4 GB May Be Vista's RAM Sweet Spot

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."

Re:x64

[Chikenistheman]

It has nothing to do with RAM so I may be offtopic, but I beg to differ.

I run two boxes x64. One is an Intel P4 with EMT and the other an AMD Athlon x64. Both run x64 OS and both x64 and x32 programs. I have two devices that will not run on x64 out all my components. An old Linksys wirelss adapter and an old soundcard.

I understand the reason these drivers don't work is due to Microsofts changes to both Networking and sound processing in Windows. So honestly IMO the gap in support between 32 and 64 is dramatically closing.

RAM costs more than a computer?

[LoverOfJoy]

How much does 4GB of ram cost? I don't know the cheapest places to buy RAM but a quick search put a couple 2GB sticks at $450-500 ($225-250 each).

Before Vista came out you could easily get a low to mid-end XP desktop computer for $500.

Re:Sysreqs

[RichMeatyTaste]

Ignore the FUD. We run it on everything going back to 3.5 year old P4's with crappy video cards and 512MB of ram. Does full Aero work? No. Does it work fine for Office/daily business use: Yes.

My home machine is a 18 month old P4 3.2GHZ with an upgraded (for games, $125) video card, 1gb ram, and Vista runs with full effects.

Even under the Macbook Pro (C2D, stock ram) it runs fine under paralells. You will never get Aero under virtual machines, but the OS works fine.

Re:Here we go...

[QuantumG]

anti-Vista crowd

That would be everyone on earth who isn't a Microsoft fan boy or shill. Vista is the upgrade no-one wants.

Re:I disagree

[bogie]

Surprisingly Aero actually has little impact on system performance. It is all of that other crap like DRM running in the background that is causing everything to slow down. Overall Vista is measurably slower than XP and many applications just run like shit right now on Vista. Just running the OS and doing some surfing or email won't show much difference than XP on modern hardware.

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.

Re:Sysreqs

[PCM2]

Note that I don't care if I get to use Aero or not.

Then you'll be fine. Honestly, people, it's not that much different than XP. I have to assume that most of the people who are repeating these claims about RAM usage simply haven't booted Vista yet. I have 2GB on my Vista machine but that's mainly for VMWare and Photoshop work. It ran fine with 1GB (though there was a slight "Windows Experience Index" improvement when I added the second gig, probably because of the aforementioned caching).

You will not see the SuperFetch problem day 1

[Anonymous Coward]

The huge amount of memory required by Vista is not seen the first day or even week. SuperFetch, as the article details, learns what you load and preloads the applications into RAM. So once it figures out that you use everything the first week (trying a new OS), you get crushed the next week when it loads stuff you dont need. If you do not have a schedule for using applications (I know of no one who does) SuperFetch keeps guessing and using RAM.

Vista just makes good use of..

[Rdickinson]

Vista remembers what you run, and when. it loads all this into ram before your going to need it.

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.

Re:x64

[644bd346996]

Almost all intel processors, starting with the pentium pro, support PAE, which allows up to 64Gb of RAM. This was supported only by the Advanced and Datacenter server editions of Win2k, and by the enterprise version of Win2k3. Unix operating systems, however, have very good support for PAE. For a single application to be able to use more that 4Gb of RAM, though, it needs to be properly written to be PAE aware. Without using PAE, the maximum memory available for a single app is 3Gb on Windows.

Re:Windows Vista Capable according to Dell

[Oswald]

I was sure you were making this up until I followed the link. Pretty damn funny.

To think I let 5 mod points expire this morning...

Re:THis is obscene!

[SEMW]

My XP box runs fine with less than 1G and runs pretty well with 1G. It is hard to see how 3G can be gobbled up by some eye candy and other "UI innovations". That an OS needs that much memory is plain crazy.

I'm tired of saying this, but read the article -- or even just the summary. The guy is not talking about how much memory the OS needs just to fit into. 3G isn't "gobbled up by some eye candy". He's talking about the point at which adding more memory would not make any difference. His equivalent estimate for XP was 2GB; and yet, as you say, it runs find with way less than 1GB. The OS doesn't "need that much memory". It can, however, use any extra memory you do have to preload applications and data.

Loading up all that RAM takes a lot of time and shows poor design.

If you've got XGB of RAM, you may as well *use* it to cache commonly used data etc. and speed up your system, rather than just have it sit there like a lemon. Please tell me how doing this "shows poor design"?

Vista's "SuperFetch" vs. XP's "Prefetch"?

[Arthur Dent '99]

What's the difference between Windows XP's "Prefetch" and Vista's "SuperFetch"? Is it just more aggressive? XP also put applications and data in memory, saving copies in the C:\WINNT\Prefetch folder so that they would even load back up on the next machine boot, thus supposedly saving time when launching frequently-used applications. I have two problems with it, though:

1. On machines with little memory, pre-loading programs that a user MIGHT use actually slows the computer down considerably!
2. If a computer gets infected with spyware/adware, Windows dutifully puts the infection in the Prefetch folder as well, so that it will be preloaded on system boot. I've had trouble with some versions of spyware removal tools removing the infected .exe, but not removing the corresponding file in the Prefetch folder. It's usually safest to just clean out the whole folder when that happens... but the average home user doesn't even know that it's there.

For Windows XP, run RegEdit and change the value of \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher from "3" to "0" to turn off Prefetch altogether. Then, you can delete all the files in the C:\WINNT\Prefetch folder, reboot, and enjoy a faster running computer. If you have enough memory, and you find that the Prefetcher actually helps, just change that registry key back to a "3" and reboot.

Re:x64

[TheRealMindChild]

PAE [wikipedia.org]
PAE on Windows [microsoft.com]

While I know you were talking specifically to the desktop oriented versions of Windows 32-bit, there is obviously code there somewhere to do it.

Re:x64

[MerlynEmrys67]

Sigh - the 4GB is the Process Memory limit. You have been able to run 64+GByte on a Xeon box for years (desktop chipsets tend not to have enough memory slots to go this high). Each process gets its 4GB with either a 2 GB Kernel/2GB user space - or the 1GB Kernel/3GB user space mentioned by the parent.

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

Re:Vista just makes good use of..

[asuffield]

Despite the MS jokes, an OS that leaves ram unused isnt doing its job properly, it can always free memory , quickly, if needed.

Sure. Which is why every other operating system has done it for years. Some have done it for decades. I think even fricking *minix* does it.

Yet again, Windows is so far behind that it's just not funny. Seriously, is this the best they've got?

Re:Article in a nutshell...

[arth1]

More RAM is not always better. I have two boxes here, one with an Asus and one with a DFI motherboard, and what's common for both of them is that you can run 2 GB in dual channel mode, but not 4 GB. So if I upgrade the RAM, the speed of all the RAM goes down. No, thanks -- faster startup for apps won't offset them running more slowly. I'm flac'ing some CDs as I type this, and would rather that not take longer than necessary.

Another issue is that the tag and MMU caches are of a finite size on some CPUs. If I understand it correctly (I may not), the CPU will then have to make an additional request to get the real RAM address, which hurts performance.

Re:I disagree

[CastrTroy]

He also stated that there was a 3GHz Desktop with 1Gig of ram that also ran like ass. Stop trolling.

Re:Great idea Microsoft!

[maynard]

It's a good plan. RAM density and processor speed has mostly followed Moore's law in transistor density. While disk storage density has followed suit, the I/O path hasn't followed suit. The typical SATA drive might burst ~70MB/s, but it still sustains ~40MB/s just like good 'old PATA.

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.

Re:x64

[lordmatthias215]

Yeah, for a single prgram- the vast majority of programs out there don't hit that limit. What the GP is saying is that the limit of total system RAM is 4 GB on a 32-bit OS. So if the article was talking about 32-bit windows, the headline could read "max out your RAM" rather than "4 GB is the sweet spot."

Re:speed, speed and more speed - but where is it?

[plasmacutter]

youre exactly right.

In all my CS courses they were playing up recursive algorithms, and brow beat me for using for loops to do the same thing in 1/100th the memory footprint.

These were not intro courses either (granted though they were also not graduate level). I'm going to be focusing my career on the economics side of my double major, but if this is the mentality CS grads are carrying into their program design workplaces, we can look forward to ever expanding bloat over the next few decades.

Re:I disagree

[jellomizer]

It is not flamebait It is true. Until recently I was running OS X on a 667 Mhz 1Gb RAM powerbook. which as 4 1/2 years old. And it ran the latest version of OS X quite well. Not quite at the sweet spot but good enough to get most of my work done. Granted my new MacBook Pro outperforms it in every respect, but still it ran well enough no to be annoying.

Re:I disagree

[Quastor]

Was it actually running any sizable applications? Or just sitting there doing nothing? (and using 1Gb in the process)

Personally, on my system, I'm running Vista with Aero on 1 gig of RAM as well. At one point in my usage, I had Adobe Photoshop open with about 3 files, Illustrator with 2 files, Firefox with 4 tabs, and a MS Word 2007 document open, not to mention the usual IM programs. Overall, I was using about 75% of the RAM, and I noticed NO performance degradation at all. Switching between the active applications was by far the snappiest I've ever seen it in Windows with large applications like Photoshop.

Re:What?

[SEMW]

The memory used for the "SuperFetch" function is not part of the os?

The superfectch function is part of the OS. The things it is caching are not (usually*). The actually Superfetch code will take up some memory, but it will be negligibly small compared to the amount taken up by the documents and data that it is caching.

(* I say 'usually' because if someone often uses, say, WMP, then it may well happen that Superfetch will cache WMP into memory, and if you count WMP as 'part of the OS' (thhough the EU would disagree with you), then indeed, Superfetch will find itself caching part of the OS. This is the exception, however.)

Re:I disagree

[dal20402]

Sadly, Apple's not immune to RAM creep either.

My experience is that Intel Macs want much more than PowerPC Macs. My PowerMac G5 has 3 GB of RAM and I *never* swap, not even when running the big stuff, and rarely go below 1GB free. My MacBook Pro has 2 GB and I swap regularly -- it's really irritating I can't upgrade further. Rosetta is a *huge* memory hog, and Intel-native apps also seem to take more room than their PPC equivalents.

My school has several Intel iMacs with 512 MB. They start swapping before the OS is done loading. Using them is like using a 1998 PowerBook G3.

Just wait... I expect an Intel Mac with Leopard will, just like a Vista box, be happiest with >= 4 GB.

Re:x64

[tomstdenis]

hardware devices can nab space in the address space for memory mapped I/O. Usually this leaves about a 1GB hole. If your CPU can only address 32-bits that means you can only have 3GB of usable memory.

With PAE or 64-bit long mode you can see more but that requires the OS to know about it and your BIOS to perform a memory remap.

Tom

Only for 64 bit versions

[denoir]

In the case of the more common 32 bit version of Vista, you'll never get 4 GB of usable memory. The reason is that all the devices in the system need allocatable addresses which can only go as high as 32 bits so they occupy the address space that would otherwise be available for the RAM. Modern graphic cards also swallow a fair bit of address space. The end result is that you'll only get about 3 GB usable memory of the 4 GB physical memory.

If you are using Vista x32, do *not* buy more than 3 GB of memory or you will be just throwing your money away.

Re:THis is obscene!

[skiflyer]

If you've got XGB of RAM, you may as well *use* it to cache commonly used data etc. and speed up your system, rather than just have it sit there like a lemon. Please tell me how doing this "shows poor design"?

And to reinforce that point a bit... Vista is faster when it's cached those programs. I have a dual boot XP/Vista box... ~60 seconds to load up my currently most common .sln file in XP... from click to type... in Vista, 4 seconds. Makes a big difference in my daily life since I have a bad habit of closing and reopening Visual Studio a lot during the day.

Re:Only for 64 bit versions

[daverabbitz]

Actually this isn't correct. If your motherboard supports PAE in 32bit mode (most 64-bit motherboards do), then you can use up to around 64GB of ram.

Windows Server 2003 supports PAE, one would assume Windows Vista (i386) also has PAE support (Check before you buy though).

I know for a fact that Linux 2.6 supports PAE as I have many 32 bit machines and 64 bit machines running 32 bit linux with more than 4GB of memory. And it is all available for use.

While your point was true last century, it isn't really applicable today.

Re:THis is obscene!

[TheNetAvenger]

Your understanding of the LDDM (WGL, or whatever the heck you want to call it) is grossly oversimplified and vastly fanboyish.


First off, LDDM was the code name from back in 2005, (Longhorn Device Driver Model); however, since Vista is NOT called Longhorn, the name is now referred to as WDDM (Windows Device Driver Model). Ever hear of Wikipedia or Google? This is easy stuff to look up, even for causal SlashDot readers.

As for my understanding of Vista's driver model and handling of GPU textures I won't repeat myself, and instead will point you to find the answers for yourself because you do seem either angry or confused.

"WDDM enables multiple applications to utilize the GPU simultaneously by implementing the following:

GPU memory manager--arbitrates video memory allocation
GPU scheduler--schedules various GPU applications according to their priority
With these technologies, applications no longer have to cede the GPU when another application requiring its services starts-up. Instead, the GPU is scheduled in a more efficient fashion."

From: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220. aspx [microsoft.com]

"WDDM now allows for "virtualized" video memory. Virtualization abstracts video memory so that it is no longer necessary to think about creating a resource in either video or system memory. Just specify what the resource is going to be used for and the system will place the memory in the best place possible. Additionally, virtualization allows for the allocation of more memory than actually exists on the hardware. Memory is then paged into the correct hardware as needed."

From: http://www.microsoft.com/indonesia/msdn/wvddirectx .aspx [microsoft.com]


I would pull more technical stuff for you, but based on the 'quality' of your response, I grabbed the first non-technical documents on this for you to read and reference.

Next time, do your own homework before attacking someone's post that you have NO CLUE what you are even responding to.

PS - Will the person that modded the parent post 'Insightful', please also take a minute to actually look some of this stuff up before clapping like a silly schoolboy on something they ALSO know nothing about.

Re: This is obscene!

[eat here_get gas]

"...Even with 1GB you are good with AERO,..." I disagree... I was running an AMD 3000+ (Barton) w/ 2X512MB and an ATI Radeon 9600SE (software OC'd to take advantage of the R350 graphics engine), and M$ wouldn't let me enable AERO. Nor could I multi-task without severe performance degradation/crashing. And this machine was rated 1.0 on the performance index, hilariously! It runs perfect on XP (which I am back to using, btw), I can play any game with ease (and full graphics!), and multi-tasking has never been an issue.

Re:Look at what we have

[Ihlosi]

Notice that? Resolution at 320 x 200 16 colours. That translates to 4000 bytes of graphics memory.. Now my Macbook Pro can do 1680 x 1050 32-bit colour. That is over 7MB of graphics memory. (Is this correctly calculated?)

The latter is, the former isn't.
320 x 200 x 4 bpp (bits per pixel) is 32 kB. However, the C64 had 16 colors only in low-res (160x200) - so it's 16 kB. At least afair. I was too young to care about the exact specs back then.

Expanding both X and Y-resolution and even colour, makes the juice required exponential..

Not exponential, but with O^2. Doubling the X and Y resoluting quadruples the memory requirement, tripling the resolution requires nine times the memory (if it were exponential, it would require 16x the memory).

Re:More RAM

[wbd]

Then simply buy it "anywhere else" and plug it in. You can do that, you know. Doesn't even void your warranty. Easy to do, even on their laptops (the slots are usually accessible underneath the battery or underneath the keyboard.)

There another anti-Mac-troll bashed with truth.

Re:More RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Price the same drive from Dell or HP. You can buy from the big brand computer co or buy it direct - the EXACT same situation applies to whether you're using a Dell, HP or Apple PC. I've never bought RAM or disk from Apple for my Macs (except once when they were doing a RAM promo price that made it the same as third party).

So it's NOT a fact, because nobhead no 1 said that RAM for Macs cost more. It doesn't and never did, because it's the same fucking RAM as everyone else uses. RAM FROM APPLE costs plenty, but see Dell and HP once again.

To sum up, fuck off.