WTF is that?

http://woshub.com/memory-compression-process-high-usage-windows-10/

The compressed memory feature in Windows 10 is designed to improve the performance (responsiveness) of the system due to storing part of the memory pages in RAM in a compressed form. It helps to reduce the number of read / write requests to the memory pages in the slow (compared to RAM) paging file on a hard drive. The required data are extracted from the RAM faster even though additional CPU resources are spent to compress/decompress them.


Might be something to look at.

Similarly, https://www.onmsft.com/news/heres-more-on-that-registry-process-you-may-be-seeing-in-windows-10-build-17063

In recent Insider Preview builds, you may have noticed a new process labelled “Registry” in Task Manager. The purpose of this process is similar to that of the memory compression store process in that it is a minimal process whose address space is used to hold data on behalf of the kernel. However, while the memory compression process is used to hold compressed pages, the registry process is used to hold registry hive data (e.g. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE, HKEY_CURRENT_USER).


It sounds like Win10 thinks your system is too slow, so it's doing a bunch of trickery to try to speed things up. That trickery may in fact be slowing down what you actually want to do.

It also sounds like it really, really wants to have a SSD for the paging/swap file. That may take care of most of these issues you're seeing.

HTH a little. Good luck!

Cheers,
Scott.