RAM going to hardware

Hello all,

First post and I thought of you guys first since I'm having a very odd issue.

First off so I don't get this! I'm on Windows 7 Professional x64, so it isn't limiting my RAM for having x86!

I have 8GB (4x 2GB) sticks of RAM installed, and it recognizes this, but it still only shows that 7GB are available for use. I checked it out under performance monitor and for some reason 1GB of it is going to my hardware.



Now I have 2 video cards each with 512 MB of RAM on them.. for some reason I'm guessing it's not recognizing those.

Any idea what the heck is going on in my system? Thanks in advance!

Check under preformance in task mngr it is probably being used in cache,and paged and non paged.

Hi all, I'm having a relative issue. I have 12 gb of RAM, and with no applications running, it consumes 1.47gb from the very beginning? Does anybody have an idea of why so much? Thanks,

Check your BIOS for an entry that will relocate your video ram (goes by different names). Some motherboards can't do it though.

By default the video ram does sit in the lower 4 gig. Having a 64 system means you can have more than 4 gig of ram installed, but doesn't get you around the fact that your hardware may [edit]still need to use[/edit] still block some of it.

Even if you can relocate your video memory above the 4 gig line, if you have 8 gig in your machine it may still show up as a hole... again, motherboard/BIOS dependant.

BTW that bar graph doesn't give you the relative locations of those memory usages, merely the amounts in use... The hardware hole is not at the begining of the ram it's most likely on the 3-4 gig. mark

gusgestal said:

Hi all, I'm having a relative issue. I have 12 gb of RAM, and with no applications running, it consumes 1.47gb from the very beginning? Does anybody have an idea of why so much? Thanks,

Click to expand...

G

Its supposed to. win 7 aloocates ram differently than previous OS's. You spent good money on the 12 gigs you have dont you want them to be used as much as they can?


ken

I understand that it's relocating the video RAM, but I'm still missing a GB of RAM somewhere.

I have 1GB on my video cards combined, then 8 GB installed. Why would the video cards be taking away from the 8GB? Wouldn't it be adding to make it 9 instead?

KtotheFC said:

I understand that it's relocating the video RAM, but I'm still missing a GB of RAM somewhere.

I have 1GB on my video cards combined, then 8 GB installed. Why would the video cards be taking away from the 8GB? Wouldn't it be adding to make it 9 instead?

Click to expand...

Don't worry, although your cards have 512mb each,
Windows reserves another gig for them in case it's needed,
The more mem you have, the more will be reserved.

Since you have 8gb, I recommend disabling the pagefile.
You won't ever run out of ram under normal circumstances.

Good luck

How would I go about doing that? =x Sorry I'm a noob lol

KtotheFC said:

How would I go about doing that? =x Sorry I'm a noob lol

Click to expand...

1. click startorb
2. rightclick on computer (in right menu)
3. click properties
4. in appearing window on the left side you'll see "advanced system settings"
click on it
5. the next dialog select "advanced" tab if not already selected
6. under performance click the "settings" button
7. in the next dialog there is another "advanced" tab
select it
8. under virtual memory click "edit"
9. in the next dialog uncheck the box "let windows....."
10. in the list click on your C: drive
11. check the "no swapfile" bullet
12. click ok a few times until you are back to the first screen.
13. Reboot your machine.

Good luck

Depending on the motherboard, sometimes the relocation ofthe video ram only gets pushed up to the 5th gig :/

Now since you obviously have a 64 bit ready MB that cn take more than 4G of ram... It wold seem hard to believe that they were only relocating the video ream from the 4th gig of ram to the 5th, it should be moved to the 9th, 13th or maybe the 200th, whatever was just beyond the max ram the MB wwould accept.

At that point I run out of steam about the limitations the BIOS might have with where it can move the video ram to attempt to get it off main ram space though...

Yeah I checked my BIOS and no memory remapping for me, so I'm stuck! Anyway, thank you all for the help, I'm guessing this is solved then!

KtotheFC said:

Yeah I checked my BIOS and no memory remapping for me, so I'm stuck! Anyway, thank you all for the help, I'm guessing this is solved then!

Click to expand...

In some BIOS's it is named different, like memory hole...

Can't imagine your mainboard supporting 8gb but not remapping.

Look again.

Greetz

Never mind, I found this in your board's manual:

Due to the chipset resource deployment, the system density will only be
detected up to 7+GB (not full 8GB) when each DIMM is installed with a 2GB
memory module.

Click to expand...

SquonkSC said:

Since you have 8gb, I recommend disabling the pagefile.

Good luck

Click to expand...

Why?

H2SO4 said:

SquonkSC said:

Since you have 8gb, I recommend disabling the pagefile.

Good luck

Click to expand...

Why?

Click to expand...

First because it isn't necessary unless one does something to use up all 8gb, in which case the pc would crash.

Second because creation, growth and maintenance of the pagefile by windows means repeated unnecessary disk access.
Many of the windows processes are partially loaded in the pagefile.
By not having a pagefile, they are loaded in RAM.

Since the HDD is already the bottleneck of any system, anything you do to prevent unnescesarry disk reads/writes increases Os performance noticeably.

I have disabled pagefile on every system I installed with more than 4gb,
for more than two yrs without any downside, and with the systems being much snappier.

Note:
On my music production machine, turning off the pagefile solved audio crackling when there are many virtual instruments playing at the same time, which is a clear indication of performance gain.

When a process is not used for a few minutes, windows starts offloading it from RAM to pagefile.
With a Ram speed critical process like virtual instruments, it results in crackling sound when you play 30 or more audio/midi tracks.

Greetings.

The detailed response tells me you're digging in for some good ol' fashioned arguing, and that pleases me

SquonkSC said:

First because it isn't necessary unless one does something to use up all 8gb, in which case the pc would crash.

Click to expand...

It is actually necessary for some peripheral scenarios - dump creation and perfmon being the usual examples.

SquonkSC said:

Second because creation, growth and maintenance of the pagefile by windows means repeated unnecessary disk access.

Click to expand...

Creation is only done at the sysadmin's behest. "Growth and maintenance" are done as necessary, so that's a circular argument. If it wasn't necessary, they wouldn't be growing.

SquonkSC said:

Many of the windows processes are partially loaded in the pagefile.
By not having a pagefile, they are loaded in RAM.

Click to expand...

Processes generally have no idea what portions of their VM are resident or paged out. That's a function of memory pressure and the Memory Manager's algorithms.

SquonkSC said:

Since the HDD is already the bottleneck of any system, anything you do to prevent unnescesarry disk reads/writes increases Os performance noticeably.

Click to expand...

No argument there. Unnecessary disk access is a bad thing.

SquonkSC said:

I have disabled pagefile on every system I installed with more than 4gb,
for more than two yrs without any downside, and with the systems being much snappier.

Click to expand...

OK, but what was the upside - why did you do it?

SquonkSC said:

Note:
On my music production machine, turning off the pagefile solved audio crackling when there are many virtual instruments playing at the same time, which is a clear indication of performance gain.

Click to expand...

You're indirectly accusing the Memory Manager or the app (see below) of having a bug which caused excessive working set trimming in the ebsence of memory pressure.

SquonkSC said:

When a process is not used for a few minutes, windows starts offloading it from RAM to pagefile.

Click to expand...

That's not entirely true. The WS trimming mechanism is mostly driven by pressure, and to a lesser extent a desire to be prepared for upcoming dearth. A page can stay resident almost indefinitely in situations where plenty of RAM is available. Even if it's trimmed, it ends up on the standby and modified lists where it can be quickly soft-faulted back into the process WS without incurring the penalty of HDD access.

SquonkSC said:

With a Ram speed critical process like virtual instruments, it results in crackling sound when you play 30 or more audio/midi tracks.

Click to expand...

Oh, sure, but now you're accusing the process/app playing those virtual instruments of having a bug and potentially not calling VirtualLock() to ensure critical pages are resident at the times where disk access is to be avoided.

SquonkSC said:

Greetings.

Click to expand...

Greetz to you too. This is just-for-fun

It's 4:53 am here and I am a bit tired to say the least, but I never pass on a good discussion.

First because it isn't necessary unless one does something to use up all 8gb, in which case the pc would crash.

It is actually necessary for some peripheral scenarios - dump creation and perfmon being the usual examples.

Click to expand...

Actually I don't care about dumpfiles and monitoring on my production systems. They simply never crash.
I set my systems up through a very strict order, that I thoroughly tested in a test (second boot) environment.
I keep logs of everything I do.
Only after thorough testing I put it into my production machine.

On the test environment I have pagefile enabled for the reasons you mentioned.

Second because creation, growth and maintenance of the pagefile by windows means repeated unnecessary disk access.

Creation is only done at the sysadmin's behest. "Growth and maintenance" are done as necessary, so that's a circular argument. If it wasn't necessary, they wouldn't be growing.

Click to expand...

Have to contradict you here.
Although this is true in theory, in the real windows world it's not.
It grows regardless of how much free memory you have left.

I'll prove my case by turning it around. If it's growth was necessary, disabling it would crash my pc.

OK, but what was the upside - why did you do it?

Click to expand...

Already answered: it noticeably speeds up the OS cause unnecessary reads/writes no longer occur.
(And read my next reply.)

You're indirectly accusing the Memory Manager or the app (see below) of having a bug which caused excessive working set trimming in the ebsence of memory pressure.

Click to expand...

Regardless of which of the two is causing it, fact is that it does happen. Disabling pagefile solves it.
Why wouldn't I disable it when Music Production and cristal clear sound is my goal?

Frankly, I think it is the mem manager cause Cubase SX is not the only audio app that crackles with many audio tracks playing.
Every audio app I used has it, Adobe Audition, Reaper, Ableton and Sonar.
And not only on this machine. My previous setup had exactly the same.
Note that I am not just putting a few tracks together.
They are complete orchestrations with usually 30 up to 60 tracks of audio and midi, stacks of virtual instruments and effects.

A page can stay resident almost indefinitely in situations where plenty of RAM is available. Even if it's trimmed, it ends up on the standby and modified lists where it can be quickly soft-faulted back into the process WS without incurring the penalty of HDD access.

Click to expand...

Again, that's theory.
The OS shouldn't offload to disk when you have plenty of RAM available, but in practice with the pagefile enabled, it does.

When I just fully loaded my project and all virtual instruments are loaded in RAM, I play the recorded tracks and all runs fine.
From that moment on, in task manager I can see the virtual memory grow, same as the free physical memory, very slowly.

After a few hrs of working, the crackling starts to occur, and I can see the virtual memory grew quite a lot, and I have more free phys. mem than when I started.

When I save, close and reopen the app, all is fine again.
I can only conclude the OS is in fact offloading to disk, even though it's not supposed to.

With a Ram speed critical process like virtual instruments, it results in crackling sound when you play 30 or more audio/midi tracks.

Oh, sure, but now you're accusing the process/app playing those virtual instruments of having a bug and potentially not calling VirtualLock() to ensure critical pages are resident at the times where disk access is to be avoided.

Click to expand...

Yes.



Greetz to you again.

PS. I'm off to bed, but I will read your reply first thing tomorrow.

Sorry, was kinda busy. Now let's get back to technical arguing in a respectful manner

Consider the implications of your "real world versus theory" position. Each of us on a Win7 machine runs the exact same Memory Manager (Mm) code. In a few days, thousands or millions of others will start joining us in relying on those same Mm algorithms. Your accusation is that the Mm erroneously and heavy-handedly trimmed the working set (WS) of a process and paged out data that was being frequently touched - without memory pressure forcing it to do so. Not only that, but over the course of time you watched the situation degenerate as the WS of your active process steadily decreased to the point where you were experiencing performance issues - again, without underlying memory pressure.

That would constitute a huge bug in the Mm, a problem arguably bigger than anything commonly discussed here. If that's your "real world" experience, and you've used perfmon or other tools to verify the details, I'd really suggest you file a bug with MS. (You'd also want to file a bug with the app developer to tell them to consider using VirtualLock() for critical pages, but that's another story.)

The practice of doing away with pagefiles at a certain arbitrary amount of RAM is IMHO misguided. We don't know whether the OP is perhaps in the habit of processing a few hundred raw dSLR images in CS4, while looking at the detailed stuctural plans for a couple of skyscrapers in 64-bit AutoCAD over on another monitor. Granted, it's probable that they won't miss the pagefile, since the commit charge rarely gets that high for most home users, but then they won't gain anything much either - except to expose themselves to a slightly elevated risk of a crash due to VM depletion.

Safety first, especially on an open forum.

H2SO4 said:

Sorry, was kinda busy. Now let's get back to technical arguing in a respectful manner

Click to expand...

If I was in some way not respectful, I apologize. I wasn't aware of it.

Consider the implications of your "real world versus theory" position. Each of us on a Win7 machine runs the exact same Memory Manager (Mm) code. In a few days, thousands or millions of others will start joining us in relying on those same Mm algorithms. Your accusation is that the Mm erroneously and heavy-handedly trimmed the working set (WS) of a process and paged out data that was being frequently touched - without memory pressure forcing it to do so. Not only that, but over the course of time you watched the situation degenerate as the WS of your active process steadily decreased to the point where you were experiencing performance issues - again, without underlying memory pressure.

That would constitute a huge bug in the Mm, a problem arguably bigger than anything commonly discussed here. If that's your "real world" experience, and you've used perfmon or other tools to verify the details, I'd really suggest you file a bug with MS. (You'd also want to file a bug with the app developer to tell them to consider using VirtualLock() for critical pages, but that's another story.)

Click to expand...

I am not making any suggestions, merely reporting what happens.
I'm not an expert in the underlying technology, so I am not going to pretend I know the answer.

The practice of doing away with pagefiles at a certain arbitrary amount of RAM is IMHO misguided. We don't know whether the OP is perhaps in the habit of processing a few hundred raw dSLR images in CS4, while looking at the detailed stuctural plans for a couple of skyscrapers in 64-bit AutoCAD over on another monitor. Granted, it's probable that they won't miss the pagefile, since the commit charge rarely gets that high for most home users, but then they won't gain anything much either - except to expose themselves to a slightly elevated risk of a crash due to VM depletion.

Safety first, especially on an open forum.

Click to expand...

Yes, in the scenario you sketch it could crash the system, but like you say it is not a very likely or realistic scenario.

There are more tips and tweaks out here that when not applied wisely could endanger stability.
I think disabling the pagefile when you have 8gb of RAM is one of the least dangerous.


From your theory it seems the pagefile just sits there just in case you run out of RAM, and shouldn't have any adverse effect on the systems performance.
I can see, feel and measure that disabling it does make a difference.

How I would have to translate my findings to a technical explanation goes beyond my understanding of the matter.

You could try disabling it and see if and how it affects your system's performance.
And then maybe you could use your knowledge to find an explanation.

Greetings.

I absolutely love this part of the forum. Especially when it involves some of my favorite members.

Greetings.

How do my ears get a taste? Do Squonks email sound bites?