86% of Windows 7 PCs Maxing Out Memory 613
CWmike writes "Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory 'saturation' point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. 'This is alarming,' Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. 'For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.'"
Re:Depends on what kind of memory (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:When do people get this (Score:1, Interesting)
Trollworthy rating for posting this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Computerworld should just close up shop for this worthless piece of journalism, or at least give their author the boot for doing any work with Craig Barth who represents a team of morons. samzenpus should be given a troll rating for getting this to Slashdot.
People are buying cheap PC's and upgrading old one (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:When do people get this (Score:5, Interesting)
So yeah, it doesn't seem like the author really knows what's going on...
Re:When do people get this (Score:5, Interesting)
If the memory was freed up dynamically as needed then no processes would ever be forced to resort to disk-based virtual memory.
The trouble is, the TFA doesn't actually say (at least not clearly) that the Win7 machines are indeed turning to swap more regularly. It just states that fetching stuff from the swap file is a consequence of running out of RAM and causes perf degradation. So if the Win7 machines are indeed utilizing all available RAM and yet not swapping at a significanly higher rate, it means they're making more optimum use of available RAM.
Re:When do people get this (Score:5, Interesting)
Totally agree. If you don't want Windows 7 to use the 4GB of RAM you've paid for to speed up your computer, take out 2GB and put it in the drawer. Otherwise, be thankful that it's actually making the most of the RAM you're using.
What next? People complaining that games use 100% CPU to give them maximum framerate when it could just use 30% CPU and give them 10 FPS?
Re:When do people get this (Score:2, Interesting)
You'll excuse my ignorance, but from college I remember that usually you have 0-2V represent 0 and 3-5V represent 1. Does a 0 have a corresponding increase in amperage so that it levels out and uses the same amount of power?
It seems natural to me that it would be initialized with zeroes on power-up, so that it would minimize power consumption.
Furthermore, more advanced chips, especially in mobile devices, have a variety of power-saving tricks. I would expect RAM would be no exception in having ways to clock down in line with requirements.
Re:When do people get this (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:When do people get this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When do people get this (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair, windows 7 will swap data out, my PC atm is sitting here with 8GB of ram, 1.1GB used by programs, 5.9GB used by cache and its reporting 1.2GB free, so it still pages out data. However I have never noticed it pageing, so likely its paging out the "right data", in other words stuff that is not used, just how an OS should work :)
Re:When do people get this (Score:1, Interesting)
:) May not be true for long. There are some recent technologies that allow not only processor but also memory quiescing. Doesn't apply to this thread, but I can see a time where unused memory doesn't use as much power.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:When do people get this (Score:4, Interesting)
actaully the windows 7 caching model is great. on games the difference between the first loading of a level and subsequent loads are night and day thanks to it's caching model.
That's the windows cache system generally, from way back in the NT days... Vista and later SuperFetch is more than that.
btw, regarding the article more directly: they shows no figure about the actual _swap_ usage, a thing that may or may not disprove their theory.
Indeed. The xpnet site does mention that they factor in paging somehow, but that's still pretty useless - paging activity needs to be a separate statistic. Also, simply looking at pagefile usage isn't terribly useful, an inactive app can have it's working set trimmed and pages flushed out to disk, and this won't matter much in the big picture.
What you need to look at is the rate of pagefile activity (ie., pages/second) as well as how often it happens - not just static numbers (even if having 1gig of data in the pf is probably a warning sign :))
Re:When do people get this (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the issue here is that the system is turning to swap.
Turn swapping off. If you have a reasonable amount of RAM there's no reason to leave it turned on. I turn it off anyway for security considerations -- I use Truecrypt -- but really there's no reason not to do so on any XP machine with 2 gigs of RAM or Vista/Win 7 machine with 4 gigs of RAM.
Re:When do people get this (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm inclined to think it's this, at least for my Vista machine. I currently have 6GB RAM, but at any given time with Outlook, FireFox, and a handful of Explorer windows open there isn't any more than 2-3GB showing to be in use. The rest is cached. This becomes a problem only when I need to fire up a 2GB Linux VM for testing, the VM will pause itself on startup, citing not enough RAM available. I'm no expert, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the caching mechanism is the culprit.
Available memory != Free memory (Score:5, Interesting)
For work I'm using Windows 7 64 bit on a 4GB notebook PC with tons of windows open e.g. a few Explorer windows open, a few Excel "windows"[1], a few Word windows, one Visio doc, Notepad++, Google Chrome, Firefox, putty, Outlook (a resource hog), Communicator, MSN Messenger windows, a Virtual Box Linux vm machine, Microsoft Security Essentials (it's my work PC so it's supposed to have AV) and it typically says 1700 to 2000MB _available_ (depending on how many firefox tabs, how many word docs and virtual machines etc). But overall no mem problem.
And guess which is using the most RAM? Not Virtual Box, not Word, outlook or Excel. It's Firefox with a 173MB working set and 142MB Private Working Set!
Yes it only has 500MB free memory, but so what? The O/S says there's 1700MB available. And so far I haven't had much slowdowns due to low memory issues.
To me the relevant metric for "low on memory" is "Pages Output/sec" (go launch perfmon.msc and add that counter). If that's a constant zero when you or the O/S switches from app to app, window to window, it means it's not swapping out. If it's not swapping out and not getting "out of memory" messages, it's not low in RAM no matter what some random "expert" thinks. And it's zero for me.
The equivalent in Linux for that is the swap "so" column when you run vmstat 1 (or vmstat 2). Same thing there - stuck at zero = not swapping.
I don't think my usage can be considered "light", as it is, what are those users running that's using up so much memory? Symantec or McAfee antivirus?
FWIW, my laptop is not running any of the "OEM crapware" - I did a clean install of Windows 7 months ago when I got the laptop.
If that "expert CTO" can't even give an example of one memory hogging program (or show where Windows 7 itself is using so much memory that it's a problem), then it's likely he's full of crap.
Lastly, it's true my taskbar looks messy with two rows of task buttons, but I don't see the advantage of closing and reopening documents or programs if I'm not running out of RAM yet. I close them if I really do not need them (e.g. the document is out of date and not used for comparison). Otherwise it's much faster to just click a button to show the desired doc, rather than have to reopen it again from scratch (uses less battery power too - except in the case of MS Word which seems to use CPU even when "idle" - haven't figured that one out yet).
[1] By default Excel actually just has one window which changes to display the relevant document depending on which Excel taskbar button you click, whereas Word actually has separate windows for each doc.
Re:When do people get this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When do people get this (Score:3, Interesting)
No kidding. (Score:4, Interesting)
I pity people running the x86 version of the OS that are maxing out at 4gb. Definitely buy 64 bit (even though its more of a beta than a real OS) if you do anything memory intensive.
The one good thing about all this is that HOPEFULLY...FINALLY...maybe this will push Microsoft to push 64 bit more. They need to abandon 32 bit and force application writers and hardware manufacturers to start making 64 bit native applications. Working in a medical environment BELIEVE me I understand the need for backwards compatability, but the fact is that the resources are just not being put in to 64 bit to make it a really viable platform and even moderate power users are going to start bumping up against the 4gb limit.
Yea, I read that thing saying that the 4gb limit is a product-based limit rather than a technical limit but either way...it appears that x64 is where MS is choosing to support > 4gb so lets get serious about it.
Re:When do people get this (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows gets really cranky when it doesn't have a pagefile. We tried it for performance reasons and we saw an almost 40% drop in performance despite the server not being under any kind of memory pressure.
And yet when I turn off swap on my 32-bit Vista laptop performance increases 1,000 - 10,000% easily. The difference between waiting 10 minutes for the computer to stop thrashing the swap file and near-instantaneous action is immeasurable.
Typical "don't turn off your pagefile" responses are fraught with lack of experience. There are times when a system performs better with a pagefile. There are many times when a system performs so much better without a pagefile that one wouldn't dream of ever turning it back on.