What is the most accurate way to tell how much ram an application is using?

[Schadenfroh]

I have heard that Windows Task Manager is somewhat innacurate. Wanted to know of any other applications that are able to measure ram usage.

 

[imported_BikeDude]

It isn't inaccurate, but it is perhaps not showing the counters you're most interested in?

Have you checked the memory counters available in Performance Monitor? (and read their descriptions?)

In addition, be aware that minimizing an application causes the window manager to flush not-recently-touched pages to the pagefile. I.e. this will reduce the amount of physical memory used by the app (currently), but gives you a false indication if you're more interested in peak usage. By nature it will be hard to pinpoint at a given time just how much physical memory an application uses (if the process allocates a 10MB memory block at initialization and doesn't touch it for quite a while, are you really going to worry about that block being paged out?).

IMO the way to go is to look at how many pages are being read from the pagefile per second. If that counter reaches a certain threshold then you need more memory.

(I'm sorry about that -- the only useful thing in my post is that bit about reading the counter descriptions found in Performance Monitor -- Perfmon has been part of Windows NT since the very beginning, so it is THE tool to use -- incidentally NT 3.1's perfmon didn't look all that different...)

 

[Gannon]

Performance monitors graph data is not the most elegantly displayed, sometimes its pretty arcane to get the graphs right so you know wtf it is you're looking at heh.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
I have heard that Windows Task Manager is somewhat innacurate. Wanted to know of any other applications that are able to measure ram usage.

i could code one if you wanted and release it as open source. but what do you want to accomplish with this? just curious? i don't think task manager is inaccurate.

 

[luigi1]

Just another vote. What I want is a judgement of how effenciently my puter is operating vs how it could if resources were as good as can be. A few of us added ram without being sure of what we were doing. I would like some metric that says if you had more ram your experience would improve or if you had a faster processor your experience would improve or if you had leeter hard drives your experience would improve. See what I'm saying? Task manager dosnt seem to be telling us what we want to hear. Does there exist or can one be developed that says hey boy your vid card is the bottleneck, or ram, or processor. A lot of us struggled with BF2 knowing that it could run smother and couldnt be sure where to throw the dollars. Ill use me as an example, I'm not top of the line but I try to keep my rig where I can experience what the latest and greatest have to offer. I'm running a NV3 Mobo AMD 3400+ processor. audugy soundblaster, Nv 6800GT (egva) I dont overclock anything because I've never needed to, I had 1 gig of value ram (2X512), I bought (2X1024) and swapped out, I'm still in dual channel and still running 1T timings (and it solved a lot of my problems with BF2). But I think the OP and my question is we were shooting in the dark without knowing where we were going.

 

[imported_BikeDude]

Originally posted by: luigi1
being sure of what we were doing. I would like some metric that says if you had more ram your experience would improve

I've already answered this...

"IMO the way to go is to look at how many pages are being read from the pagefile per second. If that counter reaches a certain threshold then you need more memory. "

As a user, you don't really care if an app eats up 2GB virtual memory. You do however care if it hits a certain number of hard page faults per second. It is at this point that you will notice a degradation of performance. Huge memory consumption increases the likelyhood of this happening, but it's not foolproof. (whereas the page fault counter directly measures your pain)

http://www.tweakguides.com/BF2_1.html is a good read. The guy mentions that you ought to look at the commit charge (peak). That is a good indicator as well (assuming you haven't just been running a memory gobbling app that you'll never run again). It'll get you in the right ballpark.

CPU is harder to gauge. I don't think I've ever encountered a game that isn't happily using 100% CPU no matter what. Displaying a menu? Sure, eat all my CPU... (oh, but by all means, never touch my second CPU)