Windows 10 Memory Compression negatively impacts developer productivity on "large" memory systems about windows-dev-performance

[randomascii]

Thanks for opening this issue. As the person who reported it on twitter I appreciate having this issue formally recorded.

I can see two possible ways of improving this situation:

1. Disable or detune memory compression on systems with lots of memory. On a 32+ GB system the benefits from memory compression are much smaller, and the costs are much greater. A reproducible 10:1 regression happens with VsChromium but can happen with any tool that sits idle for a while and then needs to touch a large percentage of its memory. This sort of tool is far likely to be run on a 32+ GB system. It is the sort of tool that justifies buying that much memory, so killing its performance is unwanted. Meanwhile the benefits are modest because a 32+ GB system will, generally speaking, have enough available memory. Using memory compression to free up a few GB is unlikely to be important or valuable, especially if the system has 10+ GB available.

2. The other possible solution is a way to have processes opt-out of memory compression. This would let (for instance) SQL server, VsChromium, and other tools which justifiably use large chunks of memory avoid the pathological effects. Currently this opt-out can be implemented by scanning through a processes memory on a timer, but that is a problematic solution - please don't force VsChromium to do that.

[randomascii]

My main use case continues to be using VsChromium. I'll have 30+ GB of available memory, then Windows will decide to compress VsChromium's memory, which means that my next search will take several seconds instead of being instantaneous. A few second delay isn't the end of the world, but it defeats the entire purpose of VsChromium which is to have all of Chrome's source code loaded into RAM and ready for instant access. Not access with a few seconds of delay, but instant.

[imsir0vic]

If Microsoft cared about its customers and listened to the feedback, we would have an option like this:

Heck, even disabling memory compression on 8 GB system has a big impact, especially for web dev.

[vertexgamer]

My main use case continues to be using VsChromium. I'll have 30+ GB of available memory, then Windows will decide to compress VsChromium's memory, which means that my next search will take several seconds instead of being instantaneous. A few second delay isn't the end of the world, but it defeats the entire purpose of VsChromium which is to have all of Chrome's source code loaded into RAM and ready for instant access. Not access with a few seconds of delay, but instant.

Indeed. Would be very useful if microsoft allowed the user to customize MMAgent behaviour, especially on systems with lot's of memory. It's a shame that such an useful feature is causing problems for being overly agressive

[sfiruch]

I think Memory Compression can manually be disabled by executing Disable-MMAgent -MemoryCompression in Powershell. Documentation here.

Of course, this shouldn't be necessary.

[heavyoak]

Hi. Id love to know why yall never did anything about this? cause even now my Win 10 Pro 22H2 19045.2728 with 32GB of system RAM is regularly compressing and consuming 13GB+ of RAM slowing down and causing RAM hungry apps like chrome and Steam to crash.

[vertexgamer]

On my testing i found a 7,3% performance penalty when running blender from compressed memory, (24,5gb vs 7gb).
The main issue is that when a resource hungry process is running for some time, it just takes a new process using more than 8gb of ram, for windows to start compressing others processes memory (even resource intensive ones that are running using constantly 70% of the cpu), even when almost HALF of total memory is free (e.g. 50gb) and there is no need to free up more

[Eli-Black-Work]

@randomascii, Does your company have a retainer with Microsoft? I'm wondering if it might be more efficient to file a request with MS via their official (paid) support services.