this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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32? It takes a lot to not only use 16, but to actively use it and be affected by slower pagefile access.
What? FF with a bunch of Jira tabs, Outlook, Teams, Excel, Miro, Spotify, and I am at 100% of 16 gigs. Not even saying anything about running a 8gig VM from time to time
Teams, Firefox, and Outlook and that’s most of my Windows work PC RAM gone. Have to close out of my dev work whenever a meeting is afoot because the calls fucking hammer this thing.
Teams is the most performance inefficient shit I've ever been forced to use.
We use both Zoom and Teams for meeting with partners. On my piece of shit work laptop, I have no problem with Zoom. Teams on the other hand will randomly cut my audio, lag my cursor, or cause peripherals to stop working when I'm in a meeting. I simply can't fathom how it's as bad as it is.
That's because Teams is a piece of shit, not because 16GB isn't enough normally.
16gb will go far on MacOS and any Linux distro you throw at it. Windows 11 will struggle.
How much is your page being used? That’s a more real indicator. You should want all of your ram to be used.
No. No I can play games on Linux without capping my 16.
Edit: yes I checked page file use, dip-ass. Not counting GPU ram.
Ehh, my main machine eats up 12-16GB with just background tasks, and that's on W10. Nobody gives a fuck about optimization since the late 00s.
E: just woke up my system
Well, I'm installing Linux (CachyOS) on my former W10 PC this weekend. So, my 16gb of ram will be well utilized.
At least someone still cares about optimization.
And CachyOS running KDE Plasma is the most RAM hungry setup. I took a Win 11 laptop with 8gb and threw Debian running Xfce and that's using like 300mb of RAM lol
I guess going from 7-8 to 600-1.2k seemed like such an improvement I didn't think to GO HARDER to 300. Though my Ubuntu server VMs get that I assume lol.
SysMain / Superfetch has altered your perception of how much RAM you actually use.
I haven't heard of that since the Vista days, totally forgot about it. Doesn't make sense, I've been all-flash* (E is still HDD for backups, no programs) for well-over a decade. Maybe I should disable it and see if it makes a difference. C is a Samsung 960 Pro and D is a Western Digital Black SN750 in raid0, so it's not really helping even if it is doing something...
The alternative is your CPU spooling up and a longer delay launching applications.
In your screenshot, you already have 70% available memory. Are you on a quest to maximize idle ram? If so, why?
Shortly after I took the screenshot I fired up Motor Town for a couple hours; when I closed it, the usage settled on 27GB. Like, sure, I have oodles of ram, but why. What does windows anticipate me doing, launching the game multiple times in rapid succession? The game is only like 3GB if I remember right, wtf is it doing that is using 19 + 8 additional gigs on? It's like this black box that's all 'trust me bro' but there's no logic to it. Opaque is the term I want, I believe.
It's been bugging me for a while, just sort of venting. Especially at a restart, I haven't launched anything beyond startup programs. Why is it trying to guess what I might do? If I launch something, close it, sure, keep it in ram for a couple minutes. But don't hold onto it like a hoarder, lol.
Ram usage isn’t important, it’s how much your page being hit. Otherwise you want your ram fully utilized.
The number of people that still don't understand this, even after it's been discussed ad nauseum for decades is frightening.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. You want it used. You want cached data there for instant access. What matters is how much is available for something else if you need it, and Windows does a shit job of getting that info across.
I'm pretty sure I have the pagefile disabled; both C and D are NVMe drives, and D is raid0. I disabled superfetch a few minutes ago, rebooted, and don't see any performance impact, but the used memory when idle is how 10GB, vs the 19 in that screenshot. No other changes.
I could see the appeal if I was using a platter drive for my programs or frequent data, but it's not 2008 anymore. I'd rather see actual usage over 'the computer knows best'.
You shouldn’t disable page.
I don't anticipate needing all 64 gigs at once, and afaik the only other reason is for bsod diagnostics. Unless there is something I am unaware of...?
Hibernate?
Not on this machine, though I use it for one of my laptops. But that system also has the pagefile disabled if I remember correctly, as it has 48 gigs.
(that unit has a buggy gpu that fails to resume from sleep and just gives static instead; windows and linux. So hibernate is the solution for 'sleeping'.)
My Linux system (which used to run Window so it has 32 GB of RAM), won't even hit 8 GB if I'm not gaming. I've opened up multiple apps just to show how efficient it is. I think it was sitting around 4 GB before I started running things to see if I can make it balloon easily.
And I'm running most my apps as flatpaks which I've heard may add some slight overhead in terms of RAM usage - someone correct me if I'm wrong about this.
My work computer (granted it likely has tons of background security tools running) uses 10/16 GB's just to get to the desktop and do nothing. The best part is, because ~1.2 GB's of RAM gets allocated for the integrated graphics, I'm really only left with ~4.8 GB's of RAM to do actual work. But wait, it gets even better! This week I found out some bullshit Copilot feature was enabled and taking up another ~1.2 GB's of RAM, leaving me with a total of 3.6 GB's of RAM. So I disabled the
WSAIFabricSvcservice and reclaimed a sliver of dignity and work space.Also, Christ, how many apps do you have running in your tray?
Damn bro, that's brutal.