Quote:Original post by Sc4Freak

Quote:Original post by DrGUI
@SC4Freak: Thanks for your response. I don't think I need more RAM, but would like more to be kept in RAM to reduce swapfile usage when half the RAM is empty!

That's the point - it's not empty. If you check Task Manager, you will have almost no "Free" memory. The "Physical Memory Usage History" graph tells you how much memory is being used up by applications and the kernel, but not how much is being used by Vista's caching.

On the contrary, there appears to be 800-900MB 'available physical memory' shown in process explorer, out of 2GB RAM. Although I do notice that not all RAM is accounted for (total - system cache - available) ~ 300MB, perhaps this is the cache?

But still there is some swapping (page faults are around 30,000 just now), so it seems that keeping that 800-900MB 'available' RAM filled would be beneficial. Unless you're saying it's already filled, invisibly, apart from the 'system cache' and the unaccounted-for 300MB?

Cheers

p.s. I'd agree that Vista got a lot of stick, probably from people just picking up on what the enthusiasts were saying about it. Granted, I joined after SP1, once all the gfx card drivers were sorted, but I've been really happy with it :)

On my crappy 2GB Vista laptop I get these results:

Task manager
Total: 2037
Cached: 1197
Free: 41

Proc Explorer
Total: 2037
Available: 1043
System Cache: 1120

That tells me that Process Explorer has no idea about SuperFetch and just assumes that the cached memory is free.

I also noticed the GetMemoryStatusEx function doing the same thing last night, it told me I had 5 GB free (physical memory) on my desktop machine even though there was like 7 MB reported by Task Manager.

Hey thanks for that info.

I just checked:

Process Explorer:
Total: 2GB
Available: 800MB
Sys cache: 730MB

Task Manager:
Total: 2GB
Cached: 900MB
Free: 4MB

Cheers, Vista _is_ probably using memory optimally in fact. It's just keepin it on the low...

Quote:Original post by DrGUI
Cheers, Vista _is_ probably using memory optimally in fact. It's just keepin it on the low...

If you click the "Resource Monitor" button on the "Performance" tab of task manager, it'll show you, next to "Memory", the number of hard page faults per second that is occuring. If that number remains low (mine stays on 0 for pretty much of the time) then it's using memory pretty optimally.

If it's > 0, then that's a sign that you probably need to install more memory.

In fact, it's probably good that not all committed memory is actually resident in physical memory. Most applications will allocate memory that they only use occasionally. For example, they might have a dialog box loaded in memory that is only used if you use a certain feature. If you don't happen to be using that feature right now, then it's better to write that page to the pagefile and free up that page of physical memory for something else. If it takes 20ms to load that page back into physical memory when you actually do click the menu item to activate the feature, then you're hardly going to notice.

Also, just an FYI, a hard page fault does not not always mean "loading a page from the pagefile", but it's a good general metric.