If in Windows 10 you want to know how much RAM the programs you have opened are consuming, it is very likely that you are in doubt because the indicated consumption does not correspond to the real one. For example, that’s what the Processes tab of Windows 10’s Task Manager shows, sorting programs based on how much RAM they’re consuming.
If we add the consumption that appears here with all open programs, we will have as a result that in theory about 9 GB of RAM is consumed, and yet in the performance section this tells us that we are consuming about 14 GB of RAM memory at the moment.
Why is there such a big gap? How to know the real consumption of RAM memory of the system? For that, there is RAMMap, and then we’ll show you how to use it.
Know the real consumption of RAM memory with RAMMap
RAMMap is a tool belonging to Microsoft’s Sysinternals suite, and it is free to download and use for all users. To download it, all you need to do is access this web page and click on “Download RAMMap”.
You will download a compressed file, which you will obviously have to unzip to a directory on your hard drive, and run the RAMMap.exe file. This will be what you will see initially.
This software is actually intended for developers and engineers so that they can develop their applications and programs, but it can also give us some very useful information for users. To do this, the first thing to do is to go to the “Processes” tab, where all the processes that we have currently loaded into memory will be detailed, including the services. We recommend that you sort by the “Total” column, simply by clicking on its name, in order to see the processes that consume the most memory at the top.
Here we have the detail of EVERYTHING that is loaded in the RAM memory of the equipment, and in fact here if you add the whole Total column it will give you the actual RAM consumption of the system, as it adds both allocated and reserved memory, as well as occupied memory in the system paging file.
We can see the same in the first tab, the one called Use Counts that we had at the beginning, where the total memory is displayed. Here we are mainly interested in three columns:
- In the Total we can see the total memory available in the system and how Windows allocates it.
- In Active, we see the memory that is currently consumed by all applications and services.
- In standby, we can see the system memory allocated but pending, and this Windows does not consider it to be “consumed”.
If you take a look, here we have the 13.7 GB that was previously displayed in the Performance tab of Task Manager.
Here you can also gain a much more in-depth knowledge of how Windows 10 handles RAM memory. In this example, we have 32 GB of memory installed, and there is 13.7 GB of consumption (active), but Windows allocated an additional 11.3 GB (standby), so in reality there is about 25 GB of memory. busy, and only 7 GB available (this is reflected in the Free column).
As you can see, RAMMap will provide you with much more detailed information about what is consuming your computer’s RAM memory, and this can be particularly useful if at some point you are running out of available RAM in the system and you don’t know Why.