Why is Windows Explorer such a pig

[BCinSC]

I don't have any wallpaper and very only 1 app (printer) in system tray. After working with system for a bit, not unusal to see 24MB+ with nothing open. Then there's a SVCHOST chewing up another 15MB and each instance of IE swallows another 15MB before it even opens a page. This one for AF is over 30MB. I have 512 physical and plenty virtual. I also run a clean machine - no viruses, spyware or even StartUp Folder/HKLMRun items. Are Microsoft's products such bloted pigs that RAM is no longer even a consideration?

 

[EagleKeeper]

When RAM became cheap, quality suffered.

If people were upgrading their systems every couple of years, memory leaks were not considered front burner material.

Without competition, forcing users to restart their systems every one in a while was considered to be a minor inconvienence.

Most office people would use only a couple of applications and shut down their systems at the end of a day.

 

[rh71]

I run a clean machine but do a lot during the day (video editing, webdev apps, etc.) on and off. My uptime is currently 1.5 days and explorer is only taking 15MB of the 384MB RAM I have. No big deal.

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: EagleKeeper
When RAM became cheap, quality suffered.

If people were upgrading their systems every couple of years, memory leaks were not considered front burner material.

Without competition, forcing users to restart their systems every one in a while was considered to be a minor inconvienence.

Most office people would use only a couple of applications and shut down their systems at the end of a day.

You can't assume that programs that utilize RAM are leaky or buggy.

My guess is that the majority of RAM usage by Windows components goes towards caching mechanisms, which utilize the abundance of cheap, high-speed RAM that many users have on their systems in order to speed up various tasks.

I haven't found too many Windows components that leak memory since Windows 2000. I would venture to guess that the majority of leaks come from plug-ins and other add-on software.

 

[tfinch2]

I run Win2000 Server and Explorer.exe takes up an average of 3 MB except when I have My Computer open.

If anyone is interested I wrote a little application that tricks Windows into releasing all of it's junk memory resources. On average it frees up about 70-90 MB RAM for me when I run it with about 6 hours of up-time.

 

[daniel1113]

Who cares? You have 512MB of RAM, which is more than enough to handle 10 "extra" MB.

 

[tfinch2]

Originally posted by: daniel1113
Who cares? You have 512MB of RAM, which is more than enough to handle 10 "extra" MB.

When you game with 512 MB RAM, you'll take all the extra RAM you can get!

 

[oboeguy]

Originally posted by: tfinch2
I run Win2000 Server and Explorer.exe takes up an average of 3 MB except when I have My Computer open.

If anyone is interested I wrote a little application that tricks Windows into releasing all of it's junk memory resources. On average it frees up about 70-90 MB RAM for me when I run it with about 6 hours of up-time.

Sounds interesting. What does it do?

 

[tinyabs]

Although the explorer might use up 20Mb+ of RAM, subsequent applications that requires services of Explorer takes up much less memory. However, it will still shows the total memory it owns. Explorer loads Internet Explorer (cos it needs it for viewing folders) and does lots of caching for icons and bitmap.

My system uses 350Mb+ of memory at startup. I rarely used more than 500Mb throughout the day.

tfinch2: I suppose you page those less frequently-used memory to the paging file to free up RAM. There are no hints or fact that a piece of memory is leaking unless you terminate the program; ie those memory that are not free by the application after termination are memory leaks.

 

[Anubis]

i have 1,5 gigs fo ram in my com, running win xp sp2 clean comp... on start up i have at most 1100 megs free, if i sisnt start winamp trillian and a few other things with windows i could push that to mabye 1200 megs free

i dont really care, i have ram so things can use it

javaw is currently useing 90+ megs, stupid azureus

the only one that really annoys me is winlogon, for some reason itll just randomally use 50megs for no reason, im the only one that ever logs into this comp, ill just be browsing the web and BAM winlogon is useing 50 megs

 

[BFG10K]

Are Microsoft's products such bloted pigs that RAM is no longer even a consideration

The handful of MBs you're using is bloat? Perhaps for 1994; certainly not for 2004. In fact for a complex OS like Windows XP I'd consider that rather lean usage.

When you game with 512 MB RAM, you'll take all the extra RAM you can get!

And part of any modern VM system (which Windows has) is that when you need RAM you'll get it. When you don't need it unused RAM is wasted RAM since you're no better off having it as opposed to not having it. As a consequence any modern VM system will allocate to useful tasks such as caching.

 

[drag]

exactly. Unusued RAM is wasted RAM.

You want your system to use as much RAM as possible. 90% ram usage is much better 50% ram usage.

Why? Because it increases performance. Disk drives are very very slow compared to ram, so the more information you have up in RAM the better you are. Every bit of information that is retrieved from main memory instead of having to be read off of a file off of the harddrive is a save in performance.

However there is a fine art to this sort of thing. What you want to have in main memory is USEFULL information and you want the ability to be able to clear out room quickly for when you start up Doom or whatever.

See most of you have screwed up ideas behind VM and memory usage because your thinking of things in terms of Windows 98 era technology. Win9x was @ss, don't think about that stuff anymore.

Remember just becuase explorer is using 20megs now were it was using 10 megs before doesn't mean that is 10 less then what is aviable for your when you run your halflife game. It CAN mean that, but it doesn't have to. It takes more analysis to figure this stuff out then just looking up at the task manager.