I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit SP1 machine with 16GB of RAM installed. If I open the task manager, it tell me that nearly all of the memory is full — only it's not.
The Total is correct, but the Cached, Available, and Free totals don't seem to reflect the amount of RAM actually available on the server. What could be causing this?
UPDATE
Per @evan-anderson's suggestion, we loaded up RAMMap. It reports a ton of memory being sucked up by "Metafile".
Found a post that explains a fix via RAMMap. I did that and it seems to be slowly freeing up memory. However, it seems problematic to have to do this every couple of days.
Also found a server fault question about this issues and am considering @BeowulfNode42's solution
Best Answer
The total of "Cached", "Available", and "Free" aren't ever going to add up to the "Total". Here's a good blog entry that describes these numbers in detail.
Task Manager is telling you that 88% of the physical RAM is occupied. You have some process (or combination of processes) that has allocated a significant amount of memory.