4GB DDR3 not enough

[sub.mesa]

Memory 'used' means used by applications. This should be about 5-25% of your total RAM. The vast majority of your RAM should be available as filecache. This will allow applications you used since the last reboot to be cached in RAM memory. Therefore, you have three kinds of memory usage: used for system/application, available but used as filecache or free and unused memory.

If you use SSDs, the extra reads caused by having very little filecache should not interfere with your desktop experience too much since the SSD is not that much slower than your RAM. But even so, more memory might smooth out things. Especially since 32GiB today is only about $150 for a cheap kit. I see you are an overclocking fan, but as a general rule RAM quantity is superior to RAM performance, especially in relation to disk performance.

When building a newer system (Haswell?) you could opt for the 16GiB DIMMs coming available just now. By having 2x16GiB, you can upgrade to 4x 16GiB in the future. That much RAM is simply great and future operating systems would make good use of it. Such as Linux and BSD with tmpfs, Microsoft should wake up at some point as well.

 

[VirtualLarry]

For those that claimed my software was the problem. Well, here it is a few weeks later after the upgrade. I opened Task Manager. Using up 6.25GB physical RAM. Only 522MB cached.

Plugin-container.exe (Waterfox plugin wrapper for Flash Player) is taking up 2.6GB by itself.

 

[mikeymikec]

For those that claimed my software was the problem. Well, here it is a few weeks later after the upgrade. I opened Task Manager. Using up 6.25GB physical RAM. Only 522MB cached.

Plugin-container.exe (Waterfox plugin wrapper for Flash Player) is taking up 2.6GB by itself.

I've never seen Firefox's plugin-container.exe use up that much RAM. What have you been doing with it? Even my wife's Firefox abuse (multitude of tabs and windows left open for weeks on end) doesn't cause plugin-container.exe to do that (for her the firefox.exe process uses loads of RAM). What other plug-ins do you have installed?

Tools/Firefox > Add-ons > Plug-ins

I only have Flash installed, nothing else listed.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just "Shockwave Flash", and some "Java deployment"-something that is listed as Disabled. (Old plugin that had something to do with Java.)

 

[mikeymikec]

I might try uninstalling and reinstalling Flash to see if that helps. Before that I would try Control Panel > Flash Player and deleting all local content.

Otherwise I'd check aboutlugins in Firefox and see whether that jibes with Add-ons > Plugins.

Maybe clearing out Firefox's cache.

Something odd is going on to cause plugin-container to use that much RAM.

It may be worth asking on the Mozilla support forums for further pointers because my other ideas are destructive ones (such as nuking your Firefox profile, or try creating another for now and see whether the problem occurs there as well).

The other thing I'd be curious about is whether plugin-container's RAM usage goes nuts soon after starting or whether it requires a longer browsing session before memory usage starts getting weird. According to Process Explorer the memory usage of plugin-container.exe here is 15MB and I have four YouTube clips open, some of which have been open for about an hour or two.

 

[VirtualLarry]

plugin-container.exe is now using 3.3GB of RAM all by itself.

7.74GB physical RAM usage. 196MB cached.

 

[sub.mesa]

That is alot of RAM. And it doesn't fit in 32-bit range. Can you open task manager and see if there is *32 behind the plugin container process? If not, you have a 'weird' 64-bit version of Firefox and plugin. Try running the 32-bit version as it is limited to 2GiB RAM memory. Filecache will do the rest.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yes, I'm using Waterfox 18.0.1 (.2?), it's a 64-bit browser, along with Flash Player, which I believe is also 64-bit.

I leave my internet radio open for long periods of time, I'm guess that that app is leaking memory.

 

[sub.mesa]

Well, using a 32-bit browser may be beneficial to you, especially since you have very little RAM memory compared to todays' standards.

 

[ShawnD1]

Well, using a 32-bit browser may be beneficial to you, especially since you have very little RAM memory compared to todays' standards.

wut? 8gb is pretty standard today. I might even consider it overkill if you're not doing anything stressful on the computer. Like I said earlier, I paid something like $600 (absolute bottom of the barrel price in Canada) for this laptop back around late 2006 or early 2007, 2gb maximum memory, and it works fine as long as it has a solid state drive for the swap file. This POS laptop runs out of CPU power all the time, but memory is rarely a problem. Now that we have SSD, needing ass loads of memory just to play freecell or troll the forum is a thing of the past :biggrin:
Things like 7zip for huge files, AutoCAD, games, and Photoshop still require real memory. Hopefully that will change in the future.

 

[sub.mesa]

Open Task Manager, click the Performance tab. Now watch the memory:

Total 32716
Cached 22018
Available 27002
Free 5017

This is a casual example. This system has 32GiB of memory, about 5GB is used by applications, 22GB is used as filecache, 5GB is unused and wasted memory.

The trick here is the filecache. A properly configured system should only have 5-25% of RAM memory in use for applications, the rest used as filecache. If your applications consume more than 50% of RAM memory, you are not running an optimally configured computer system. Filecache is very important to performance experience.

With todays RAM prices, a new system should have nothing less than 32GiB. This allows for a healthy amount of filecache while your applications have plenty as it should be. If you have to fallback heavily to swapusage because of too little RAM, I would not consider that system as being optimal, even though performance can still be decent with a fast SSD. But following the same philosophy, you could have only one megabyte of RAM and use your SSD as RAM instead. Needless to say, that will lower the performance even more. A proper configuration will involve SSD but only used as storage device not as emergency RAM memory.

 

[VirtualLarry]

With todays RAM prices, a new system should have nothing less than 32GiB.

The rest of that is basically true, but there is a problem expanding many computers to 32GB of RAM. First of all, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit is limit to 16GB, necessitating an upgrade to Win7 Pro 64-bit. Second, many (most?) motherboards only have two slots.

 

[SPBHM]

I'm doing fine with 4GB for most of the time, I can even leave my web browser with multiple tabs open while running something else in many occasions (but I don't really need to, Opera will keep my tabs if I restart the browser, and I can save sessions, also it loads so quickly...) but not always, only some rare games that I play really go on the limit, like SWTOR after a long time playing starts having issues with memory, but for many new games I can still see memory usage well under 2GB.

I really doubt that 90% of the users really need (I mean, will notice a significant difference) more than 6-8GB...