I’ve got 4GB of DDR RAM and a decent enough graphics card/CPU (GTX 560 Ti and i5 2400, respectively), and like to run stuff in the background while running games - stick a video on the background. Unfortunately this seems to shoot ‘Physical Memory Usage History’ in Task Manager through the roof. Even just browsing the old interwebs with Steam in the background has memory usage up to 2.47 GB (which is more than my old compy even had). CPU usage is 11%.
I’ve only just upgraded to Windows 7 off the back of XP (don’t worry, 64 Bit - I’m not that stupid), and am still feeling my way around it. How should I use the Memory Optimizer utility? Currently the ‘amount of memory you want to free up’ is set to 1791 MB, does it need changing? The other options are ‘Optimize automatically when free memory’, set at 401 MB, ‘Increase free memory to:’ 1003 MB and ‘ONLY optimize is CPU-Usage is below:’ 10%
Should I just chuck another 4GB in there? Or should I tweak some settings? Or should I stop asking my computer to do so much? Or does a high memory usage really not matter? Thanks!
Higher RAM usage is not necessarily a bad thing. Free memory is memory you might as well not have; it’s just sitting there doing nothing. Modern OSes will try to keep as much memory in use as possible. If you open a program and close it, it can keep the program’s code in memory, for example. If you open the program again it will load up virtual instantaneously. If you don’t the OS can re-use the memory at any time.
Better signs that you might benefit from more memory are if your system is paging, or flushing dirty pages to disk a lot are better warning signs. I don’t know how to check for this in Windows.
Thanks for the reply Rysto, I’m just concerned that I’m really bumping up against the 4GB limit. Right now with a game minimised I have only 13MB free (!).
Oh, in the OP, I also meant DDR 3 RAM, rather crucial number missed out there.
Did you actually do an in place upgrade, or did you install a clean OS? Windows is notorious for having strange issues after upgrades. Probably not the issue, but I figured it might be worth throwing that out there.
Your memory usage does seem high, but from the sound of things it’s probably just due to all of the programs you have running. As long as everything is running reasonably smoothly though don’t worry about it. If things get noticeably slow then you might want to consider upgrading the RAM.
What are you doing with steam? I’ve never seen it take up that much memory on my system. Are you browsing through a lot of game trailers or maybe downloading a bunch of software? Doing that might take up a lot of RAM, at least temporarily.
This is a question I asked some friends (And Dopers through a different venue) and wasn’t totally satisfied with the responses.
Right now, Win7 64-bit, Google Chrome with five tabs open, VLC media player and Steam open, I have 54MB of RAM free out of 4GB.
When I go to “processes” I see at the bottom that Windows Media Player still has a process going in addition to WMPSideShowGadget, whatever the fuck that is.
Why has WMP not gone away yet? I closed it hours ago.
I’m running VLC right now with a 2 Gig mkv file playing. I have firefox, Word 2003 and file explorer open.
Task manager reports 1.14 Gig used. 1943 MB cached, 1900 MB available. 22% of my processors dual cores are used playing the big mkv video. at times my processor usage jumps to 66%, but memory doesn’t peak.
Under Vista and 7, when looking at the memory stats in Task Manager, the value you should be interested in is the Available memory category. The Free memory listing is for memory that is unallocated by any process whatsoever. As Rysto said upthread, having a lot of free, unused memory is wasteful. The SuperFetch system is designed to take advantage of the large amounts of memory on modern systems to speed boot and program launch performance. It will preload frequently used programs into memory and keep recently closed programs in memory until more memory is requested by an active process.
Is there a good tour of Windows Task manager out there? I use it for the basics, but it displays a lot of information, and I’d like to know to satisfy the what’s-under-the-hood in me.
If you really want a good idea of what is going on, get Process Explorer from Microsoft (Sysinternals, actually, but Mark Russinovich went to work for MS a while ago).
I use it as a replacement for Task manager, and have it always running in the background (it is set to run on startup). Also, check out Mark’s blogs over on Microsoft for some great details on how Windows memory (and other) management systems work under the hood.
WMP is always running as a service in Windows 7 by default. They do that so it doesn’t cause lag on startup when you browse a directory with multimedia clips for example. You can disable it though, Start Menu, “Run”, “Services”, then find the entry for Windows Media Player and change its properties from “Automatic” to “Manual”.
The SideShowGadget I thought was removed from Windows 7, but I am often mistaken. It is an additional multimedia extension, that is designed to handle multimedia input and output devices other then the keyboard and computer monitor. IIRC, it can be used to pump multimedia data to your HDMI TV, and handle the inputs from wireless remotes and such. It could also interface with smartphones and DVR’s, but I really thought it was gone from Windows 7.
It only matters when your disk starts thrashing. If you have no thrashing, it doesn’t matter.
If you’re looking at the Task Manager view of your memory, make sure you’re reading the “Available” figure, not the “Free” figure.
If your Windows 7 is working correctly (i.e. you haven’t tinkered the crap out of it trying to “fix” its memory usage ), the “Free” value will be very close to zero at all times. This is a good thing, as it means your computer is using all of its available RAM to cache frequently-used files and programs, which speeds up everything you do on your computer.
Believe me, unless you have a PhD and have been working with computer memory usage your entire career, you’re not going to hack your way to a solution better than the one Microsoft ships out-of-the-box. Although you might get some benefit from the placebo effect.
This article from Ars gives a good overview of how memory usage in Windows 7 works, if their server ever comes back up. It’s a rebuttal to a factually-flawed press release slamming Microsoft over Windows 7’s “high memory usage”, because they hadn’t updated their benchmarking tool to look at “Available” memory instead of “Free” memory.
EDIT: BTW, one of the (many) reasons Vista gave people a bad impression is that Task Manager in Vista wasn’t updated to correctly show the difference between “Available” and “Free” memory, either. Making it look like more of a hog than it actually was.
One thing I don’t think anyone else commented on yet is your mention of “memory opimizer”. Windows 7 doesn’t come with any such utility, and most of tools of that class (which includes Registry cleaners and similar stuff) either attempts to solve a “problem” that doesn’t exist, or introduces new problems of its own.
As another poster pointed out, you want the system to use all available memory for the tasks at hand, unless you frequently launch new applications, in which case having a reasonable (small) amount of free memory may speed things up somewhat.
There’s another point of view, which is to give Windows so many resources that it can’t possibly run out of anything (like this), but that isn’t cost-effective.
This is the correct approach to determine if you have sufficient RAM. You do not want to be consuming so much RAM that your system is forced to periodically store and fetch data on your hard disk pagefile. In Windows, you use Perfmon (Performance Monitor) to measure disk paging.
Start -> Run: perfmon
In Perfmon, right-click on the graph area, and Add Counters
Add counter: Memory \ Page Reads/sec .
Page Reads / sec measures how often the system reads data from the pagefile into RAM.
If you launch an application that is not cached in RAM, Windows first tosses out other cached applications until it has enough room to load the one you want.
But here’s the part that throws people: removing a cached program from RAM takes zero time. It takes time to load a program into memory, but zero time to remove a program from memory.
(Ok; that’s also slightly inaccurate… but it takes the same amount of time to remove a cached program from RAM as it does to zero-out the RAM, and Windows 7 for security purposes always zeroes the RAM anyway.)
In short, you never want “Free” RAM if possible. Even if the programs cached in RAM are programs you only use once every year (and they won’t be, Windows 7 is good at predicting what programs you use), you’re still better off than if there was nothing cached there at all.
:eek:
), the “Free” value will be very close to zero at all times. This is a good thing, as it means your computer is using all of its available RAM to cache frequently-used files and programs, which speeds up everything you do on your computer.