Questions for OS Techs wrt Memory Usage

[OAITW r.2.0]

I was curious about which programs take up the most memory in my PC. Surprised to see Google Drive and Dropbox accts uses a combined 400MB of constant memory allocation.

I would have thought that far less would be needed in "standby" mode. Any reason why so much real estate is needrd in my PC?

My browser Opera is hogging 360MB, 8 processes. Again, it's in standby...why should it take up so much space? Just opened Chrome and it automatically loads a constant 250MB with 12 processes running. And I haven't even starting using the program.

That's 1 gig of memory allocated for these 4 programs. Another 237 processes running totally 4.6 GB. Luckily, I have plenty of memory - 16GBs - so it's not an issue now. It was an issue on my last desktop when I only had 4GB and running all of the same apps.....very slow.

[cos dem]

1. Web browsers are notorious.

There's no excuse for it, except that browser developers are more concerned with dodads, and less with writing robust code.
Outlook is another one that hogs way more memory than it should.

[cos dem]

2. I should add that ad downloads in your browser are particularly bad.

I installed a pihole ad blocker at home, and my browsers are way more stable now.

[freedomrock1970]

5. PiHole for the win !!!

I also installed a piHole and I highly recommend every household do so.

The amount of ads and trash that your browsers ask for and store is incredible.

This is one of the main reason the memory used is so large, they cache the ads so if you go to another page, boom here it is.

Pihole says fine, that's an ad, here is a big box of nothing instead back to the browser.

Memory usage stays low, Screens stay clean, internet usage does down, web pages load faster.

Hell, even games on tablets like candy crush don't load those crappy banner ads.

Like I said, Entire household, ad free.

pihole.net

[Sentath]

6. Tiny Correction pi-hole.net

https://pi-hole.net/

[SheltieLover]

3. There is a process called Superfetch - Vista & newer

What it does is it loads programs into free ram (otherwise wasted if not in use). This makes programs load faster out of free ram. Ram is much faster than a storage drive.

It is actually a good thing because it makes programs load faster.

[mr_lebowski]

4. Those readings are memory that's reserved by the program in case it needs it ...

A lot of programs are overly-aggressive in that regard. They'll see you have 12GB not allocated and go 'okay lemme reserve 10%' (as a for-instance) even though it's highly unlikely they'd ever need it.

However, Windows should, if you start running out of memory, and programs aren't actively using what they've reserved, begin to take memory away from those programs to use for active processes.