Windows 10 users may have noticed, if they have a not too recent or powerful computer, that in the task manager or task manager there is a process called "System and compressed memory" which takes up a lot of RAM . The most negative thing is that this System process cannot be terminated because, simply, it is Windows itself and does not really have the possibility of being terminated except by turning off the computer.
The fact that the "System and compressed memory" process occupies so much RAM, however, should not be normal at all and in the past, with Windows XP or Windows 7, when it happened to see System so demanding from the point of view of memory use, you could suspect malware on your computer.
In Windows 10 however, the fact that compressed memory occupies a lot of RAM is not a bug, but a characteristic of Windows 10 that we are now going to explain.
Everything is in the different way in which memory usage is managed in previous versions of Windows, compared to what happens in Windows 10.
In Windows 7 and XP, when you fill up your computer's memory, the system starts using the paging file, or virtual memory, instead of the memory.
Since the paging file is saved on the hard disk, which is the slowest component of the computer (while RAM is the fastest), all operations suddenly slow down, with a general decrease in performance due to the slowness of the disk.
This however prevents one of the programs in use from crashing, even if the PC becomes really immobile.
Windows 10 still uses the paging file when it needs it, but when the computer's memory starts to fill up, before switching to virtual memory, the system starts compressing old pages of memory so that they take up less space, similarly to how compress the files by zipping them.
So, for example, if a program is open that is not being used but that is in memory, if the RAM runs out, instead of using the paging file for that program, Windows 10 goes to compress the data in memory of this application and makes it smaller.
When you go back to that program, the CPU will do the work of decompressing the part of the reserved memory.
However, the process is always faster than what happens with the paging file on the hard disk.
The memory that is compressed by Windows 10 is stored in the System process .
So if you have been using many programs together for a while (or even one but heavy), then you will notice the System process getting bigger and bigger in the use of RAM.
Microsoft has used a rather efficient memory compression system, which has already been present on Macs since 2013 and on newer versions of Linux systems.
In conclusion, if you notice that in the task manager RAM is occupied most of all by a process called System or "System and compressed memory", which cannot be terminated, it certainly means that the computer is in a memory deficit and is experiencing a little suffering, but not that there is a virus or a software problem.
To recover memory, therefore, you will not have to close the System process, but terminate one of the most open and heaviest programs.
Ideally the issue could be resolved simply by adding RAM to the computer (and installing a 64-bit version of Windows that can use more than 4GB of RAM).
Otherwise, the usual and classic operations to speed up Windows 10 and then uninstall unnecessary and heavy applications, disable the automatic start of programs, close the tabs of the unused browser and so on are to be implemented.
