Wow 80% utilization of 8GB of RAM!

[Yousuf Khan]

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/img190/5864/resourcemonitor76ramusa.jpg

Yousuf Khan

 

[VanguardLH]

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/img190/5864/resourcemonitor76ramusa.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?

 

[Dave \Crash\ Dummy]

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/img190/5864/resourcemonitor76ramusa.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

 

[DanS]

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/img190/5864/resourcemonitor76ram
usa.jpg

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

How many total processes are running there ?!

 

[R. C. White]

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


"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
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/img190/5864/resourcemonitor76ramusa.jpg

Yousuf Khan

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Alias.

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

Thanks for the catch.

RC

--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010)
Windows Live Mail 2011 (Build 15.4.3538.0513) in Win7 Ultimate x64 SP1

"Alias" wrote in message

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.

 

[Dave \Crash\ Dummy]

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

Wishful thinking?

 

[Ken Blake]

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!

 

[Paul]

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

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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

How many total processes are running there ?!

I don't know how many were running at the time of the screen cap, but
right now I'm running 92 processes, with 2 user accounts active in the
background, and 1 active in the foreground.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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

Nope, not worried at all, just surprised and fascinated.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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.

I am just rerunning the test under similar conditions, except one. This
time I decided to disable the real-time scanning feature of Microsoft
Security Essentials virus scanner, and the memory requirements just
dropped like a rock. It's currently hovering at the 50-53% mark rather
than 80-83%. I had noticed that one of the processes listed beside
Thunderbird, and Duplicate Cleaner (the scan operation that I was
purposefully running at the time), was MsMpEng (Security Essentials).
Looks like since Security Essentials tries to scan every file ahead of
anything else accessing them, it uses up a lot of memory pre-screening
them. After disabling the real-time scan, not only is memory usage much
reduced, but the duplicate scanner is running much, much faster.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Paul]

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.

I am just rerunning the test under similar conditions, except one. This
time I decided to disable the real-time scanning feature of Microsoft
Security Essentials virus scanner, and the memory requirements just
dropped like a rock. It's currently hovering at the 50-53% mark rather
than 80-83%. I had noticed that one of the processes listed beside
Thunderbird, and Duplicate Cleaner (the scan operation that I was
purposefully running at the time), was MsMpEng (Security Essentials).
Looks like since Security Essentials tries to scan every file ahead of
anything else accessing them, it uses up a lot of memory pre-screening
them. After disabling the real-time scan, not only is memory usage much
reduced, but the duplicate scanner is running much, much faster.

Yousuf Khan

In a similar vein, I had to turn off the AV on my Windows 7 laptop, so the
indexing function could finish faster. It runs twice as fast, without
the AV hooks pre-scanning the files in the same way as you experienced.

If your system was under memory pressure, would MsMpEng release that memory ?
Or would your system be driven into swap country instead ?

If you wanted to test that, you might be able to arrange something with
the testlimit program from Sysinternals. The last time I tested it, I
was doing something like this, to use up memory. This should be able to
create some memory pressure (if you can figure out what command line
arguments to use).

testlimit -d 1900

Download links here.

http://live.sysinternals.com/Tools/WindowsInternals/

Paul

 

[richard]

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/img190/5864/resourcemonitor76ramusa.jpg

Yousuf Khan

I'll bet you've got several programs that are not in operation but have a
scheduling program running in the background.
I run 7 HEP don't have but about 30 processes running.
I have real player and when I boot up, I immediately go into task manager
and turn it off.
I also turn off Java.

Got Norton? It's always been a big resource hog.
If I were you, I'd take the time and go through that list.
If it's third party software, and you're not using it, end the process.

I run my memory gadget on the desktop all the time. I never see it above
30%.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

In a similar vein, I had to turn off the AV on my Windows 7 laptop, so the
indexing function could finish faster. It runs twice as fast, without
the AV hooks pre-scanning the files in the same way as you experienced.

Hmm, wish I'd thought of that when I did index my drives, way back when.
They might have finished quicker back then. The indexing is finished now.

I actually like Windows' indexing feature nowadays. It makes finding
files much simpler, I got millions of folders spread out over half a
dozen drives. I don't have it index the contents of files, just their
properties.

If your system was under memory pressure, would MsMpEng release that
memory ?
Or would your system be driven into swap country instead ?

Well, swap is always running no matter what of course, but I don't think
swapping activity was any more intense during that time. I checked out
the Hard Faults/sec field in Resource Monitor and it looked normal.

However, disk activity was mighty, the disk queue length was frequently
going over the 1.00 mark. Which is understandable considering I was
running a file scan at the time. I did notice that disabling the AV also
reduced the number of times the disk queue length went over 1.00; it
would still go over 1.00 but not as frequently.

If you wanted to test that, you might be able to arrange something with
the testlimit program from Sysinternals. The last time I tested it, I
was doing something like this, to use up memory. This should be able to
create some memory pressure (if you can figure out what command line
arguments to use).

That's okay, I'm not that concerned.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I'll bet you've got several programs that are not in operation but have a
scheduling program running in the background.
I run 7 HEP don't have but about 30 processes running.
I have real player and when I boot up, I immediately go into task manager
and turn it off.
I also turn off Java.

Well my system is a little unique it's almost used like a server.
There's multiple user accounts that are logged in simultaneously on it,
so that's why you see so many processes on it.

Got Norton? It's always been a big resource hog.

All AV's are resource hogs.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

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.

I am just rerunning the test under similar conditions, except one. This
time I decided to disable the real-time scanning feature of Microsoft
Security Essentials virus scanner, and the memory requirements just
dropped like a rock. It's currently hovering at the 50-53% mark rather
than 80-83%. I had noticed that one of the processes listed beside
Thunderbird, and Duplicate Cleaner (the scan operation that I was
purposefully running at the time), was MsMpEng (Security Essentials).
Looks like since Security Essentials tries to scan every file ahead of
anything else accessing them, it uses up a lot of memory pre-screening
them. After disabling the real-time scan, not only is memory usage much
reduced, but the duplicate scanner is running much, much faster.

Yousuf Khan

MS Security Essentials lets you exempt certain program from scanning. In
particular, I like to tell it to ignore my backup programs. It can make
a big difference in backup time.

Back when I still used Symantec, I did the same thing, also to good
effect. I would not be surprised to learn that nearly all security
software has the same capability

Confession: I didn't look at memory usage or other stats, only the data
rate reported by the backup programs.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

MS Security Essentials lets you exempt certain program from scanning. In
particular, I like to tell it to ignore my backup programs. It can make
a big difference in backup time.

Good idea, I never looked for this feature. I've added a whole bunch of
scanning utils to this list now. I won't have to manually disable the
real-time protection, it'll do it on its own.

Yousuf Khan