"Your computer is low on memory" when its clearly not

Anonymous

This problem started when i upgraded from windows 8 to windows 8.1

When i run a game, for example, Arma3 randomly throughout my game i'll be thrown back to windows desktop and presented with a message saying "Your computer is low on memory. Save your files and close these programs: 'Game name here'"

Screenshot Here

As you can see from the above screenshot i have 2.6gb in use and 5.3 free, so why does it think its out of memory?

I have set my pagefile from "system managed" to 16gb initial - 24gb max

This made no difference whatsoever..

My hardware has not changed, Like i said i noticed this almost instantly after upgrading to 8.1

Any help would be appreciated because as far as i'm aware theres no way to revert back to 8 from 8.1?

Thanks

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Anonymous

Thanks Adriaan - I have changed the registry setting and rebooting seems to help.

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Anonymous

2014-02-03T03:27:09+00:00
here is what I have observed about this error.

the root cause is something in 8.1 that is causing memory Commits to expand to fill the entire physical RAM. In order to verify this do the following: download Process Explorer from Sysinternals. Run it. Under the View tab select System Information. Select the Memory Tab. This will give you a running graph of both Physical memory usage and System Commits.

The problem happens when you run a program in Full Screen mode. For me its Windows Media Center.

So run your full screen program. After a minute or so Alt-Tab back to the desktop. Look at the System Commit graph. If the problem is occurring then you will see a saw tooth like graph for system commits. While the full screen program is up the System Commits grow and grow. As soon as you alt-tab out the system commits drop back to the level of the amount of physical memory in use.

Ways I have seen around the issue:
1. Run your program in a window (the size of your full screen). This supposedly helps XBMC users and I would suspect other users as well. I have not tried it.
2. Set your desktop to the same resolution as the game you play before you launch the game in full screen mode. This seems to help those people running WMC, but it all goes to heck when you turn off the TV.
Disabling the popup dialog does nothing to fix the issue of the system commits growing while the full screen game is up. Even though the dialog is gone, all your physical RAM is full of system commits.

If you are playing a full screen game I would suspect you could alt-tab out every so often to clear out the system commits.

Bottom line is Microsoft has an issue and I have seen no patch to resolve it.

I am ho on this issue because it reduces my WAF (wife acceptance factor) of using WMC instead of a cable box. I will report any fix that I see.
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Anonymous

2014-01-30T17:50:30+00:00

Anyone tried this?

I have this problem with multiple games like Portal 2 and Alan Wake.

Haven't had the problem since.
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Anonymous

2014-01-30T14:09:27+00:00

Anyone tried this?

I have this problem with multiple games like Portal 2 and Alan Wake.
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Anonymous

2014-01-24T17:21:25+00:00

I oddly don't have this issue with the Dayz Mod and it seems to be pretty hardware hungry. I can only get 15 FPS but never run into the low memory issue.
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