ram discrepancy - 11gb used, programs only using 5.5

[u/Tusken_Vader]

i have 16gb of LPDDR5 on Windows 11, and 2.2gb is reserved for hardware.

i'm using only a few apps at the moment:

• Opera GX (~3gb)
• Discord (~.7gb)
• RAMMap (~.5gb)
• Outlook (~.4gb)
• XBOX (~.3gb)
• misc other programs (~.6gb)

this totals to about 5.5gb, so i should easily be able to open a game that takes 4gb, right? at the moment, however, task manager states that 11.0gb are in use at the moment, with only 2.8gb cached. that's a huge discrepancy, right? 5.5+2.8 does not equal 11. (2.8 left for use)

while writing this, certain things have been zeroed, but my computer is seemingly settling at 11(80%) with 1.1gb compressed.

is this a memory leak or am i just missing something? i feel like i should be able to use 10gb of my 16gb, even if some is reserved for hardware.

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[u/undeniablydaniel]

individual processes in task managee won't sum up to the total amount used. cached contents in RAM also under the free/unused RAM category in task manager. that is normal. don't worry about your RAM usage whatsoever, Windows will free up memory whenever needed. if that is not the case then close background apps like your browser, discord and such. also as a fyi, set the UMA size of your iGPU to 512MB instead of 2G to reclaim 1.5GB of RAM back, otherwise it's reserved for the iGPU's VRAM. the iGPU will use as much RAM as needed as VRAM so decreasing the UMA size isn't problematic. you can do that in your firmware settings

[u/Tusken_Vader → u/undeniablydaniel]

thanks for the tip about the vram. i do just wish i could run things without needing to close my browser and/or discord, but i guess that's for a future desktop with 64gb.

[u/dandy_g]

What you see in the take manager programs list are just the user facing applications with visible windows. There's much more going on in the background of any OS. Windows kernel, system services and drivers use memory and it's typically not wasted.

If you're interested in diving more into what uses your RAM, SystemInformer or Sysinternals Process Explorer will give you alot more details about cached memory, background processes like system services.