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Some crazy Ram Usage on my system....Need some help

K

KeyserSoze

Diamond Member
Hello all. My system sometimes runs SUPER slow. I look at the Task Manager, and shows the system using well over 350-400 mb of RAM, with almost nothing open. Usually just a few songs in Windows Media Player, and tiny apps that are in my system tray. (Kerio PF, AVG, and DC++.)

System specs:
2.8 P4 (W/HT)
512 mb RAM (DDR)
40 gig
160 gig

Do you know of any programs that will help me optimize system settings, or better show memory usage on my system? The weird thing is when I look at Task Manager, the total memory being used by processes DOES NOT equal the total amount of ram my system shows in use. So, there's something somewhere being a hog, and not being reported.

Thanks for any advice you can send my way. I am using Process Explorer to try to track some of this down.




KeyserSoze
 
Hey guys, thanks for the responses.

CTho9305, I'm not sure exactly what the system cache and kernel memory are exactly, so I guess I need to read up a little more on that.

Silo, my system stays pretty clean. I use Firefox, and run Spybot every so often, I'll do that again, and will get the program you reccomended. I was under the impression that programs like this really couldn't do much to free up system memory.

Thanks again, as I'm still researching this problem. Quite frustrating to have a *decent* powered system, and have it lag on performing simple things.





KeyserSoze
 
Originally posted by: Silo
I am assuming you use Windows XP, FreeRAM XP will show you how much RAM you are using as well as free up RAM that is capable of being freed.
Click to expand...
Do not use FreeRAM. All FreeRAM and programs like it manage to do is force all of the pages in your system cache to disk. They nearly always cause more paging activity as a result.
 
Originally posted by: KeyserSoze
CTho9305, I'm not sure exactly what the system cache and kernel memory are exactly, so I guess I need to read up a little more on that.
KeyserSoze
Click to expand...

What, exactly, in Task Manager is telling you that you are using 400 MB of RAM? What statistic are you looking at?

 
Originally posted by: kylef
Originally posted by: Silo
I am assuming you use Windows XP, FreeRAM XP will show you how much RAM you are using as well as free up RAM that is capable of being freed.
Click to expand...
Do not use FreeRAM. All FreeRAM and programs like it manage to do is force all of the pages in your system cache to disk. They nearly always cause more paging activity as a result.
Click to expand...

^ what he said. 🙂 Those "free-more-RAM" programs are nearly 100% snake-oil, and do nothing for system performance. If you don't have enough RAM, buy more.

As for the strangeness of the memory-allocation problem, I'm not sure. I've witnessed W2K thrashing madly (and slowing down), with no user-mode processes taking any noticable amount of CPU time or VM. What it turned out to be, was that using QuickPAR to create some PAR2 archives for a very large data-set, it was trying to allocate something like 10GB of VM space, and W2K was pre-creating the PTEs to map that VM size like mad, and paging those PTEs to disk, and it was causing "phantom thrashing" as a result, because those allocations weren't accounted to any user-mode process that was visible through Task Manager.

Fun stuff! 🙂
 
Turn on the "Virtual Memory Size" column in the Task Manager. That's a more accurate description of the total that you see in the graph.
 
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