Memory compression: trading CPU for RAM, and when that trade is wrong
SHORT ANSWER
Memory compression is disabled with the PowerShell command Disable-MMAgent -mc. Windows compresses pages in RAM instead of writing them to disk, spending CPU to save memory. Disabling it frees that CPU time — but only makes sense if you have plenty of RAM. On a 8 GB machine it will make things distinctly worse.
Exactly what it changes
Read straight from the application source. If a tool will not show you this, it is asking for trust it has not earned.
Disable-MMAgent -mcTurns off in-memory page compression.
Enable-MMAgent -mcTurns it back on. This is the revert.
What it does
Rather than paging cold memory out to disk, Windows compresses it and keeps it in RAM. Reading it back costs CPU but is far faster than a disk round trip.
The compression and decompression work is real CPU time, which is the argument for turning it off when memory is not the constraint.
When it helps
- Frees CPU cycles on systems with 32 GB or more, where compression is solving a problem you do not have.
- Can slightly reduce frame-time variance in heavily CPU-bound games.
When it hurts
- On 8 GB and often on 16 GB, disabling it pushes Windows to page to disk instead, which is far slower and produces exactly the stutter you were trying to remove.
- The effect is highly dependent on how much memory your games actually use. Measure before assuming.
How to undo it
Run Enable-MMAgent -mc and reboot.
Verdict
Only with 32 GB or more. On 16 GB it is a coin flip and on 8 GB it is actively harmful — one of the clearest examples of a tweak whose correctness depends entirely on your hardware.
Related guides
Everything else we change is listed too
All 127 optimizations are published in full, with what each one does and which are free. You can apply any of them by hand using pages like this one — the tool exists to do it in one click and put it back after every Windows update.