AFAIK the OS file cache doesn't get counted towards the process's memory usage, so if windows defender is showing up as using 2GB of memory, it really is using 2GB of memory for the app itself.
I have a DBMS, a browser, and an antivirus - all of which would love to have "free ram" that's not currently in use by other programs in order to speed up its own work.
How do I tell the system which of them I prefer (or some rank), instead of letting them fight it out, each of them thinking that they are the process entitled to all the perks of the currently unused memory?
Either they need the memory or they don't. If they feel like they need to store something to save on network costs then they should store it, and the OS will page it if it isn't used often.
The AV doesn't need to take "free ram" except when it tries to guess what the OS will do with disk cache. But by putting it in the AV cache it then prevents other software from using the cache.
Nothing is "fighting it out", there are internal heuristics to understand what applications need that RAM.
This is an internal OS feature of modern operating systems. If you are not capped out on RAM usage, this point is moot. If you are truly running at the RAM cap, to where the OS is paging out memory to disk and you have contention, you need more RAM.
Yes, but the context of this discussion was Q:"why is Windows Defender using 2GB of ram!?!?" A:"It only does that if no other process needs the memory". Which works fine only if there is only one distinguished process.
My point was that there isn't one distinguished process, and that thus -- as you described -- it should be left to the OS to decide and not to Windows Defender.
