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.
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.