8GB no longer enough

[abmv]

windows has a lot of service u can disable. and if you are running w10 if you lockdown the privacy settings and background apps...

Caveat Emptor. "Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long

[Rage]

This is representative of society today : waste resources because there are "plenty" of them instead of trying to optimize.

Do not escape reality : improve reality !

[Member 9167057]

Don't fold hands. Instead, do something. You have tons of service host processes? Find out which services run in which process. That will get you started with possible fixes.

[phil o]

This seems like an indecent number of svchost.exe processes. I would investigate loaded dlls with ProcessExplorer to try and find what is really going on.

enum HumanBool { Yes, No, Maybe, Perhaps, Probably, ProbablyNot, MostLikely, MostUnlikely, HellYes, HellNo, Wtf }

[kalberts]

In the old days of virtual memory, when we had to pay for RAM chips (that is, more than small change) ... There was the concept of "working set": The resources actually in use. If they are not in use, why should they occupy space in RAM? Fortunately, both Windows and the x32/x64 architecture have roots back to those days. They can shuffle virtual memory pages in and out as they are needed. You can pretend to have a 16 GB RAM machine, because you only make actual use of half of the data/code. All the memory segments have been assigned addresses in memory space, but they are not actually brought into RAM until you actually reference them. As long as your working set fits into RAM, the performance of your system is very little affected. I can assure you: You are not referencing more than two million different memory pages (each 4 kibyte) all the time! Lots of the code perform functions you are not using (and if you start using them, it takes a handful milliseconds to brin them in), or initialization code that can be thrown out once run, or tables that you are not referencing (say, user messages in some strange language you do not master anyway), and so on. For a number of years, quite a few people have believed that virtual memory slows down execution even when you have so much RAM that you can load all the segments, not just your working set. They believe that they speed up the machine by turning off paging. Placebo works. They know that it gives better performance. If it can at all be measured, I guess it would be by fractions of a percent - not the least because most of it is handled in hardware that is active even if you turn off the software to handle a possible page fault. Disabling a page fault handler that is never called anyway gives no speed-up. The main effect of turning off paging is that your physical RAM size sets an absolute limit to the total size of programs you can have in memory. When you hit the ceiling, it is hard. If you really are banging your head into the ceiling at 8 GByte, it sounds as if paging is turned off on your machine. Turn it on, and you can go up to 16 GByte virtual memory space. You can go even higher, but the default setting in Windows is to set virtual memory to twice the physical one. It will cost you 8 Gbyte of disk space on your primary disk, but that you can afford! (If it is a flash disk, the impact of a page fault will also be far less than with a magnetic disk.) In the old days, when RAM was super-expensive, you could

[realJSOP]

I just upgraded my new-ish laptop to 32gb. Mostly so I can give my win7 vm up to 24gb RAM.

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

[raddevus]

abmv wrote:

windows has a lot of service u can disable.

Interesting. I will have to look into that. Thanks.

[raddevus]

Great post and very interesting to me. I also run the same setup (Android Studio, FireFox, Android Emulator) on a Virtual Machine that only has 2.5GB RAM given to it. Just this morning I was thinking, "how is that even possible?" It is quite slow but none of the processes ever crash like they do on my real machine that has 8GB. I think what you've explained here (virtual memory) is in effect what the VM is doing. It is quite a bit slower because this VM only has 2.5GB of RAM, but on my main machine (8GB and an SSD) I probably won't see near the slowness and I won't see the crashes. I will try this out later today. Thanks for the great insight!:thumbsup::thumbsup:

[raddevus]

#realJSOP wrote:

I just upgraded my new-ish laptop to 32gb.

I'm very jealous! :) My stupid cheap laptop only goes to 8GB. :((

[abmv]

privacy settings (disable) , cortana (disable + rename searchui.exe) , disable telemetry .. saves a lot of your CPU and data that leaks to msft .... [Windows 10 Telemetry explained - Privacy AMP](https://privacyamp.com/knowledge-base/windows-10-telemetry-explained/)... task sheduler and disabled Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser. [Windows 10, version 1709 and newer diagnostic data for the Full level (Windows 10) | Microsoft Docs](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-diagnostic-data)

Caveat Emptor. "Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long

[raddevus]

Thanks for the hints. I have seen numerous problems with the telemetry proc in the past. It was the reason I went from an HDD to an SSD.

[realJSOP]

I have two 8-year old laptops than can only go to 8gb (and they're both maxed out).

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

[Dan Neely]

The number of service host processes has been steadily going up since IIRC w7. MS used to cram dozens of services into a single process to save a bit of ram. Newer versions have gone the other direction for troubleshooting and security reasons. It's much easier to figure out what service is going bonkers causing its host to eat a CPU core and needs a cluebat applied if you don't have 20 services in a single process. On the security front running services in their own processes makes it harder for a malicious or buggy and hackable one to attack other services by increasing the level of isolation between them.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[Dan Neely]

My newish work laptop came with 32gb of ram, it's one of the few things I like about it; as with a crapton of browser tabs and multiple copies of visual studio on my old 16gb machine I could find myself swapping enough that even with an SSD to read/write to my system started lagging noticeably.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[Dan Neely]

If a system's slowing to a crawl it's probably that it's swapping faster than the drive can keep up with not that the page file is turned off. At my last job I briefly was trying to work on a machine misconfigured by someone who'd drank the no page file good koolaid. When the ram was maxed out - which was easy to do with my workload - applications would randomly crash when they page-faulted, rendering the system not obnoxiously slow but a chaotic crashfest that initially had me thinking hardware failure/corrupted OS install.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[AnotherKen]

8gb is fine for Win10. You must have some piece of software that is running in an infinite loop allocating memory for variables until you run out of space.

[kalberts]

It is highly unlikely that paging is "slowing a system to a crawl". Certainly not on a desktop system used for varied tasks, like sw development. You have a real page fault, one that leads to a real, physical disk access, "every now and then". When your system comes to a crawl, have the Resource Monitor running on your system, and take a look at the Disk load. The total data volumen handled by the disk system is shown in the top running display; blow that , the queue length for each disk is shown. If you opwn Storage section in the main display, you can see for each disk the "Active Time (%)". If the disk can't keep up with the paging requirements, the data volume would approach the transfer rate of your primary disk. A SATA-600 disk could in principle go up to 75 Mbyte/sec; you'll never see a magnetic disk that can do 75 Mbyte/sec, especially not on random accesses. Seing flash disks doing 25 Mbyte/sec is nothing special. The data volume is for all disk combined, and if you have more than one disk controller, the sum could actually go even higher than 75 Mbytes/sec. Then take a look at the "Active Time" of your paging disk (usually the C-disk). Is it getting close to busy 100% of the time? 50%? Even 10%, over an extended period of time? I doubt it very much! Peaks: yes, of course! When you start up a huge application, thousands of pages must be brought in; that is unavoidable. Those "startup" disk accesses would have to be done no matter how much RAM you've got. Also, when the disk driver initites a physical disk operation, it will not block the entire system while the transfer is done: The CPU is released for other tasks, and the electronics of the physical disk interface transfers data directly between the disk and RAM. For paging, the thread causing the page fault will be blocked, but no other threads. No matter how slowly the system is crawling, I have never during this millennium (and we could add another ten years) traced it down to the paging disk being the bottleneck. Practically always, it comes down to resources (in RAM) being locked by one thread (/process), and the queue of other threads for this resource builds up. Lots of developers never analyze their locing of resources, but rather, "to be on the safe side" holds locks throughout lengthy operations, across disk accesses or network interactions, thereby blocking others out. This is the main cause of systems going into a crawl. Besides, you still see lots of programmers running in busyloops waitin

[Reelix]

Fun fact of the day! Each process on your PC has something called "Modified Page List Bytes" which is additional RAM that a process is using that is hidden from Task Manager. This amount happily sits at around 8GB on my 32GB Desktop Machine. This amount cannot be picked up by Task Manager, and requires specialized RAM-based process monitors to detect (RAMMap, in-depth investigation into Windows Performance Counters, etc). Whilst using such methods can tell you the total amount of invisible RAM being used, there is no way to tell what is using it, if something is leaking it, or even how to easily free it up (Although closing a process will free up its associated modified bytes) Task Manager can show you at 30% total Memory usage when in reality you could be sitting at 90%+ and start tossing "Out Of Memory" exceptions any moment now. Disable your Pagefile to drastically speed up this process to experience this first hand :) Have fun :p

-= Reelix =-

[raddevus]

That's really great information and explains some additional things I've seen in recent past where things have crashed even though I have 0.5-1GB free (according to TaskManager). Thanks for posting.:thumbsup:

[User 2893688]

[Computer Memory: 640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone – Quote Investigator](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/)