Windows Defender a memory hog! Change default settings?
 

In the last month o two it seems like my laptop is running a little slower at times. Memory used % is always high 30s to low 50s.

"Antimalware Service Executable" runs between 40mb and 150mb. Could this be the problem?

Would you suggest I change any of the default settings?

I also run the free version of Malwarebytes and "MB Service" is sitting at 147mb right now.

TIA

If you think 40-150MB is a lot, don't ever look at what Chrome or Firefox are using...

95MB (average of 40 and 150) would be 14th on my list, sorted by Working set (memory) in Task Manager right now (and 150MB would be 17th of Peak). Overall I'm at 46%.

I never worry about memory utilization, unless it's near 100% (which is hard to do outside of Photoshop/Lightroom compositing/rendering). I'd rather memory be used to cache items I may use again than just sitting there idle. It's very different than CPU or bandwidth utilization.

I seriously doubt 30-50% memory utilization is slowing anything down.

Fwiw, my MBAService is at 274MB and Nortonsecurity.exe at 20MB.

FF is 47% of the memory on my X1 Carbon W10. How this compares with anything else I don't know but that is a heck of a lot. Been getting less and less impressed with FF over the years anyway and probably should look at something else. Netscape was alright as I recall. :)

Well, there's always Lynx at about 12MB:

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...959002c02d.png

:D

Are you at 100% utilization and using disk to swap memory, slowing you down?

If not, it's intentional - using idle memory sitting around to pre-load frequently-used and cache recently-used items for performance reasons. IME, it's actually a very good software performance engineering approach. (I once had a team tackle an application that was written elsewhere and performing poorly, simply looking for caching and pre-loading opportunities. We reduced average response time from 15.5 seconds to 1.3)

And if you are, $50 to add 8GB RAM would be well-spent.

Out of curiosity, do you have a lot of tabs open? For FF, each tab or window is treated as a separate instance and consumes more ram. I believe Chrome does the same... Also, if a tab or window crashes, often that memory is not released back to the system until a reboot is done.

Just food for thought.

So, a close/reopen of FF puts it down to ~26%. I have about 14 tabs open. I don't feel that my computer is slowing down anyway just surprised at how much it was using when I checked (it is a work one and we have plenty of apps on it that do that) but it just seemed a lot for a browser. As for my Windows Defender to answer the OPs question in task manager it is ~5% that it is consuming. I am lazy at closing tabs so part of it is self-inflicted. Thanks.