Windows Memory - All Lies :D

S

snugam

Well-Known Member
Joined
Sep 18, 2006
Messages
465
Reaction score
1
Location
Pretoria
Hi Friends

Thanks for a great forum;

This morning I started up my PC and the |Performance| tab shows that I am using somewhere in the vicinity of about 550mb's of Ram (which is already over what I've got on this box).

I then opened the |Processes| tab, and did a print screen of the whole window showing all the processes and the amount of memory they each use.

I ran an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on that window; because its much faster than trying to retype those numbers and I calculated them; and those numbers no where even closely matched the amount of memory being used according to the |Performance| tab.

Here are the figures -
52,584k, 42,836 K , 18,768 K , 12,876 K , 12,868 K , 5,164 K , 2,844 K , 2,288 K , 2,196 K , 1,996 K , 1,868 K , 1,672 K , 1,668 K , 1,600 K , 1,512 K , 1, 188 K , 828K , 768K , 736K , 648K , 632K , 592K , 536K , 400K , 356K , 352K , 256K , 252K , 236K , 232K , 220K , 216K , 216K , 212K , 200K , 200K , 100K , 68K , 45K , 40K , 16K , 171,186,
totalling 171,286 KiloBytes which I assume is 167megabyte (1024Kb per mb)

Is there someone out there who could explain how this works?

This means that Windows has an overhead of 512 - 164 = 345mb of memory being used that it doesn't want to give an account for.

Short and Simply, what the |Processes| tab shows and the |performance| tab shows are two different things.
 
Last edited:
Needless to say, the top two memory users there 52584 and 42836 are both M|cr0s0ft applications
 
What version of Windows are you running?

Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP or Vista?
 
Funny that someone else is also moaning about this... 2 pc's, same software on both, same everything besides maybe SATA drives and a videocard that differs... and ofcourse 1 pc has 256meg ram, the other 1gig ram. The pc with 256meg ram stands idle with only 36meg ram used. The other idles and stands with 560meg ram used. ... is a bit strange!.
 
It might be that some applications use the RAM to cache data. Only when the application is closed, will the cache be cleared, and the RAM released. Firefox does this for pages you visit, and will give up this cache if other programs ask for more memory.

Personally, I wouldn't trust the processes that you see in the Task Manager, as the only processes that are running. It for instance does not show the threads of multi threaded processes (e.g. oracle). It will only show the parent process, whether the size of that process includes the child processes, is anyones guess.
 
An OS does not only use memory for running programs ... the NT cache manager grabs as much memory it can get away with based on your physical RAM to cache the file system.
 
Well, he wouldn't tell us which OS he's running, so I assume it's WindowsNT. :p
 
Yup .. wondoze grabs memory that it thinks would otherwise be doing nothing and uses it for chacheing.

It's a good strategy, catch is when you need that memory that is now used for caching - now windoze uses wierd algorythms and logic to re-allocate the memory used for cache to the program requesting more memory, and sometimes these algorythms don't free up enough cache memory, and the program that would have run fast on a computer with less memory suddenly behaves like a snail in water.
 
He's Prob. Running XP, Doubt NT!.

I'm Running Vista, and it acts more or less the same as XP's memory usage. The only real difference i've noticed, is it releases memory better after a program is shut down than XP does.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X