Hi Nick,
did you also find a solution to to my initial problem, it doesn't have any relation to Expedition:
Right clicking in Stripchart gets slow and when Stripchart has been open for some hours it complains on "Out of memory".

I shall add that the PC memory is 8 GB and only 4 GB is used, so I am not reaching the PC limit and no other application is affected.
Is there anything I can send you to help in the fault finding?

Best regards
Magnus Olofsson

Magnus86 wrote:

I shall add that the PC memory is 8 GB and only 4 GB is used, so I am not reaching the PC limit and no other application is affected.
Best regards
Magnus Olofsson

Hello Magnus, I want to preface my comments with I worked on Windows Memory Manager for over 12 years.Here’s how to make sense of the “why isn’t Windows using all my RAM?” feeling.
How Windows uses RAM (why it can look “unused”)
Installed RAM is split into a few buckets:

• Hardware Reserved – carved out below the OS (e.g., integrated GPU “shared memory,” device MMIO). Windows can’t touch this. If this is big, usable RAM shrinks.
• In use (active/modified) – what you think of as “RAM used by apps + OS.”
• Standby (file cache) – already-used pages that are immediately reclaimable. Task Manager often shows this inside “Available,” which makes “In use” look small even when your RAM is doing useful caching.
• Free – truly empty pages (usually small on a healthy system).

Two more pieces matter:

• Commit charge (Committed Bytes) – total virtual memory promised to processes. This is backed by RAM + page file. If Committed approaches the Commit Limit (≈ RAM + pagefile size), you feel pressure.
• Memory compression – Windows can compress cold pages in RAM, so physical “In use” is smaller even when workloads are large.

So it can look like Windows “isn’t using RAM” when:

• A lot of memory is in Standby (that’s good; it’s fast cache).
• Compression shrinks physical usage.
• The page file holds very cold pages to keep more RAM free for cache. This is usually managed by Memory Manager and can grow to 10+ times the size of actual physical RAM.
• Hardware Reserved is large (iGPU DVMT in BIOS, etc.).
• App/OS constraints (apps, VM/container quotas, NUMA locality) keep some RAM idle.

Although Windows 10/11 will "run" with 2GB of RAM (minimum requirement) 2...8GB is not enough to run serious applications like Expedition and Stripchart, unless you do some serious Windows tunning, and even then sometimes you will run out of memory.

Believe me when I tell you that when you actually measure how much "RAM" every single process and service in user land (the part of the Windows Kernel that interfaces with user applications), system land, HAL, etc. you will end up with a number much bigger than the actual physical RAM you have in your system. This is because Memory Manager is leveraging other hardware to make up for the lack of physical RAM. 
 
IMHO, this is Windows Memory Manager's beauty, you can run Windows in 10+year old hardware that was not even designed with today's memory requirements. 
Yes Linux is "better" but not really when you compare the amount of application's with rich UI/User Experience run in both OSs.  

BTW, unlike many applications, Expedition is very efficient in it memory utilization, for example each Chrome tab you open uses hundreds of MBs and a single page can run into GBs. Same is true for other browsers.
ChatGPT or other rich web pages use even more, this is despite having Chrome set to maximum memory saver, a ChatGPT and others can grow into GBs per tab.
As you can see you can very rapidly exhaust all your physical RAM, with just web pages!

My personal advise, is that if you want to run Expedition in a machine with 8GB (Which I do without many problems) do the following :
*Backup
*Remove or close all the apps that you do not absolutely need on a boat's nave PC.
*Disable as many services as you possibly can, remove any non MSFT antivirus/ransom ware apps, Windows* *Defender is extremely good and is all what we use at MSFT with our most secure laptops.
*Close all your browsers and configure them to use maximum memory saver.
*If you have Adobe disable the updater, and so on.

After that, run disk cleanup and clean system files. 

Set the page file to minimum 64GB max 64GB (this is for an 8GB system). If you do not have 64GB of disk space make it so it is 50% of the available space and reboot.(1)

Then, please make sure you have a backup, run the following in  PowerShell as admin. 
These commands are not risky and will clean up Windows, you can Google what each does.

dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth
dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth
dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
sfc.exe /scannow
dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore
dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup
dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

Run defragment 5-10 times, even if you have an SSD.

Then and only then you might be able to run Expedition and Stripchart without having memory issues.
(1) If after all the cleaning, you have more space then increase the page file to either 64GB if you still not have room then 40% of the available space. 

Run the defragmenter 5-10 more times.

By setting the min and max to the same number tells Windows to allocate the page file in as contiguous space as possible, then the defragmenter will try to reorganize all the files to be as contiguous as possible, which helps a lot with performance. Even with SSDs, because it forces the SSD to level the files across the least wearer cells.     

I hope it helps.
Astolfo
 

Last edited by Astolfo (9/15/2025 10:42 am)

Nick wrote:

Fyi, Stripchart was using memory inefficiently. That has been fixed.

Maybe I should have added generally