Cache memory fills up RAM so I can't play performance heavy games

Hello,

I have a really powerful gaming rig with Intel Core i7 2.8 GHz, Crucial C300 64GB SSD and 8 gigs of RAM which most would think is more than enough to run even the most performance demanding of games. I was playing COD: Blackops the other day and Windows told me it had to close some programs because it was low on system memory. I then saw that 5 GIGS were bound in cached memory and Windows 7 seemingly refused to give them up so I could play the game.

I don't want to hear from people saying that this it's actually a good thing that Windows is using my memory to cache programs and stuff and that it's a process I don't notice at all since it gives it up if you need it. The thing is it DOES annoy me because Windows doesn't give it up and it means I have to restart if I want to play a game that demands only roughly 1 gig of the 8 gigs I have. Also since I have a SSD all my programs load superfast anyways so I really want to find a way to completely shut this really irritating and stupid function off since it annoys me a lot.

Does anyone know of any way around this or a way to maybe make Windows realize that I sometimes need some of the gigabytes of RAM I paid for.

Manitis said:

I was playing COD: Blackops the other day and Windows told me it had to close some programs because it was low on system memory. I then saw that 5 GIGS were bound in cached memory and Windows 7 seemingly refused to give them up so I could play the game.

I don't want to hear from people saying that this it's actually a good thing that Windows is using my memory to cache programs and stuff and that it's a process I don't notice at all since it gives it up if you need it. The thing is it DOES annoy me because Windows doesn't give it up and it means I have to restart if I want to play a game that demands only roughly 1 gig of the 8 gigs I have.

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Asking for help and then telling people you don't want to hear reality prolly isn't the best way to actually get the help you're looking for. When you let people know right off the bat you're not receptive to truth... well... who wants a part of that, right?

What you have is a memory leak; caused by some application you installed and run in-between reboots.

You can start helping us help you by filling out your system specs, in detail, and list all the applications/programs you have up and running, or that you run when you notice high memory usage.

Do you have a page file?

I'm sorry about the irritated response to start with, I was just a bit fed up that every site I visited seemed to say that nothing was wrong and I was getting frustrated at not being able to fix a problem that seemed to be a byproduct of failed memory handling on Windows behalf. So I apologize for that, my temper just flared up a bit.

My system specs are:
CPU: Intel Core i7 2.8GHz
Motherboard: Asus P6T SE
GPU: 1GB Sapphire ATI RADEON HD 5770
Ram: 4x2GB DDR3 1600 MHz Corsair XMS3
SSD: 64GB Crucial RealSSD C300
HDD: 2x1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA-300 7200rpm 32MB
PSU: SilverStone ST75F 750 Watt

At the time when I got the message I was playing COD: Blackops and I would guess that the two main possible culprits would be Chrome or Skype. I was actually video chatting on Skype at the time and that means that Skype takes up about 250MB of RAM and I almost always have some Chrome windows open and due to the fact that I have quite a few extensions it actually runs quite high in RAM, for example right now as I'm writing this Chrome as a whole is actually taking up 1GB of Private memory and 1GB in private virtual memory with 500 MB in mapped virtual memory (don't know which number was needed). Other than those two I didn't have other notably RAM heavy programs running.

@logicearth: I do have a pagefile which is the size that Windows recommends 12274MB and it resides on one of the 1.5TB drives and is set such that Initial Size and Maximum Size or both set to 12274MB.

I hope this helps and I appreciate any support (even though I started sounding like I didn't )

No blood no foul Manitis, we've all been there.

Since you've got your page file on another drive, did you make sure to go to your power options and set your hard drives to turn off "never"? If Windows needs to page, and that drive has spun down, this may be creating a problem?

Black Ops doesn't have a leak... I can't speak for Skype or Chrome, but the fact that Chrome seems to want 2.5GB's of RAM tells me there's a problem, a big one. Try using another browser for a few days and see if the problem still occurs.

Is your OS fully patched?

Often memory errors like this are due to the Pagefile. many times because its disabled.

Having it on another drive should be fine. But, as pointed out make sure that Drive is not going into sleep mode.


Something else you may want to try, if you do not want the PF on the OS.

A 500MB PF on your main OS drive.

Then the Main PF on secondary drive..
With 8GB of RAM, I would just use something like a set (Min/Max) 4GB one as the main PF. Or you can set it to let Windows Manage.

Its a good thing to have a least a small PF with the OS IMHO.



Keep in mind most Games are 32bit apps, and therefore will only use up to 2GB of RAM.
Of course thats 2GB per 32bit app. There really shouldn't be a issue running multiple things in memory .. especially no more than you are.

I agree, the fact Chrome is using so much itslef though is a bit troubling.

Yeah I'm actually myself amazed at how high Chrome was. In a process explorer the processes combine most of the time to a little over 1 GB. I don't know if in the example before it was actually taking up 2.5Gigs since I don't know what the virtual memory is in fact (from what I've read it's not directly the pagefile but more a mixture of the CPU,RAM and the HDD as this guy writes: Answers.com - Difference between virtual memory and main memory )

I found the hard drive turn off idea very interesting and thought that could've caused it but unfortunately it was already set to never. I will however make a small 500mb PF on the main drive just to test that out. It's also a good point made by Wishmaster that because most games are 32 bit they only access 2GB and therefore although they appear to be way under my maximum RAM usage they could be maxing out the 2GB accessible to them.

I was wondering whether there was any program at all that could help me identify which program could be causing the memory leak, like say a process explorer that can list what's in the cached memory? Because the problem is I don't have a certain way of causing the problem so it's a little bit tricky to know when it's solved and when it's not, so much harder to solve those kind of problems. I'm going to try to find a way to reproduce the problem and find out whether the problem lies with Chrome or Skype, since those are the two main suspects.

Amother suggestion - turn Superfetch off (in Services). That should stop the caching. It is not something I recommend on a permanent basis, but as a test it may give us some clues.

It is actually disabled, it happens automatically in Windows 7 because I have a SSD. Windows then disables disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching.

Manitis said:

It is actually disabled, it happens automatically in Windows 7 because I have a SSD. Windows then disables disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching.

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Superfetch is not automatically disabled because of the SSD - at least not on my 5 systems with SSDs. Did you actually check that in Services?

Oh okay, I read that somewhere but it could be wrong. But I checked and it is disabled on my computer.

I actually have less RAM than you (see system specs) and am an avid gamer and have never run into memory problems. I would suggest you check to see if it isn't actually a game related issue as opposed to a Windows memory usage issue. Wishmaster is also an avid gamer and I'm quite sure she hasn't run into your problem either (I think).

BTW I do have a pagefile, I don’t have Superfetch disabled. In fact I don’t have any Windows "tweaks" at all. I’ve also got all my games on a mechanical hard drive as opposed to my SSD drive.

Again, with this configuration, and only 6gig of RAM, no memory issues. I say again, check to see if this isn’t in fact a game issue. Some game are in fact known to have memory issues, so.....

My two cents.

Just a thought ...

The next time this happens look in your services, and show processes from all Users.


See how much memory the audioDG is using.
I remember a while back playing EQ2, that my RAM use would climb up to about 6-7GB of memory use. Which was just a bit overboard.
Eventually I would get a message that memory was low.



After some investigation, I found the audiodg.exe was very high use.
Turned out for me, Ventrillo was the culprit.

It had since been fixed but ...


Perhaps something similar is happening here with Skype?
May not be the issue, but was just a thought.

I have never used Skype, nor know anything about it, but its something to at least look into.



And as Sygnus has suggested, some games have leaks. I've seen it myself.
If, for example,they attempt to write to memory outside of thier 2GB allocated space, it will cause a memory error. This usually causes a crash though.

whs said:

Amother suggestion - turn Superfetch off (in Services). That should stop the caching. It is not something I recommend on a permanent basis, but as a test it may give us some clues.

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Manitis said:

It is actually disabled, it happens automatically in Windows 7 because I have a SSD. Windows then disables disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching.

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whs said:

Manitis said:

It is actually disabled, it happens automatically in Windows 7 because I have a SSD. Windows then disables disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching.

Click to expand...

Superfetch is not automatically disabled because of the SSD - at least not on my 5 systems with SSDs. Did you actually check that in Services?

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It's not disabled right off with a new install on newer SSD's, until you run the WEI for the first time. Then it automatically disables it. If you don't ever run the WEI, it won't ever automatically turn it off.

I believe on old first gen SSD's they didn't auto disable it at all.

Airbot said:

It's not disabled right off with a new install on newer SSD's, until you run the WEI for the first time. Then it automatically disables it. If you don't ever run the WEI, it won't ever automatically turn it off.

I believe on old first gen SSD's they didn't auto disable it at all.

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Hmmm.... never knew that. Is there a place to find this info?

Thanks.

Never mind I found it.....

Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck.

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Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Disabling Superfetch is a BIG mistake. RAM is a lot faster than the fastest SSD.

Microsoft apparently doesn't think so. However in regards to early gen SSD's....

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.

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whs said:

Disabling Superfetch is a BIG mistake. RAM is a lot faster than the fastest SSD.

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I agree.
While the benefit is not immediatey apparent, after a few days there is a bit of a difference.

I turn mine back on.

Honestly I never even knew mines was off, had no performance issues or drive degredation so I'll leave mine as is.

I leave SuperFetch enabled on my box with my SSD.

To the OP, Windows 7 should use RAM and it should free up that RAM as needed. That is normal and what you want. However, in your case, it's not cached RAM that is filling up your memory, but rather a memory leak that is causing RAM to be fully used and thus running out. So, those are two different things.