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4 GB May Be Vista's RAM Sweet Spot
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Feb 20, 2007 07:09 PM
from the honkin' dept.
from the honkin' dept.
jcatcw writes "David Short, an IBM consultant who works in the Global Services Division and has been beta testing Vista for two years, says users should consider 4GB of RAM if they really want optimum Vista performance. With Vista's minimum requirement of 512MB of RAM, Vista will deliver performance that's 'sub-XP,' he says. (Dell and others recommend 2GB.) One reason: SuperFetch, which fetches applications and data, and feeds them into RAM to make them accessible more quickly. More RAM means more caching."
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Turn SuperFetch off (Score:5, Funny)
Well, Duh...
Remember the $40/Meg RAM days?
More RAM (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:More RAM (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:More RAM (Score:5, Funny)
Dell: "What?"
Microsoft: "Want some of this?"
*Microsoft waves a bunch of cash in dells face*
Dell: "Yes please
You can Imagine the rest...
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Re:More RAM (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Turn SuperFetch off (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, Duh...
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Re:Turn SuperFetch off (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Turn SuperFetch off (Score:5, Funny)
Vista: RAM is very important to your system. Are you sure you want to look at your RAM?
You: OK
Vista: Are you sure? Anything you do might cause your computer to perform poorly. Are you sure?
You: OK
Vista: Really? Cause I don't think you'd even know what to look for. Are you sure?
You: OK
Vista: Really?
You: OK
etc. . .
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Re:Turn SuperFetch off (Score:5, Funny)
Vista: O rly?
You: Ya rly!
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Dealing with Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Corridor, Aft End
This is one end of a short corridor that continues fore along the main deck of the Heart of Gold. Doorways lead to aft and port. In addition, a gangway leads downward.
>go south
That entrance leads to the Infinite Improbability Drive chamber. It's supposed to be a terribly dangerous area of the ship. Are you sure you want to go in there?
>go south
Absolutely sure?
>go south
I can tell you don't want to really. You stride away with a spring in your step, wisely leaving the Drive Chamber safely behind you. Telegrams arrive from well-wishers in all corners of the Galaxy congratulating you on your prudence and wisdom, cheering you up immensely.
>go south
What? You're joking, of course. Can I ask you to reconsider?
>go south
Engine Room
You're in the Infinite Improbability Drive chamber. Nothing happens; there is nothing to see.
>look
I mean it! There's nothing to see here!
>look
Okay, okay, there are a FEW things to see here...
(the above with all due respect to Douglas Adams, Steve Meretzky, and Infocom)
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Vista as Martin the depressive robot (Score:5, Funny)
Eg, as Martin the depressive robot :
OS : You are about to visit a web page. It sounds like fun, but I'm just stuck being a boring OS assistant. Do you really want to go there?
You : Yes
OS : Figures, I'll never have even a fraction of the fun you're having using this computer. That page wants to run a flash application. Are you sure you want to go to that web page?
You : yes, dammit
OS : You are annoyed at me, I'm just a dumb lowly Operating System security warning system. You probably don't even care about me at all. Do you want me to stop nagging you?
You : YES, PLEASE shut the hell up
OS : Oh, that's great, I've been programmed with state of the art security warning information, and you just don't want to appreciate my pathetic self. Are you sure you really want to turn me off?
You : YES, go away and never come back.
OS : Fine, I'll just sit here in my own misery, and hope that you turn me back on one day, which you probably won't.
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Re:Turn SuperFetch off (Score:5, Insightful)
OS/2 reccomended 4MB
Vista? 4GB
Too bad we aren't doing exponetially better things with these boxes...
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Re:Turn SuperFetch off (Score:5, Funny)
$100,000 for 16K? Teehee, and you had to build a new wing for it.
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speed, speed and more speed - but where is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The system had two colour graphic displays, a printer or two, and 4 operator terminals. It ran a real time, multi tasking operating system (called RSX11).
The main system had 128kb of memory. Yes, 128kb.
Today my dev machine has 2Gb of memory and the 3Ghz processor must - surely - be some thousands of times as fast.
So I have 15,000 times as much memory, a processor perhaps 3,000 times as fast (I'm guessing, as figures are hard to pin down). That sounds like 445 million times as much power to me.
And what do we do with all this grunt? Well damn, solitare looks good these days.
So, were the old programmers really, really good? [We were, we were
Are the new ones really, really bad? [hang on, I'm still at it
Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?
I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.
I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well. Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.
And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.
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Re:speed, speed and more speed - but where is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The average consumer has seen mass improvement. Today I can simultaneously rip a DVD, listen to MP3s, browse the internet, and play a game with a core 2 duo. I was lucky to get 1 of these working at a time back in win95 days. It takes less than a second to load most apps (well, pretty much anything but adobe).
I agree that we have stopped caring about size/performance because in most cases it doesn't matter.
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But take a look at *cost* (Score:5, Insightful)
No. But our limits of acceptability have changed. As processing power has gotten cheaper, developers (myself included) have focused more on getting features out to market faster, rather than application performance.
I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.
That's always been correct. We care more about how many features are available at what cost, so long as performance isn't noticably bad on commodity hardware.
Do you remember when c was considered a "high level language"? What about the debates on how slow programs written in c were? I do. Times have changed....
I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well.
I don't know about that. Perhaps you don't remember loading DOS programs like PC-Write on an 8086 processer with 512K RAM? That was my word processor of choice, and it got slower the longer your document was. By the time you passed 100k, it was a dog.
Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.
I sure do. I also remember the care with with I never hit the two space bars together in a graphics program. (That would universally crash my computer). It shared TEXT ok, but anything graphical was another mess entirely.
And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.
If you don't mind me asking, what would you RATHER be writing?
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Re:speed, speed and more speed - but where is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
In industry almost everybody uses loops instead of recursion unless there's a really good reason to use recursion (e.g. tree traversal). More because of readability than efficiency; in principle your optimizer should be able to convert tail recursion to iteration anyway (though whether this will actually happen or not does depend on the specific language and implementation). Academics just love recursion because it maps neatly to mathematical induction and hence makes algorithm correctness more easily provable.
The reason "bloat" happens is more because programming teams have deadlines and if there's a choice between a new feature, a bugfix or some not-strictly-necessary optimization (and there's always a choice), the optimization's never going to get done. It's just good business sense; sure everybody complains about slowness, but if application A is mean-and-lean and application B is bloated but has a feature you need to do your job, you'll whine and cavil and buy B anyway.
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Re:Turn SuperFetch off (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to be picky, but OS/2 (even assuming 2.0, since it was the first 16/32bit release) REQUIRED 4MB of RAM, but didn't run well unless you 12MB of RAM, although I do know some people that got by with 8MB of RAM, I also even know peeps that ran NT 3.1 with 8MB of RAM as well, even though it was just as painful to watch.
So bascially people are here making fun of Vista for wanting 512MB, and running 'much' faster than XP when configured with > 512MB...
Last I checked OSX even wants 512MB and 1GB of RAM for acceptable performance if you run a lot of concurrent apps since the windows are double buffered in system RAM for the composer.
Also any *nix distribution with XWindows and a Windows Manager like KDE running, easly scale to where 512MB and 1GB are a sweet spot as well.
Since this is the year 2007, I don't see Vista being far out of the ballpark, except for the fact it has some really smart caching technology that allows it to better use > 1GB of RAM via its Superfetch caching technology in ways other OSes don't unless they have the application load demanding it.
Which is the point most everyone seems to keep missing in this post. They are in a fuss because Vista continues to get faster and faster as more RAM is added.
Most OSes 'desktop performance' top out at 1-2GB of RAM and don't use the extra RAM for anything but dumb/lazy caching.
So instead of making fun of Vista for actually taking advantage of this extra 'free' RAM and scaling it in a way that 'continues' to add performance even when applications don't need it, maybe we should focus our efforts in the OSS community to work on caching technology so all OSS OSes will scale RAM as well as Vista.
(PS, Even though I'm responding to your OS/2 numbers, this post is meant more of a general response to everyone in here, so nothing personal to you, the OS/2 numbers were just a fun place to jump in
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Re:THis is obscene! (Score:5, Interesting)
MS knows shineys sell software to Joe Sixpack, so they don't mind the extra memory it takes to run them all the time. However, I'd don't think vista needs 4 gigs of memory to run snappy with all the goodies turned off.
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Re:THis is obscene! (Score:5, Insightful)
But if you turn off Aero and all that stuff, why bother upgrading in the first place?
So that you can see the Black Screen of Are You Sure You Want To Run That Program?
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Re:THis is obscene! (Score:5, Interesting)
Even with 1GB you are good with AERO, as Vista only uses a fraction of system RAM for the AERO effects, since it intelligently co-shares system and video RAM.
For example, Aero is consuming only 12Mb of system RAM on the computer I am typing this on at the moment. I also have an animated wallpaper (video) and this window is partially transparent so I can see my applications behind it.
Vista does NOT double buffer like OSX, so there is not this massive overhead for RAM by using the AERO interface like there is in OSX to get tear free applicaiton drawing.
People forget that turning off Aero and effectively the DWM, reduces ALL application performance on Vista.
This is because it disables the acceleration drawing in hardware at the GDI/WPF level, and also pushes application redrawing back to the applications like WindowsXP.
So you not only get a worse 'visual' experience with it off, as you get tearing and extra redrawing with the composer turned off, you also get a massive performance reduction as this tearing and redrawing forces the application to consume CPU cycles to redraw when you do anything, just as Windows XP did.
When you turn off Aero you lose the composer and some of the 3D GPU acceleration of Vector and Bitmap drawing functions of the core graphics subsystem that assist the appliation in drawing the interface before it even gets to the composer.
And even though Vista gets the 'effect' of double buffering Window textures, it doesn't technically double buffer them, so the RAM overhead to do all this is quite minimal as the GPU RAM is used instead of both System and GPU RAM being used as in OSX.
See Vista's driver model gives it some cool tricks, and this is just one side effect. And since the driver model allows Vista to draw directly to the screen from GPU or System RAM without having to shove the System RAM image into the GPU before drawing like OSX does, you don't have to double store images in the composer.
So Vista can use system or GPU RAM intelligently and draw directly to the screen from either memory pool. Which is also why AGP and PCI/e are needed for the Aero interface in Vista.
So even with 1GB of RAM, don't be so quick to turn off Aero.
In fact several 3D games run faster with Aero enabled,(even on 1GB systems) because if you only have 128MB of Video RAM, and the game wants more for textures, Vista will intelligently use free System RAM to hold the less performance intensive textures. And since the application via the Vista WDDM sees the GPU and Vista allocated System RAM for textures as the same it can draw or use them directly as if your Video card had 512mb of GPU RAM instead of 128MB.
So if your video card lacks the GPU RAM for the 'high quality' textures in your game, leave Aero on and you can shove the texture quality in the game up beyond what your card would normally be capable of handling.
Also with respect to how the OpenGL driver is made by ATI or NVidia, Vista can even do this for OpenGL applications as well.
Good luck and don't be so quick to turn off Aero, you might be surprised how much performance it adds to the system, even with 1GB of RAM.
(Our techs even leave it enabld on 512mb systems as it still gives more of a performance boost than the 8-20mb of RAM it consumes on average.)
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Re:THis is obscene! (Score:5, Informative)
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heh heh (Score:4, Funny)
But I'm guessing it's going to be a sticking point for most consumers. At least, the ones without a sugar daddy.
Re:heh heh (Score:4, Funny)
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Great idea Microsoft! (Score:5, Funny)
1) Cache contents of entire hard disk to RAM
2) Claim performance boost in Vista
3) Profit!
Re:Great idea Microsoft! (Score:4, Informative)
All modern OS's load huge executables compared with the good 3M workstation days (1 Megabyte, 1 Megapixel, 1 MIP). Microsoft is doing the right thing by aggressively caching commonly run items. And I note, they're late to the party: 'NIX does this too.
And I say once again (as a NIX professional) that Vista's pretty damn good. Gone are the days when Windows was a toy. No longer. It has plenty of bullshit legacy cruft, but Vista is a BIG improvement.
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I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Informative)
All I know is beyond whatever the benchmarks show Explorer is even slower in Vista than it was before. Go out on the network and wait in agony while the little green bar at the top of Explorer chugs along taking forever to finally display files. I'm sure this just the fault of the switches and Windows 2003 R3 servers I've been using though *rolls eyes*. I'm just really disappointed with Vista after all of this wait and at this point the only time I boot into it anymore is to check app compatibility.
Hint - Set VLC to GDI mode so you don't have to see the f'ing jarring screen transition anymore.
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Re:I disagree (Score:5, Funny)
Heh. And Apple's "super slick" interface runs just fine on my three year old iBook (800Mhz G4, 640mb RAM) and I typically have >15 applications open at a time.
I know this is not a reasonable comparison, as Windows can't open 15 apps at a time
(joke)
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Re:I disagree (Score:5, Informative)
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Bad news for intel here.. (Score:5, Interesting)
If vista scales all the way to 4, then we're looking at a windows market that will be very similar to the mac market, where upgrading the video card and ram will get you more bang for your buck than replacing the processor.
this will mean a slowdown in intel sales (and amd)
Seriously (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a good reason: people remain employed.
Re:Seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
Twenty years ago I remember the "media" I "collected". Amazing 256-color graphic files. Mostly of stupid things like bowls of fruit (porn really wasn't all it was cracked up to be at the time). No pictures of family and friends in high detail. No means of easily storing said photos for extended periods of time.
Twenty years ago I remember when a "state of the art" game was one that wasn't entirely text-based. When an adventure game's inventory had a max of 16 items and enemies were scripted (and therefore dumb as bricks). No photorealistic visuals to draw you in. No fairly natural AI to breathe life to the world. And certainly no way to play with thousands of others at the same time.
My point?
All of these changes have been the result of higher memory, faster processors, etc. Yes, we use a bigger memory footprint nowadays. So what? Isn't broadening the appeal of the PC (families storing photos and grandmothers that can actually work the email program) worth it? Yes, the fundamental operations haven't changed (write email, send email, etc). Big deal. Call that a testament to stellar original design than a foible of modern design.
Fact of the matter is I *can* do more, much more, than I could with my PC from 20 years ago. And I can do it in an easier way (blame Vista/OS X all you want -- they're still better UIs than what we used in '87). That's called "progress", regardless if the memory footprint grows or not (and the fundamental tenants of computing stay largely the same).
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Re:Seriously (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's just the mythical "average user". Operating systems have to support more than the average user -- they have to support the guy writing apps for the average user (development and debugging have gotten significantly easier); the office of the average user (managing a large userbase); the folks writing content for the average user (both professionals and YouTube).
Many of these things are transparent. And, yeah, I could go back to using pine, bash, rxvt, and WindowMaker (although that's only 10 years ago, not 15), grep through my emails when I needed to find something and use IRC to talk to my friends.
But you know what? This is better. A lot better.
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Re:Seriously (Score:5, Funny)
Sure, you can watch video with a 800 Mhz, 256 MB, Windows 2000 box. But you can't do all the real-time encryption / decryption operations required for modern DRM systems. So we're SO MUCH better off with today's faster machines and Vista.
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Article in a nutshell... (Score:5, Funny)
This message brought to you by: Article in a Nutshell (TM)
RAM costs more than a computer? (Score:5, Informative)
Before Vista came out you could easily get a low to mid-end XP desktop computer for $500.
completely not true (Score:4, Interesting)
Increased bloat + static OS expectations = (Score:4, Insightful)
This much bloat simply isn't necessary. Caching is one thing, but the RAM requirements of Vista simply for code space are massive compared to XP for roughly the same functionality. That's a center that cannot hold.
What we expect from an OS is pretty well-known and well-defined now. This means the innovation will slow and there will be increasing reluctance to upgrade simply for the sake of upgrading, especially when the upgrade is a worse performer than the software being upgraded!
This is fertile ground for optimization.
An example:
Compare the executable size and memory utilisation of uTorrent and Azureus. Azureus represents the old guard of BT clients, you might say. A large, bloated code base in Java, implementing features that you wouldn't think would require that much code. And boy it's a dog, and crawls on any sub-1.5Ghz laptop. Enter uTorrent. I would say Azureus is the Vista to uTorrent's microLinux. For the uninitiated, in terms of program size (exe + libs) and memory utilization, we're talking about 170kB/4MB to 7.6MB/16.3MB, respectively. uTorrent was able to bring just about all the features present in Azureus and compact it into a 170kB
I think this will be the end of Microsoft. The API expected for a Windows box is known. It's publicized. The time is ripe for a competitor to come in and reimplement it, using less RAM and resources while conforming to the same standards, and for a fraction of the price. If this were to happen, and if the software companies were to realize they didn't have to sit beholden to *Microsoft's* "Windows" anymore, then we'd really see some fur fly in the marketplace.
Vista just makes good use of.. (Score:5, Informative)
The sweet spot for memory will be vista requirements(512mb or so) + space for whatever apps you usualy concurrently run, IE/FF, photoshop, iTunes, whatever, it'll dump those into system ram before you even click their icons, reduce real world loading times significantly.
Despite the MS jokes, an OS that leaves ram unused isnt doing its job properly, it can always free memory , quickly, if needed.
May I have your attention please (Score:4, Insightful)
Note to Mac users: You want to run OS X? Then shut up and pay for the pretty hardware.
Note to Windows users: You want to run Vista? Then shut up and buy the extra memory.
Windows Vista Capable according to Dell (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought you were joking, but,... (Score:5, Insightful)
Brett
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Re:x64 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:x64 (Score:5, Informative)
Since most environments run more than one process, they can take advantage of the extra ram assuming their total amount of allocated space is above 4GB. For that matter, I used to run a 32bit version of BSD 5 years ago that ran on a Dual PIII system with 8GB RAM. Basically we ran 2 caching processes of 4GB each, and some smaller processes that added up to a memory load of 8GB.
What you get with a 64bit operating system is a theoretical 64bit address space for each and every process. In reality different processor architectures offer somewhere between 40 and 48 bits worth of physical address space (Good for almost a Petabyte of RAM). 64bit is really only useful for a few VERY large applications such as Database, a few imaging processing apps, and some massive number crunching... Your average desktop OS application has no need for more than 32 bits, and in fact most of us would actually have slower machines with a 32bit user space
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Re:x64 (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Pre-emptive strike! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:4GB? 64bit here we come! Lets just hope *nix wi (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
The satisfaction in knowing that you are no longer using an operating system that directly contributes to the decline of Microsoft's profits?
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Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
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