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why does Windows suck up so much ram and not give it back when I need it?

toyota

toyota

Lifer
this always bothered me on Vista and the same thing happens on 7 too. with nothing more than Steam and FF with 20 tabs running all 4 gb of ram eventually gets eaten up. at this point just clicking on tabs or opening up a file becomes a little sluggish. if I try to run a FRAPS video it will literally just pause for a few seconds as the hard drive has to do everything. these are not problems for the first couple of hours after a reboot but will eventually happen every time. and again it has happened on every Vista and 7 install I have ever used even on completely different comps.
 
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I asked the same thing about windows 95 back around 1997 or 1998.

When I upgraded my system memory to 128 megs, it was funny how an operating system that only used like 20 - 30 megs of hard drive space took up almost 40 or 50 megs of memory.

Regardless of how much technology progresses, sometimes things stay the same.
 
toyota said:
this always bothered me on Vista and the same thing happens on 7 too. with nothing more than Steam and FF with 20 tabs running all 4 gb of ram eventually gets eaten up. at this point just clicking on tabs or opening up a file becomes a little sluggish. if I try to run a FRAPS video it will literally just pause for a few seconds as the hard drive has to do everything. these are not problems for the first couple of hours after a reboot but will eventually happen every time. and again it has happened on every Vista and 7 install I have ever used even on completely different comps.
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That's really odd. As much memory as Windows uses for caching, it shouldn't have a negative affect on performance. I'd say something besides Windows itself is causing your issues.
 
Nothinman said:
That's really odd. As much memory as Windows uses for caching, it shouldn't have a negative affect on performance. I'd say something besides Windows itself is causing your issues.
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again it did it with Vista and 7 installs on various computers so its nothing specific to my pc. I originally blamed Vista and then I thought just 2gb was the problem. the same issues still occur with 7 and 4gb.
 
toyota said:
again it did it with Vista and 7 installs on various computers so its nothing specific to my pc. I originally blamed Vista and then I thought just 2gb was the problem. the same issues still occur with 7 and 4gb.
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I had no such issues on both of my Win7 laptops, one with 2G and a new one with 8G.
 
Nothinman said:
I had no such issues on both of my Win7 laptops, one with 2G and a new one with 8G.
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thats what people say until I show them that theirs does the same thing. once all the memory is cached and you open a program thats not in cache it is noticeably slower. clicking on a tab or opening a program will be a little bit sluggish. I think FRAPs is the main culprit here for me though. it seems to need a lot of memory fast so when its all cached it slows down the whole pc while its accessing the hard drive.
 
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toyota said:
thats what people say until I show them that theirs does the same thing. once all the memory is cached and you open a program thats not in cache it is noticeably slower. clicking on a tab or opening a program will be a little bit sluggish. I think FRAPs is the main culprit here for me though. it seems to need a lot of memory fast so when its all cached it slows down the whole pc while its accessing the hard drive.
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Doubtful. I've got ~5.2G cached right now and it's running as fast as normal. And I've been using the thing more than normal lately because I haven't been at home much and I haven't noticed any slowdowns that I can think of.
 
toyota said:
maybe having 8gb instead of just 4 will help.
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Maybe, like I said I went from 2G to 8G. With 2G I would notice some chugging occasionally but I also tend to leave everything I use open all of the time so obviously something is going is going to be evicted from memory eventually.
 
Nothinman said:
That's really odd. As much memory as Windows uses for caching, it shouldn't have a negative affect on performance. I'd say something besides Windows itself is causing your issues.
Click to expand...

How about Firefox? Responsible for many a memory leak in the past. Close all FF windows and see if things improve.
 
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