Windows 7 Ultimate ram usage

Windows 7 Ultimate ram usage

Windows 95/98 used ram, took it away when a program opened and on close would not give it back, until XP came along and saved the day allowing us to abandon that nifty little Ram Booster 2.0 to recover lost memory. Not since those days have I been concerned with Ram usage, I spent 10 years on a Pentium 4 with 512mb of ram running XP to the point of steam coming out its ears, with dozens of applications, for weeks on end without rebooting. My final uptime on that system was 101 days, closing ram usage 435mb.

Windows 7 Ultimate under half that load grows from 890mb usage at reboot, to 2.80gb within 12 hours of my normal daily task load as perfected over the previous ten years on 1/8th the ram I have now, using all the same programs, doing all the same things. But now one week into a new, never online build of Ultimate 7 at the end of my day, with not one program still open. Not one background process running. Not one forgotten about app, or misunderstood mechanism. Not one obvious flaw in task manager with all processes showing and generally understood. with not one place left to look, I at the end of just 12 hours of uptime, 1/200th my record uptime, I am missing nearly 2gb of ram. And each new task i perform takes a little bit more away forever. [See Attached]

I am not trying to prevent Windows from using all the ram it needs. I just want it back when it is done. So where did my 2gb of ram go? I used it, it worked fine with no system errors. Now I want it back.

WHERE DID MY RAM GO?

The only thing that is unusual is the Paged and Non Paged Kernel usage which is very high for a system with 4 GB RAM. Typically this would be caused by a driver problem, not likely by a process.
Sorry, but I can't provide much help with that.

whs said:

May I ask you to post a snip of Process Monitor > Memery tab like the one below. Then we have better information and may be able to give you some educated advice.

This is exactly what I did post in the photos above, they are in a different theme, look harder or be more specific what my Process Monitor photos above are not showing.

LMiller7 said:

Typically this would be caused by a driver problem, not likely by a process.

This is a clean install, never online, using only the stock MSI drivers that came on the instal disk, over written by the updates downloaded from MSI. How likely is it that their drivers are in error here?

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I do a lot of data processing with large volumes of text files. Nothing different than before though.

Does Ultimate 7 slowly increase in ram usage perhaps, as various systems wake up, then remain awake maintaining their hold on the ram they grabbed to remain instantly fast, to ultimately settle on some number of ram usage that is much higher than my 4gb will allow. My thought is a 5gb OS uses 500mb natively so then would a 25gb OS use 2.5gb natively? What I am asking is over a very long uptime of weeks or months, will this constant increase in ram usage I am seeing eventually level-off at a certain number?

Or perhaps the change I am seeing is one of bits, and tolerances. Is the ram capable 64-bit system naturally hungrier than the 32-bit version of the same OS?

The memory usage of any modern OS is highly dynamic. The usage of an individual process can vary by a factor of 100 and more. I have seen this. This is completely normal. It is not at all unusual for the memory usage of an OS to increase during a session. The file cache will grow and the working set of active processes can grow. The system manager will always maintain control over memory usage, always with the goal of maximizing performance.

A 64 bit OS is a larger and more capable OS with higher memory requirements. To make it possible to run 32 bit applications it must include substantial portions of a 32 bit OS. The similar user interface hides the fact that internally a 32 bit and 64 bit OS are very different.

As I mentioned previously the 960 MB paged kernel memory usage seems very high. How much this will increase RAM usage is hard to say. Nothing in Task Manager or Resource Monitor will tell you this. It would be highly unusual to say the least for a process to be responsible for this. Task Manger doesn't show this. All that is left is either a driver issue or malware.

whs said:

a black background like those are completely unreadable for me.

And vice-versa for me. As you may know you can invert colors of most pictures in Photoshop, to make black backgrounds pure white and their white text pure black.

LMiller7 said:

Task Manger doesn't show this. All that is left is either a driver issue or malware.

Or super-prefetch... "In order to increase the performance of Windows 7, the priority of superfetch has been slightly reduced." meaning superfetch will auto cache your known programs in the automated-presumption that you will run them regardless of reality. It will not do this immediately, but rather slowly, incrementally, and irrevocably taking away ram for no known or registerable reason? I am asking. Is this superfetch, a component absent in ram stable XP at work? Because I have no need to save a little time at load up at this cost.

meaning superfetch will auto cache your known programs in the automated-presumption that you will run them regardless of reality. It will not do this immediately, but rather slowly, incrementally, and irrevocably taking away ram for no known or registerable reason?

No.

Superfetch is often misunderstood. Superfetch does cache applications that have been identified as being frequently used. But there are 2 very important things that need to be understood.

1. Superfetch uses low priority IO so there should be only minimal impact on other IO.

2. Superfetch stores it's data in Standby memory. This memory serves a dual role. It contains useful data, in this case that used for superfetch. But this memory is also available for use by any application that needs it. When an application needs memory the system first goes to free memory and when that is insufficient it goes to the Standby list. In Vista and later the Standby list is actually 8 prioritized lists, that used for Superfetch being the lowest 2 in priority. So when the system goes to the Standby list superfetch data will be the first to go. Memory used for Superfetch is shown in the the Task Manager memory graph as being unused. But in reality all memory except for that labeled as Free is actually in use.

The description here might seem complex but is actually very much simplified.

Bottom line: Superfetch does not take away from memory available for application use.

[QUOTE=LMiller7;2817205]

The description here might seem complex but is actually very much simplified.

That was a very good explanation. I can confirm initially that running through my usual day with Superfetch off I have both NOT noticed any change in performance, nor seen absolute proof this is my solution. Ram usage seems less, I have yet to approach 2gb usage, but have steadily, and irrevocably gained usage despite NOT being able to justifying this loss with an increase in open programs.

7 Ultimate is consuming my ram for unseen reasons. This i do know for certain. And having provided all valid details above, and received no stick-shaking suggestions, I wait and hope someone else sees this problem and its solution.

In the meantime Superfetch stays off.