaxed about it. Presently I have about 21Gb in standby and 718mb "free"

The things you're asking were all a very common thing after Windows Vista launched and it introduced this behavior. It further led people to believe Windows Vista was hogging RAM (because it simply tried to put what you had to use).

The "free" value isn't the singular value you should focus on for the way you're trying to interpret how much available RAM resources you have. I like to treat that more as "RAM the system hasn't touched since it hasn't needed to yet". The "available" value, while it may not entirely be the only singular value to pay attention to either, is a better reflector of this. Pay attention to the commit limit, too (although keep in mind this isn't an entirely static value and may shift, unless page file behavior is altered).

[Daggoth]

Originally posted by yeeyoh:

Thank you, I'll have to look into these commands a bit further.

Meh, it's just a bunch of cleanup utilities.
Cleaning temp files, analysing and cleaning unused windows files, running the disk cleanup tool, saving the options, and then running disk cleanup using those options (do people recommending these things even understand what they do?), running disk cleanup on the system drive, and then turning hibernation off.
Also, don't use shutdown with the /f switch if you can help it, it forcibly shuts windows down without waiting for processes to close/save any data they have open.

Net effect on the Standby/Cached data statistic? Nil.

There's nothing to fix, there's no problem, it's all running exactly as it's supposed to and is working the best way it can to improve your experience with commonly used programs.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

If you want actual tweaks that have a real world function to the average user; try app called ShutUp10. Its also been updated to support Win11.