Too much ram.

[thespyder]

"BUT IT'S ON SALE, I SAVED US MONEY. See? I'm a good shopper."

But but but.....

There's not an easy way to win this argument I've tried and failed multiple times.

the best way to "win" that argument is "Yes dear." Works every time.

 

[XLNC]

the best way to "win" that argument is "Yes dear." Works every time.

Loosest definition of "win" I've ever heard.

@OP, I should have my rig running in a couple of weeks. Going to try out that RAMdisk software. Will try to give an honest assessment to see if it makes a difference.

 

[dorion]

Informative bump.

I reinstalled Windows the other night and guess what? I now have 14GB cached according to my task manager. I wonder if Windows doesn't know how to reset its Superfetch limit if ram is installed without a reinstall or some other cue?

 

[SickBeast]

With all that ram, you should see a very nice performance boost if you just leave your computer on all the time or else in sleep mode. All of your frequently used programs and games will remain in the ram and should load up instantly. That's what I find with 12gb.

 

[taltamir]

Informative bump.

I reinstalled Windows the other night and guess what? I now have 14GB cached according to my task manager. I wonder if Windows doesn't know how to reset its Superfetch limit if ram is installed without a reinstall or some other queue?

now that is an interesting possibility... We need to do some testing on that and see if that is the case.

 

[Emulex]

check the size of your hiberfil.sys - if its 12gb you have a problem

 

[dorion]

check the size of your hiberfil.sys - if its 12gb you have a problem

You bastard! Its 12.5GB, whats it mean? Its the file the ram is saved to when I hibernate/sleep?

 

[taltamir]

You bastard! Its 12.5GB, whats it mean? Its the file the ram is saved to when I hibernate/sleep?

yes, it is the file into which ram is saved when you sleep

 

[blckgrffn]

check the size of your hiberfil.sys - if its 12gb you have a problem

Please explain

 

[Voo]

Please explain

Well if the PC hibernates it has to write the contents of the RAM onto the disk obviously. So a 12gb file will have some problems saving 16gb of data since the contents are afaik not compressed..

 

[blckgrffn]

Well if the PC hibernates it has to write the contents of the RAM onto the disk obviously. So a 12gb file will have some problems saving 16gb of data since the contents are afaik not compressed..

I see - can the size be changed or does Windows discover this or what? Is this a common issue - what tripped the earlier comments seemingly from the blue?

 

[jimhsu]

Learn how to use After Effects and you'll see that much RAM go away in a hurry. Seriously, with 2GB/process (not unusual for a medium-sized project w/ dozens of layers .. and that's just 720p) and 8 cores (4 hyperthreaded), you could actually RUN OUT of memory on a core i7 with 16GB doing rendering with After Effects. I think RED ONE (4K) quality video uses something absurd like 1GB/second. It just uses that much RAM.

Oh, and most scientific/engineering software too. Solving 10 million simultaneous systems of equations, for example.

 

[Nothinman]

My hiberfil.sys is only ~6G and I've got 8G of memory in this notebook so there has to be some compression or discarding of the filesystem cache in order to make it fit.

 

[aigomorla]

It was just so cheap.

Maybe I should start folding or something.

well once people get up that high, the system is usually a 24/7 system.

What they do is partition some of that ram as a virtual ram drive, and use that as a junk / temp / cache drive for your programs.

However ram drives will reset once u restart the system, which is why people use them for junk / cache / temp.

Personally i run with 12.
At most i think i use about 6-8gigs... the rest is excess from my experience.

But its a Tri channel system, so i need 3 sticks.. at the least, which means 6 or 12... so i stay with 12.

 

[Voo]

My hiberfil.sys is only ~6G and I've got 8G of memory in this notebook so there has to be some compression or discarding of the filesystem cache in order to make it fit.

Ah yeah the default size for the hibernate.sys seems to be 75% of the RAM for Win7 and you can change that with some cmdline options.
Seems like MS implemented compression for the hiberfil file with 7 - makes sense considering that the bottleneck should be the disk speed.

So the 12gb figure for 16gb RAM is actually just fine - sorry, didn't know MS added compression~

 

[Nothinman]

Ah yeah the default size for the hibernate.sys seems to be 75% of the RAM for Win7 and you can change that with some cmdline options.
Seems like MS implemented compression for the hiberfil file with 7 - makes sense considering that the bottleneck should be the disk speed.

So the 12gb figure for 16gb RAM is actually just fine - sorry, didn't know MS added compression~

I'm surprised it took them this long, TuxOnIce (suspend2) has had compression for years now. It was one of the best things about hibernation on Linux because you could maintain your whole filesystem cache in the image so when you resumed it would be 100% as responsive as before because it wouldn't have to repage anything else back in.

 

[Voo]

I'm surprised it took them this long, TuxOnIce (suspend2) has had compression for years now. It was one of the best things about hibernation on Linux because you could maintain your whole filesystem cache in the image so when you resumed it would be 100% as responsive as before because it wouldn't have to repage anything else back in.

Not my expertise, but iirc suspend2 is also not merged with the vanilla kernel, so I would think it's not that easy.

Also it's only about compressing the files, not what is saved - so the only advantage you get from it is a bit faster wake up and a smaller file on disk, while you've got to solve the problem of what to do when you can't compress the data good enough. Could already been part of Vista, but I doubt it had an especially high priority in the development process.

 

[Nothinman]

Not my expertise, but iirc suspend2 is also not merged with the vanilla kernel, so I would think it's not that easy.

Also it's only about compressing the files, not what is saved - so the only advantage you get from it is a bit faster wake up and a smaller file on disk, while you've got to solve the problem of what to do when you can't compress the data good enough. Could already been part of Vista, but I doubt it had an especially high priority in the development process.

Yea, some core people complained about the modularity and amount of changes involved in suspend2 and instead wanted a purely userspace implementation which was called uswsusp and I believe that's what's currently used. Suspend2 was what the original hibernation should've been. Obviously if you have the hibernation file smaller than the available memory you risk not being able to store it all even with compression, but luckily you can just drop pages from the file cache and not save them. That isn't 100% guaranteed either, but I'm sure that's why MS picked the percentage that they did.