How To Empty Standby Memory And Fix Game Stuttering On Windows 10
If you’re running the Windows 10 Creators Update, or the Fall Creators Update, and playing games on it, there’s a chance you experience game stutter while playing. This happens because of a bug in Windows 10 that causes your standby RAM to fill up for no reason. The game you’re playing may not need additional RAM but that doesn’t stop it from filling up and ultimately slowing your system down so much your game begins to stutter. The quickest way to fix game stuttering is it to empty standby memory. Of course, you will need to do this repeatedly because this is a bug and it will manifest again and again until Microsoft fixes it.
Empty Standby Memory
RAMMap is a utility that shows you how Windows is assigning physical memory and it has tools for clearing memory as well. If you’re looking for a tool that can empty standby memory, this is a good, free option. Simply go to Empty>Empty Standby List, and the stuttering should go away immediately.
As we mentioned early on that cleaning the Standby memory once isn’t enough. It fills up because of a bug and once you clean it, it will fill right back up again. It may take a little time but if this bug manifests on your system it’s not going to go away until it’s patched by Microsoft.
Create Scheduled Task
If you’re playing games then you will need to empty standby memory regularly to make sure there’s no stuttering and a scheduled task is the best way to go about doing this. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to schedule a task to empty standby memory using RAMMap. We recommend using a little app called Empty Standby List.
Empty Standby List is a single-purpose app. Run it, and it will empty standby memory. You can create a task in Task Scheduler that will run this EXE. When you run Empty Standby List, you will see a Command Prompt window appear and disappear after a second. That’s all the app has for an interface i.e., it’s basically just a console app which makes it ideal for use with a scheduled task.
Create the task to run regularly, or to just run when you’re playing a game and keep things clean while you play.
Microsoft is aware of this problem and a patch may be coming in the Spring Creators Update, whenever it rolls out. For now, both Windows 10 1703 and 1708 have this bug.
Haha you expect them to fix anything, or you are just asking ? Windows memory management wasn’t probably much updated since Windows XP. Since back than computers had only 512MB ram and windows had to use page file to compensate for the fact and put things into standby memory, because memory was slow back than.
No matter how much RAM you have, free memory will be slowly filled with standby memory and your game freezes/crashes, because memory leak… I have 8GB memory freeze and game freezes, because standby memory takes every bit of space. Yes when i clean standby memory game is running fine even with 0.
ISLC is good for cleaning standby memory, however when standby memory is cleaned, game freezes on a moment. Which is annoying and it fills quickly again, so you will have freezes each time standby memory is cleaned. I heard even people with 32 GB ram having same problem. You can use page file, i am currently getting away with 800-2933, but it wears down your ssd quickly so you don’t wanna do that! But this issue still not being fixed so. Page file in 2020 haha, why should you need to use that, while you can have up to 128GB ram, more than any game currently needs… Stupid…
This standby issue is really annoying. I ended up writing a Windows service to clear standby memory every 60 seconds. There is a side effect that it immediately starts loading about 150 MB of system DLLs into standby memory, but not that big of an issue with M.2 NVME. I hate enabling virtual memory because Windows starts using it when it’s not needed and then makes programs slower switch to or close once they’ve been put into virtual memory, but I was getting too many out of memory errors without enabling it. After keeping Standby Memory clear, I don’t get run out of memory and don’t need Virtual Memory enabled.
This just fixed my problem!
Any news on microsoft solving this issue?