Did you know there’s an “efficiency” feature in both Windows 10 and Windows 11 that actually isn’t very efficient at all? At least not when it comes to sysetm memory usage. The feature is called Delivery Optimization and its main purpose is to “optimize” the downloads of updates and apps from Microsoft:

You can use Delivery Optimization to reduce bandwidth consumption by sharing the work of downloading [Windows update, upgrade, and application] packages among multiple devices in your deployment.

Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t managed to fully optimize the Delivery Optimization feature—it might be useful for what it does, but it takes up more of your computer’s system resources over time.

Apparently, one user (spotted by Neowin) mentioned that Delivery Optimization “will eat up all your memory and just sit there for fun.” Then, a Reddit user named Niff_Naff ran some tests and found that “the service can eat up loads of your system memory” over time:

Fortunately, it’s possible to turn off Delivery Optimization, which is done via Windows Settings. Simply navigate to Windows Update > Delivery Optimization. There, untick “Allow downloads from other computers.”

Hopefully, you should now have a bit more system memory left for more important processes!

Further reading: 12 easy Windows 11 tweaks for a faster PC