Windows 8 To Reduce Memory Footprint 306
bheer writes "Microsoft's Windows 8 blog has a good post about the work being done to reduce Windows 8's memory footprint. The OS will use multiple approaches to do this, including combining RAM pages, re-architecting old bits of code and adding new APIs for more granular memory management. Interestingly, it will also let services start on a trigger and stop when needed instead of running all the time."
Re:About friggin' time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people who don't really understand memory management will just look at the processes and start bitching how much memory each program uses, or how Windows shows there isn't any memory available (while in fact it's just used for caching things). They're only half-intelligent, which hurts them even more than not knowing at all. The fact is, non used memory goes to waste. Every time there's memory that's free, well, it's just wasting it. It's much better approach that OS tries to use it all intelligently.
This same pattern of stupid comments can be seen in browser comparisons too. It's always full of people going "omg Firefox/Opera/IE is using this much memory!" while it shows that they don't understand what is really happening. The browser and OS reserves that memory because it speeds up things. If the memory is needed elsewhere, it can and will free it up. That's something that seems to be really hard for people to understand, as the same thing always happens in every browser story or story about memory management.
"let services start on a trigger" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:About friggin' time... (Score:5, Insightful)
By what mechanism can a browser know when the memory it has reserved is needed elsewhere in the system? I don't think it works that way.
When people complain about browsers needing excessive amounts of memory they usually refer to memory leaks, not to intelligent use of memory through caching.
The bit about how some people misinterpret the amount of free memory the OS reports is totally true, though.
Re:About friggin' time... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Except for the services part, Windows memory management has been improving a lot with each version."
Are you forgetting Vista? It's only two versions of Windows ago. Windows 7 certainly improved on Vista, but Vista's memory requirements were hugely greater than XP's, for seemingly little benefit (despite all the little tricks they introduced).
"The browser and OS reserves that memory because it speeds up things. If the memory is needed elsewhere, it can and will free it up."
I understand the concept of RAM caching - it's not exactly rocket science. But how does Firefox/Opera/IE free up memory when the OS needs it? What is the mechanism by which the OS tells the browser to free memory?
I hope you're not referring to paging. Excessive paging to and from disk as you switch between applications is not a sign of a well-performing system.
Re:About friggin' time... (Score:4, Insightful)
By what mechanism can a browser know when the memory it has reserved is needed elsewhere in the system? I don't think it works that way.
When people complain about browsers needing excessive amounts of memory they usually refer to memory leaks, not to intelligent use of memory through caching.
The bit about how some people misinterpret the amount of free memory the OS reports is totally true, though.
I recall people complaining that their Vista system with 8GB of RAM had no free memory. This was true of systems running with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB RAM. This tells me that much of that was cache but that didn't stop people from claiming that Vista was a memory hog.
However, you do have a point about the browser. If I leave Firefox running on a page that refreshes itself, like Slashdot, over the weekend, when I come back to the machine, Firefox is using over up to a GB or RAM and everything else is swapped out to the HDD. It takes several minutes for the system to become spunky again, and it usually requires a force close of Firefox. Firefox has pages cached on its own and OS knows nothing about it. All it sees is that Firefox.exe "needs" 1GB RAM.
Re:I have a Windows XP box running... (Score:4, Insightful)
It shouldn't need to - you quite literally cannot buy new memory in less than 512GB capacity. That would be like saying "I can run Linux on a Motorola 68000, will Windows 8 do that?" - it won't, because there's very very little market demand for running a new operating system on decade-old hardware.
Re:Like Mac OS classic (Score:4, Insightful)
More useful would be a message asking tasks to free up memory if they can. Tasks that can't (or were from prior to the new message existing) would simply ignore it and the OS would deal with them just as it currently does.
Tasks that are just holding onto memory for caching or other non-immediate uses could potentially free up a lot. Obviously wouldn't apply to a whole lot of programs, but being applied to a handful of important ones (say, browsers) could make a lot of difference.
Of course the OS would still need to be smart about it.. it would be too slow to try that on the fly.. but the OS could easily determine when it thinks its own cache is getting too small and can start bugging programs to free up theirs.