One day you notice your system is starting to run slow. You check the task manager, it tells you CPU usage is negligible. Then you notice that the task manager reports memory usage at 70, 80 or 90 percent. So you start looking for the process that is consuming all that memory. You add up memory usage for all the processes listed in the task manager and your total ends up less than 1Gb. You think “what the f@#$”

Welcome to the wonderful world of caching. It was designed … drumroll… to improve performance! Thankfully if you know what to look for it’s easy enough to fix.

First you need to download RAMMap and see what is consuming the memory. If you see the entry called “Mapped File” using an exorbitant amount of memory that would be your culprit.

To fix it you need to download the DynCache Service. Installation instructions are fairly self-explanatory, the only thing readme file fails to mention is that you need to run command prompt as administrator when creating the service. Just creating the service and importing the reg file is not enough, however, as by default it will allow the mapped file to consume up to 90% of your physical memory and that’s exactly what you don’t want. So using the same readme you will have to go into the registry and set the maximum. I have been setting it to 20% of physical memory and leaving the other parameters alone, seems to work well, but if you want more fine-tuning there are certainly other parameters you can play with.

The DynCache service download page doesn’t list Windows 7 as one of supported operating systems, but it does work on Windows 7.