Wow 80% utilization of 8GB of RAM!

I found this interesting. I got a 8GB of RAM, and 64-bit Win7 Ultimate.
I was recently doing a few things and fired up the Resource Monitor.
Much to my surprise, it said I was using over 80% of my RAM at that
moment. I've seen it go upto 50% before, but never this high. I guess
it's true, you can never have too much RAM.

The picture below shows it when it was /merely/ using 76% of the RAM,
but later it climbed up 83% and it bounced around between 80-83% from
then on. I was running a duplicate file finder utility at the time, so I
think that's what used up most of the RAM.

http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/5...or76ramusa.jpg

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:

> I found this interesting. I got a 8GB of RAM, and 64-bit Win7 Ultimate.
> I was recently doing a few things and fired up the Resource Monitor.
> Much to my surprise, it said I was using over 80% of my RAM at that
> moment. I've seen it go upto 50% before, but never this high. I guess
> it's true, you can never have too much RAM.
>
> The picture below shows it when it was /merely/ using 76% of the RAM,
> but later it climbed up 83% and it bounced around between 80-83% from
> then on. I was running a duplicate file finder utility at the time, so I
> think that's what used up most of the RAM.
>
> http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/5...or76ramusa.jpg

According to the portion of the table that was shown, Thunderbird was
eating up the biggest chunk of memory. Normal consumption for v3 should
be 200MB, or less, unless you installed a ridiculuous number of add-ons.
You might want to ask the Mozilla folks in the thunderbird newsgroup (on
news.mozilla.org server) why your Thunderbird is such a memory hog.

Even then, you must be running a hell of a lot of [superfluous]
processes to eat up the rest. I see you're running Steam (something I
hate with games and will avoid those, and here you're running it without
running a game), emule, a cleaner (that apparently has to run
continuously in the background instead of on-demand or scheduled), and
others not visible. Were you attempting an exercise to see how many
concurrent processes you could leave loaded in memory?

VanguardLH wrote:
> Yousuf Khan wrote:
>
>> I found this interesting. I got a 8GB of RAM, and 64-bit Win7 Ultimate.
>> I was recently doing a few things and fired up the Resource Monitor.
>> Much to my surprise, it said I was using over 80% of my RAM at that
>> moment. I've seen it go upto 50% before, but never this high. I guess
>> it's true, you can never have too much RAM.
>>
>> The picture below shows it when it was /merely/ using 76% of the RAM,
>> but later it climbed up 83% and it bounced around between 80-83% from
>> then on. I was running a duplicate file finder utility at the time, so I
>> think that's what used up most of the RAM.
>>
>> http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/5...or76ramusa.jpg
>
> According to the portion of the table that was shown, Thunderbird was
> eating up the biggest chunk of memory. Normal consumption for v3 should
> be 200MB, or less, unless you installed a ridiculuous number of add-ons.
> You might want to ask the Mozilla folks in the thunderbird newsgroup (on
> news.mozilla.org server) why your Thunderbird is such a memory hog.
>
> Even then, you must be running a hell of a lot of [superfluous]
> processes to eat up the rest. I see you're running Steam (something I
> hate with games and will avoid those, and here you're running it without
> running a game), emule, a cleaner (that apparently has to run
> continuously in the background instead of on-demand or scheduled), and
> others not visible. Were you attempting an exercise to see how many
> concurrent processes you could leave loaded in memory?

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with 4 GB of RAM, and I have never
been close to using it all. Here's what my equivalent snapshot looks like.

http://crash.thedatalist.com/temp/ResourceMon.png.htm
--
Crash

Living is much more than staying alive.

Yousuf Khan <> wrote in
news:4e780625$:

> I found this interesting. I got a 8GB of RAM, and 64-bit
> Win7 Ultimate. I was recently doing a few things and fired
> up the Resource Monitor. Much to my surprise, it said I was
> using over 80% of my RAM at that moment. I've seen it go
> upto 50% before, but never this high. I guess it's true,
> you can never have too much RAM.
>
> The picture below shows it when it was /merely/ using 76%
> of the RAM, but later it climbed up 83% and it bounced
> around between 80-83% from then on. I was running a
> duplicate file finder utility at the time, so I think
> that's what used up most of the RAM.
>
> http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/5...cemonitor76ram
> usa.jpg

Holy cow!!!!!....there are 10 processes showing, and the
vertical scrol handle is very small....

How many total processes are running there ?!

Hi, Yousuf.

I also run WinXP Ultimate x64 with 8 GB RAM. I have no idea how much RAM is
being used most of the time. The Gadget is on my Desktop, but I seldom even
look at it.

I never care how much of my RAM is being used - so long as it is given back
instantly when needed for something else.

If 100% of the 8 GB is being used, and then I start a new app that needs 3
GB, I never even notice because Win7 immediately takes back the memory that
it needs and uses it to run the new app. Since I'm not a techie, I don't
understand all that is going on "under the hood", but I think that Win7
moves 3 GB (or whatever is needed) from RAM to the page file - and that
happens so quickly and smoothly that I don't even know it's happening.

As several others here have said, unused RAM is wasted RAM. Don't worry
about how much is being used; only about how much can't be taken back -
immediately - and re-used as required. When you can't start a new app
because no memory is available, then worry. Until then, just don't look at
the resource monitor. If you had not looked, you would not have worried.
;<)

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010)
Windows Live Mail 2011 (Build 15.4.3538.0513) in Win7 Ultimate x64 SP1


"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message news:4e780625$...

I found this interesting. I got a 8GB of RAM, and 64-bit Win7 Ultimate.
I was recently doing a few things and fired up the Resource Monitor.
Much to my surprise, it said I was using over 80% of my RAM at that
moment. I've seen it go upto 50% before, but never this high. I guess
it's true, you can never have too much RAM.

The picture below shows it when it was /merely/ using 76% of the RAM,
but later it climbed up 83% and it bounced around between 80-83% from
then on. I was running a duplicate file finder utility at the time, so I
think that's what used up most of the RAM.

http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/5...or76ramusa.jpg

Yousuf Khan

Hi, Alias.

Woops! Typo, of course: Win7 Ultimate x64. Just like Yousuf.

Thanks for the catch.

RC

--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010)
Windows Live Mail 2011 (Build 15.4.3538.0513) in Win7 Ultimate x64 SP1

"Alias" wrote in message news:4e78b8b5$...

On 09/20/2011 05:54 PM, R. C. White wrote:
> I also run WinXP Ultimate x64 with 8 GB RAM

Nice trick. Where did you get WinXP Ultimate x64? I've never heard of it.

--
Alias

Alias wrote:
> On 09/20/2011 05:54 PM, R. C. White wrote:
>> I also run WinXP Ultimate x64 with 8 GB RAM
>
> Nice trick. Where did you get WinXP Ultimate x64? I've never heard of it.

Wishful thinking? :-)
--
Crash

"In politics, stupidity is not a handicap."
~ Napoleon Bonaparte ~

On Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:54:54 -0500, "R. C. White" <>
wrote:


> As several others here have said, unused RAM is wasted RAM. Don't worry
> about how much is being used; only about how much can't be taken back -
> immediately - and re-used as required. When you can't start a new app
> because no memory is available, then worry. Until then, just don't look at
> the resource monitor. If you had not looked, you would not have worried.
> ;<)


Double ditto!

Ken Blake wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:54:54 -0500, "R. C. White" <>
> wrote:
>
>
>> As several others here have said, unused RAM is wasted RAM. Don't worry
>> about how much is being used; only about how much can't be taken back -
>> immediately - and re-used as required. When you can't start a new app
>> because no memory is available, then worry. Until then, just don't look at
>> the resource monitor. If you had not looked, you would not have worried.
>> ;<)
>
>
> Double ditto!

I do care about how software is engineered, with regard to memory usage.

But in this case, I don't have the confidence in what Resource Monitor
tells me, to get excited about it.

Any time an OS makes speculative usage of system memory, and purges
that speculative usage on demand, I don't call that a real usage,
because it doesn't affect me. If 20% of my memory is really being
used, then I can start another 80% worth of apps, and the OS
will "squeeze" out the crap it has been holding onto. In that
situation, I'm less inclined to "stare at the resource monitor".

The only thing in the picture that interests me right now, is
the huge allocation for Thunderbird. Must be one biiig "inbox" :-)

Just for the record, they do something similar in Linux. If I use
the "top" command, then start a program which reads and processes
a lot of disk files (even a copy operation will do this), the
files are read into memory. The "top" command, a resource monitor,
shows the system memory as all being used. When in fact, if you
issue a cache purging command like this one, the recording in "top"
reports the true value again. (This only works as "real" root.)

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

In Linux, there are other commands other than "top" that report the
real usage (bytes being used by real user processes). Such an
example is "vmstat".

In a test, I issued the "drop_cache" command over and over again,
while the computer was doing something file related, and it made
no difference to the execution speed (benchmark finished in the
same number of seconds). So while the "top" command would have
suggested I could be penalized by swapping, no such swapping
occurred - and it's because as a resource monitor, "top" was
full of crap.

It's just a matter of testing resource monitoring applications,
until you find one that makes more sense from an intuitive
perspective. (I.e. If you can still launch new applications
without a system slowdown, then obviously there is available
memory.)

Paul

On 20/09/2011 3:42 AM, VanguardLH wrote:
> According to the portion of the table that was shown, Thunderbird was
> eating up the biggest chunk of memory. Normal consumption for v3 should
> be 200MB, or less, unless you installed a ridiculuous number of add-ons.
> You might want to ask the Mozilla folks in the thunderbird newsgroup (on
> news.mozilla.org server) why your Thunderbird is such a memory hog.

Oh, I know, I've already posted about that ages ago on the Mozilla
forums: they're pretty much stumped. I've even put my name on a waiting
list of people waiting for a bug fix for this problem: so far no response.

However, I have already tested the problem extensively. It's got nothing
to do with add-ons, the memory hoarding starts as a result of going into
newsgroups. If I am just using Tbird for checking email, then it behaves
normally, but as soon as I open a newsgroup account (I got two servers),
the memory usage starts soaring.

Thunderbird often ends up taking over 1GB of memory. In fact it was one
of the main reasons I upgraded from 4GB to 8GB on this machine. However,
even when Tbird uses this amount of memory, the overall memory usage
doesn't go much over 50%. The 80% is as a result of another program.

> Even then, you must be running a hell of a lot of [superfluous]
> processes to eat up the rest. I see you're running Steam (something I
> hate with games and will avoid those, and here you're running it without
> running a game), emule, a cleaner (that apparently has to run
> continuously in the background instead of on-demand or scheduled), and
> others not visible. Were you attempting an exercise to see how many
> concurrent processes you could leave loaded in memory?

Actually in this case it's the cleaner that's taking up the majority of
the ram here, even if it isn't showing as taking all that much on list.
As I said, if it was simply Thunderbird, then I'd only be using 50%, but
when I ran the duplicate cleaner, it soared upto 80%. And the cleaner
was running on demand.

Yousuf Khan