Ever since buying the new computers back in December or so, I’ve noticed memory problems–specifically memory not being released after I close a program. At least once a day I have to at least log out of a given account to free the memory back up, and at least once a week I have to reboot. After a little googling I discovered that I was not unique in having this issue, which appears to stem from a change in Windows’ memory management system.
Okay, so that tells me what the problem is. What I’m wondering about, programmers, is why the problem was created. Did the change in memory management systems actually do anything to make Windows more stable, more robust, more powerful, etc? If so, what?
My not-so-WAG: they changed their memory management scheme to facilitate “instant on” capabilities, and suspend/resume for tablets and laptops. I know little about Windows, but on iOS, Applications are never really “quit” - they just become idle and so are instantly available without a re-launch delay if needed. The only time that memory is purged is if it is really needed. I suspect that Microsoft, in their effort to emulate Apple even more faithfully, is doing the same thing.
What are the actual symptoms you’re noticing? Do you get “Out of memory” messages from programs? Excessive swapping? Or is it just that the Task Manager shows more memory use than you’d expect?
WAG (basically a rerun of beowulff’s answer): It’s quite possible for the OS to keep a just-closed program’s memory reserved to simplify/accelerate reopening it later on. Previous versions of Windows didn’t do this, but maybe Windows 8 does. Ideally, the memory area in question would be freed when another program needs it, so it wouldn’t really be noticeable.
That absolutely fits with all of the trends, beowulff!
By the way, in the past when Microsoft has changed things and made life difficult for developers and users, they had usually given new specs for programmers to work against 5 years in the past.
The programmers that got in trouble were the ones who waited until the last minute to move to new APIs, etc…
Massive system slowdowns after, say, working from home all morning on Saturday. When the slowdown gets noticeable I’ll check Task Manager, and see something like 75% memory usage, even though nothing but Word, Excel, and IE are open. I’ll have opened & closed other programs many other times during this period.
If you go to the Performance tab of Task Manager and sort by Memory usage, what would you say your top 5 memory users are?
How much are they each using?
What other programs are you using, other than Word, Excel and IE? The link you provided is mostly people having problems with the game Battlefront 3. It’s no big thing in general that RAM is heavily utilised, makes things snappier if nothing else, but the OS should be able to manage memory allocation for well-behaving software. Is there something you are using that needs updating?
That being said, you said you bought a new computer in December. I am wondering if you have unified memory where the graphics card and CPU share system RAM. This can lead to issues such as what you are encountering. Especially if the memory allocation is dynamic, and, you can usually define a set RAM allocation for the GPU in BIOS.
Also, Office has this thing where it stores a lot of data in the “clip board” for later use for copy and pasting. I find this incredibly annoying at work where I do a lot of Word and Visio editing. A lot of times it does not “empty” the clipboard and I have to do the same as you.
Up until Windows 7, all of MS’s OSs have had memory management problems and leaks making them unstable to the point where one was forced to reboot on a regular basis.
Nonsense. Frequent reboots haven’t been a problem since XP SP2 (released almost 9 years ago).
What programs are using the memory? In general, an application manages it’s own memory usage, so high memory use by an app is generally the app’s fault.
As an aside, just using a lot of memory (as long as it’s not above 100% and causing page swaps) won’t slow a PC down. I suspect the culprit application is using memory and large amounts of CPU and/or disk activity. Those are generally the things that cause noticable performance hits.
Well, since XP, there’s been Vista. Vista which comes factory-set to reboot itself constantly because the constant updates and just about any configuration change required a reboot, which it tended to do automatically. Also, a reboot that could get caught up in an endless reboot cycle. Was Vista stable? Who knew since you’d wake up finding it rebooted itself. I guess if it’s always rebooting, then the memory management would be quite clean.
So, 7 is stable. Not so much anything else. (And 8 is just 7 with a second GUI… which seems to make things unsurprisingly not more stable.)
Except that does’t happen with Windows 8; the app is still running in the background. The fault with Windows 8 is the difficultly in actually really quitting an app; a mistake by Microsoft, I believe.
As to the OP, I still believe the memory use isn’t the cause of performance issues.
I haven’t seen this problem on Windows 8, and I’ve been using it since release. I’m not aware that 8 does anything different than 7 in terms of “memory management.”
that’s only with “Store” (i.e. “Metro”) apps; they stay resident but asleep for a while. Desktop programs (which BF3 most assuredly is) work no differently than they do on Windows 7.
So far as I can see the changes for suspended apps in the OS pertain only to Metro style apps. The OS will page out essentially all data of a suspended Metro app. Non-metro apps stay as they were.
Modern UI (Metro) apps don’t just stay asleep. They will actually get shut down if necessary, since they are required to be able to suspend to disk (similar to hibernation). Windows just pretends they are still in memory, even if it actually has to restart the app when you click on it in the side bar (or alt-tab to it).
There really are not that many programs that have a problem with the new memory management system. Games and other software that are heavily optimized to work more directly with the hardware are the ones most likely to have problems. Chances are, if a program is at fault, it is just one program.
However, I did run into this problem back on Windows 7, and it was not a program, but a poorly written driver. I installed a cheap webcam for my sister to use with Skype, and Windows would wind up using a lot of memory over time, even though it could not tell me where the problem was. Luckily, I found it mentioned on Google and uninstalled the driver (and Skype), fixing the problem.
I think a driver is a much more likely candidate, as they will persist through a logout. Programs don’t, other than maybe your antivirus, which you may want to try swapping out. Unlike drivers, a program will not continue to use memory after it is explicitly closed.
I do wonder one thing, though. Maybe Windows 8 doesn’t do as good a job as it should closing down Modern UI apps when they aren’t in use. You are closing them by dragging the top of the screen down to the bottom, right? You should get a tiny version of the window that moves the bottom of the screen when you do this. Merely switching to another app, Start Screen, or desktop does not actually close a Modern UI app.
I haven’t tested that scenario, as I don’t like having my sidebar all cluttered with “running” apps. I’m on the Desktop more often than not.
Don’t know about iOS, but it’s a mistake shared by Android. Backing out of an app on my Galaxy 3S means it’s still running. I have to go into the app manager to really shut down an app from continuing to run in the background. And even after closing them all down, the app manager tells me I have like 54 apps running in the background. So, I have to manually shut down all that crap.
Maybe it’s just the ‘app mentality’ that apps are meant to be like old-school DOS memory-resident executables. If you got 16 Gigs of RAM, why shut anything down ever!!!
Not true at all. Yes, there were some memory issues, but with decently-written software it was entirely possible to go for months at a time (or longer) without reboots. I worked on plenty of low-level Windows services and always-on types of software in the 90s that ran on Windows without requiring reboots just fine.
Man, that takes me back to the day. Is this a thing now with new PCs?
The one and only time I took my PC to a store to get repaired was in the late 1990s andit got hit by a lightning surge (I could actually hear the modem break.) Had major graphics issues and the PC guy – who repaired computers for a living even though it was at a big chain store – wouldn’t believe me that I had a unified memory. So I bought a replacement memory and my PC was then working again – thankfully it had only fried my modem and memory.