It's no secret Tarkov is ""perfectly optimised"", and "needing 18 gb of ram" is ""normal"", but if you don't want to buy more ram sticks, you can create a virtual memory on a hard drive for a bandaid fix.
You can google how to do it, but for ease, I'll put it here (for Windows)
Open Settings, click System
Click About, scroll down and click "Advanced system settings"
Under the Advanced tab, look for Performance, open the settings
Advanced tab, click "change" under Virtual Memory
Pick the drive you want to use, keep it mind that the pagefile will take up space, so make sure there's room
Select custom size. You can either make the pagefile full size immediately, or as a variable size which will change size within a set boundary.
For full size, set the initial size and maximum size to the same value. Remember that the value has to be in binary. Eg, for 20gb, it has to be 20480mb. This will immediately use up 20gb of your hard drive however, but has its advantages.
For variable, set the maximum size to what you want, and the initial to something smaller, like 2937. This will make a pagefile with a minimum size of 2937, and change size depending on usage, up to the maximum you set.
I had trouble loading into some maps like shoreline with 16gb of ram, even with Tarkov set to high priority, and this helped me greatly.
