Vista memory usage
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CataclysmicQuantums wrote:
When are programmers going to make computers use their resources to do more useful and sophisticated things instead of being lazy asses and writing things like this...
Poor coding is one thing, wanting to watch full screen HD movies on your computer is quite another.
CataclysmicQuantums wrote:
Ssy that to the family who worked hard to save up just enough money to buy a family computer.
I will. Further more I'll tell them to seek expert advice on the specifications of their new PC before parting with the cash. Besides which, owning a computer is more affordable now than it has ever been; an additional 2GB's of RAM from Crucial costs $117.99.
"On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't. "I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it." -Tina Farrell, a 23 year old thicky from Levenshulme, Manchester.
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why oh why does everyone seem to have troubles with OS? Does anyone do a custome install and proper config. I am currently running Vista on a P4 with 1GB memory. I have my iTunes running, I'm here roaming around CP, and I am doing Google searches in another browser and I am using about 45% of my memory. I can open VS2008 Express and work on a project also and still not use all my memory. What is everyone doing that is giving them problems?
If you can read, you can learn
That 45% can be tricky. You need to pay attention to the swap file also, virtual ram can be storing a bunch and causing a lower ram consumption rating. I know on my system running Vista Ultimate 64 with only 1 GB RAM (have a bad memory bank on my board and do not have time to fix currently), I often had my system come to almost an entire halt. Of course, having several IE instances, SQL Sever, SQL Managment Studio and Visual Studio (2008 beta back then) all going at the same time was a good part of the problem :). Anyway, I was getting to the point I figured I had to fix the system so I could add more RAM, but thought I would ReadyBoost a try and purchased a 4GB ReadyBoost compatible Flash Drive and gave it a whirl. While the system can take spawn out a lot of virtual ram at times, it no longer locks up my system, it remains mostly usable even under load. Although, that is about the only difference I noticed using ReadyBoost, it just made the virtual ram access much more survivable, but that is enough, it justified the purchase.
Rocky <>< Blog Post: Silverlight goes Beta 2.0 Tech Blog Post: Cheap Biofuels and Synthetics coming soon?
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I honestly haven't seen that as a problem. The only thing that has annoyed me about it is the constant hard drive access when I'm doing nothing that should be accessing the hard drive. I think it won't be long before hard drives with moving parts are obsolete (hopefully) anyway so it's all kind of a moot point then.
All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
Constant HD access is not always for this reason. If virtual RAM is moving, it can cause it. Then there is Searc Index service that can keep it spinning. Along with Defender and that one SNV client (tortise or something like that). There was one more along these lines, but do not recall what it was. The old SysInternals drive monitor was handy in finding out all the services pulling my drive around. At least now my HD drive light gets a bit of a rest :)
Rocky <>< Blog Post: Silverlight goes Beta 2.0 Tech Blog Post: Cheap Biofuels and Synthetics coming soon?
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Constant HD access is not always for this reason. If virtual RAM is moving, it can cause it. Then there is Searc Index service that can keep it spinning. Along with Defender and that one SNV client (tortise or something like that). There was one more along these lines, but do not recall what it was. The old SysInternals drive monitor was handy in finding out all the services pulling my drive around. At least now my HD drive light gets a bit of a rest :)
Rocky <>< Blog Post: Silverlight goes Beta 2.0 Tech Blog Post: Cheap Biofuels and Synthetics coming soon?
It was either superfetch or indexing, I fired up process monitor (replacement for the old sysinternals thing) and narrowed it down to one or the other or both and shut them both down a while back. I have a quiet office and the contstant rumbling from my SATA array was pissing me off. My computer is plenty fast without those features turned on.
When everyone is a hero no one is a hero.
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The answers to some of your questions may be found in "Windows Internals, Fourth Edition". The only difference with loading data into 'used' memory rather than 'free' memory is that the 'used' memory has to be taken away from whatever working set it belongs to first. Windows basically has a few categories of memory status: assigned to one or more working sets, 'standby' (trimmed from working set, either read-only or writable but changes already written back to either the original file [memory-mapped files] or to the pagefile), 'modified' (trimmed from working set, unsaved changes not yet written back), 'free' (link back to working set no longer retained, contents unknown), or 'zero' (all bytes known to be zero because zeros written by the idle thread). When allocating physical memory to a working set, if the memory is going to be used by kernel-mode code only or immediately filled by data coming from disk, the OS takes a page from the 'free' list. Otherwise it will take memory from the 'zero' list to ensure that the process can't see another process's data - this is for security. If the appropriate list is exhausted, the OS tries the other one, zeroing a page from the free list if necessary. If that is also exhausted, it then tries the standby list, but to use a page from that list, it has to unlink it from the invalid page table entry that was pointing to that page, which takes a bit more time. If no pages are available from the standby list the OS will write out a page from the modified list so it can reuse it - this is the only time that eager swapping occurs. When the OS decides, periodically or if memory demands get too great, that a working set is too big, the least-recently-used pages will be trimmed, that is, the corresponding page table entries will be marked inactive. (The processor will then generate a page fault the next time any code touches the page.) If modified since last written (tracked automatically by the processor setting a bit in the page table entry), the page goes onto the modified list, otherwise onto the standby list. Background threads then lazily write back data from the modified list at which point the pages are put on the standby list. However, the page table entry still contains information about which physical page was used. When a page fault occurs, the page fault handler code first checks whether the data is still actually in memory on the standby or modified lists and if so, simply fixes up the PTE to be valid again, takes the page off the corresponding list, and dismisse
Wow Mike, great post! I just ordered Windows Internals (the Windows Internals I read was written in 1993 by Matt Pietrek about Win3.1). I guess it will be an interesting read. Thanks for your post, it really cleared many things up. I'll bookmark this in my blog in case I want to refer to it later. :)
Luis Alonso Ramos Intelectix Chihuahua, Mexico
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John C wrote:
This got me curious as to why it does use approx 1gb of memory after boot and here is at least in part the answer:
This seems like a fantastically bad idea to me. Ok, it may work well for the "average" user who is almost never going to run a high-memory-load application like a game or Visual Studio, but for everyone else it's going to get in the way when the app you're loading suddenly asks for 500MB or 1GB of RAM. Not to mention that there is a distinct benefit to keeping some of that RAM unused, even if it is powered - power usage and hardware life expectancy. It's an idea that makes sense, and yet, it seems to be lacking something..
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. - Albert Einstein
Here's my superfetch adventure. I used Daemon tools to mount the MSDN ISO image for Visual Studio, which was about 3.5 GB, in order to install it. After unmounting the image and a reboot, the system was fairly unresponsive for several minutes from constant disk access. Apparently it was fetching the image file into memory; resource monitor confirmed this.
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You're right - caching is important. Windows would run like a dog without it. It's easy to demonstrate just how important it is, like so: 1. Restart your computer. 2. WAIT, until the hard disk light stops flashing. 3. Start up IE and time how long it takes. 4. Shut down IE, then start it up again, again timing how long it takes. The difference is startling. That's caching for you. Utilising all your RAM on the offchance that it might avoid a disk access is a no-brainer. The clever part is deciding what to hang on to and what to throw away. Is Vista driving down the cost of RAM, like XP once did? Methinks it is.
Paul Sanders http://www.alpinesoft.co.uk
My problem is with step 2. I don't like waiting after every reboot. Does caching multiple gigabytes of stuff, instead of the most frequently accessed hundreds of megabytes, make it that much faster? I've disabled superfetch, and I've yet to feel that IE, Visual Studio, or Photoshop could load faster. They still get cached the standard way, so opening them a second time is faster than first-start.
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John C wrote:
Sound familiar?
Nope :-D I would have been just starting primary school lol Im still only 19
"There are three sides to every story. Yours, mine and the truth" ~ unknown
I was an HS freshman when 95 came out, it took about ~2y for it to become accepted in the gaming world, mainly because it gave enough extra stuff over dos/3.1 that eventually the game devs all started writing for it. I don't recall a big snowball over 98, nor do I recall anyone good mouthing ME. OTOH everyone who didn't like 9x was jumping onto 2k instead. Unless you want to count win32/64 there isn't a parallel codebase to be called better this time around. 2k to XP had major numbers of holdouts for several years. eventually as hardware got to the point that it wasn't 2s vs 1s but .2s vs .1s the overhead became unnoticeable small, undercutting everything except the 'it looks ugly' argument. Eventually the same thing will happen with vista; probably combined with a gradual shift in the gaming world from writing DX9 and adding a few DX10 extras but keeping everyhing else DX9 regardless to writing DX10 primarily and only implementing basic features in DX9 which'll pressure gamers into switching hard. ALternately the need for 64bit ram addressing might do the same. Like XP, vista has a looks like 2k and prior option, although oddly enough not a looks like XP one. that's something of a pity since my preferred start menu would be XP with search. Vistas search box only works if you have an idea what the app is called. At times though actually eyeballing is needed to jog the memory and my home XP machine has a ~2600 pixel tall start menu (3 1200px columns). Vistas short scrolling list doesn't work well there.
Otherwise [Microsoft is] toast in the long term no matter how much money they've got. They would be already if the Linux community didn't have it's head so firmly up it's own command line buffer that it looks like taking 15 years to find the desktop. -- Matthew Faithfull
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My problem is with step 2. I don't like waiting after every reboot. Does caching multiple gigabytes of stuff, instead of the most frequently accessed hundreds of megabytes, make it that much faster? I've disabled superfetch, and I've yet to feel that IE, Visual Studio, or Photoshop could load faster. They still get cached the standard way, so opening them a second time is faster than first-start.
Checkout XP's hibernate function. Resuming from hibernation is much faster that booting from scratch (ask any hedgehog).
Paul Sanders http://www.alpinesoft.co.uk
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Checkout XP's hibernate function. Resuming from hibernation is much faster that booting from scratch (ask any hedgehog).
Paul Sanders http://www.alpinesoft.co.uk
I meant from things like WindowsUpdate. :) Without SuperFetch trying to load gigs of data at boot time, my system usually starts in 30 secs or so, which is fast enough for me.