35-60% of my memory is MIA.. help me find it!

[charles3]

What your saying is my 512MB GFX card gets mirrored? I only have 1G in the system right now, if I'm running a game that utalizes all 512MB of gfx, plus the 60% plus the 450MB the program is using... That's somewhere around 1.5 to 2G that's being used when I game.......... I know I've got a paige file but damn that doesn't have sound math there.

In reality the math is quite sound, Take a look at how “backwards compatible” hardware is, and how old ways of doing things have stuck with us for years long after they should have died a painful death.

your vid card does use 512Mb of memory, check out your Device Manager, first view hidden devices, then (Device Manager, View -> Resources By Type) , and look at all the little things taking up memory. Look at memory and IO each and every little thing in there is a bit of communication with another device if you map the ranges, you will find some gaps, and some intentional overlaps. All that is how your machine works.

I only see X GB of ram, but I have 4GB, what is wrong with my memory? - OCZ Forum
The computer reserves blocks of MMIO addresses for Video RAM, then buses, bridges, BIOS, then DRAM.

. Basically if your theory held true if you had a 2G video card and 2G onboard then where is the computers ram!? Gone because you have to mirror the video cards image so it knows what to see?

yep, it happens in real life, you have a machine with so little usable memory in real life that it swaps to disk whenever you try to run anything.

Lets see what Microsoft says about memory mapping, and how it relates to usable memory.

The system memory that is reported in the System Information dialog box in Windows Vista is less than you expect if 4 GB of RAM is installed
For example, if you have a video card that has 256 MB of onboard memory, that memory must be mapped within the first 4 GB of address space. If 4 GB of system memory is already installed, part of that address space must be reserved by the graphics memory mapping. Graphics memory mapping overwrites a part of the system memory. These conditions reduce the total amount of system memory that is available to the operating system.
...
the total system memory that is available to the operating system is always less than the physical RAM that is installed

how about the mac-vs pc argument when apple had 64 bit support, and PC's 64 bit support sucked?

AppleInsider | Road to Mac OS X Snow Leopard: 64-bits, Santa Rosa, and more
OEMs will encourage customers to upgrade a 2GB machine to 4GB, even though the usable RAM might be limited to 2.3GB. This is especially a problem on high-end gaming machines that have huge graphics cards as well as lots of RAM."

Go to Device Manager, View -> Resources By Connection . Then do the math for your system and see how much memory each item is sucking up.

Ask Dan: What's with the 3Gb memory barrier?
4Gb of RAM, and a pair of Nvidia's oddball 1Gb GeForce 7950 GX2 cards. Result: 56.25% of the installed memory absent without leave. You might as well have only bought 2Gb

Are all these people from the past so wrong about how pc hardware works? Or has win7 changed the fundamentals of how computer hardware works?

It's independent, just as off board sound was created so the computer doesn't spend resources on sound. It's ingenious! adding external devices so that we don't have our CPU do the work!? What shall we call these devices? PCI!? GREAT!!!

yep, that's the physical structure/protocol but HOW do you move things around, where does the CPU write the bits that get moved? Where does the vid/sound card READ the bits from? It all has to get stored someplace...



computer does spend resources on sound, and other things, just not as much if the device is “hardware” vs “ a port on a stick”

Softmodem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Softmodem, or software modem, is a modem with minimal hardware capacities, designed to use a host computer's resources (mostly CPU power and RAM but sometimes even audio hardware) to perform most of the tasks performed by dedicated hardware in a traditional modem.

other things like non hardware raid, soft soundcards, USB , and other stuff uses the cpu/mem to get the job done. if your moving a few hundred gigs of data across a USB port you will see more CPU usage than if you used the same speed fireware, because 1394 does more "in hardware" than USB.

[edit] Infact, what happens if you have a video card with more ram than the PC!? OMG We created a problem!

you can “lock up” the pc during boot (POST fail), or the vid card will not have “all” the memory on it in use.
if you want to try and see what happens when you have a vid card outstrip your memory, get a couple of Newegg.com - PNY VCQFX5800-PCIE-PB Quadro FX5800 4GB 512-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Supported Workstation Video Card - Workstation Graphics / Video Cards and be sure to disable swap (if it will let ya) and see what happens..

Think outside the box. Sometimes the better answers are so crazy they just work.

see if your explanation, or my explanation works in real life, how does the data get transferred from one device to another? Lots of ways, one of those ways is the memory location.


once more, are all these people from the past so wrong about how pc hardware works? Or has win7 changed the fundamentals of how computer hardware works?

Even Wikipedia has some good stuff on this very issue

Memory-mapped I/O - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Memory-mapped I/O (MMIO) and port I/O (also called port-mapped I/O or PMIO) are two complementary methods of performing input/output between the CPU and peripheral devices in a computer.

Framebuffer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
While framebuffers are commonly accessed via a memory mapping directly to the CPU memory space, this is not the only method by which they may be accessed.

Toms hardware has this very same question answered... in 2007...

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/243662-30-does-video-card-count-system-memory
tlreaves 07-17-2007 at 08:39:44 PM
To answer your question, yes the video card memory shows up as system memory in the strictest sense of the word.
…
But when you have 2GB of physical memory, and your video card has 768MB, and windows is assigning the rest to your sound card, pci busses, etc... there are no addresses left over for your extra RAM to operate. This is why 32-bit XP usually does not "register" more than 3.2-3.5 GB of physical memory.

 

[mushroomboy]

Yes but the paigefile isn't active, as it shouldn't be reported as % of physical memory. I know things go to paigefile, but what's active in the card isn't exactly mirrored or what's active in your system memory. The ultimate reality is everything that your computer reads goes through it's memory and cpu, that's just how busses work I know this. I'm just saying as far as active memory goes there is a reason why we created expansion slots. I do program c++, it's just wrong to tell them they need more physical memory and that it's mirrored like that. Your paigefile is usually data that is accessed more frequently but not enough to be in physical ram. I know how this all works, but it's not a mirror.

 

[charles3]

It looks like we are getting away from what the OP ( jvincent08 ) asked, and it was, to paraphrase “I have 2gig, why is it getting all used up, the system reports only a small amount in use”, so I've created a different thread for talking about how windows (and the pc/x86 hardware world in general ) uses memory...
http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/41866-win-7-mmio-video-device-memory-use-system-mem.html



Hopefully the jvincent08 is ok with the answers given for their own system. If not I'd be glad to continue here and deal with the issue he started off with. If he's fine with the explanations so far, perhaps he can change the title prefix to resolved.



I will reply to http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/40369-35-60-my-memory-mia-help-me-find-3.html#post403828 in the new thread http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/41866-win-7-mmio-video-device-memory-use-system-mem.html.

 

[gordyboy]

charles you seem to be filling your posts with random nonsense ...

like what boxes do u come accross once or twice a year that needed your magic touch of moving a dimm around to get them working ? , im pretty sure whoever put the rouge dimm in the machine in the first place will have a basic knowledge of troubleshooting , besides , ram is an extremely reliable part if a dimm is going to be faulty it generally shows problems straight after you install it

i thought the days of being able to buy ram so cheap and nasty that it would throw up errors


you say that you mentioned about triple dimms to help people who may look at your posts in the future?

but you do not explain in enough detail about what they would be doing plus the fact you clearly gave the actual person who was asking the wrong advice by suggesting he used triple dimms when infact his system would not accept triple dimms the way you are suggesting as his system is a dual channel NOT TRIPLE CHANNEL


so you are not only confused yourself by marketing posters you are passing on your lackluster "advice" like it was gospel

stick to asking questions , not giving answers

 

[charles3]

I work with servers, datacenters, and sometimes large cad/graphics workstations. You can have up to 40 1u servers to a rack, each server has 8 (or sometimes 16) slots. So you could have up to 640 swaps per rack. Upgrade a few racks a year (or a few dozen) , and you will encounter the same errors, its just basic stats.

 

[gordyboy]

im well aware of how dense racks can be i have worked with many over the years

your answer is still irrelevant your so called advice relates to a server enviroment , not a home user using a single core DESKTOP

also you will be using totally different ram for a server so why do you even make the comments you do when they have no relation to whats being asked ?

stop throwing different technologies and hardware scenarios that have nothing atall to do with what people are talking about all you are doing is confusing people who have came here to seek advice

 

[danbaker27]

The reason you're losing memory:

First of all, you should NEVER run windows 7 on less than 2GB RAM, That's just plain experience. If you need cheap ram, go to www.ewiz.com, those are the guys I use.

You need to disable superfetch. This can be done by the following:
1) Start
2) Control Panel
3) Administrative Tools
4) Services
5) Right Click on Superfetch & choose Properities
6) Choose Stop, then Disabled
7) Choose OK
8) Reboot your machine

The second thing you can do if you have a low level of RAM, right click on the start button, choose properities, then customize. Un-check everything that has to do with searching, and finally choose don't search. In it's place, enable the run box. That will give you the same functionality.

Those two tricks worked well with vista, and should continue to work well with 7.

 

[mushroomboy]

First of all, you should NEVER run windows 7 on less than 2GB RAM, That's just plain experience. If you need cheap ram, go to www.ewiz.com, those are the guys I use.

You need to disable superfetch. This can be done by the following:
1) Start
2) Control Panel
3) Administrative Tools
4) Services
5) Right Click on Superfetch & choose Properities
6) Choose Stop, then Disabled
7) Choose OK
8) Reboot your machine

The second thing you can do if you have a low level of RAM, right click on the start button, choose properities, then customize. Un-check everything that has to do with searching, and finally choose don't search. In it's place, enable the run box. That will give you the same functionality.

Those two tricks worked well with vista, and should continue to work well with 7.

Umm I think that's kind of wrong to say. I'm running the 64bit version with 1G of ram just fine, and I haven't had any problems so far, and I have twice the ram usage when programs run (sort of 2x the use).

Also superfetch really only affects boot time, if you need ram for a game or an application it will release the used ram so the application can use it. It will affect paigefile and cached memoy, but active memory won't be affected if a program needs it. If you have decent amount of memory I wouldn't worry about superfetch as you won't see any gains from disabling it. You might get a quicker startup, but nothing too noticeable.

And your screenshots of your taskmanager are incomplete, the first image with all users checked all we can add up is roughly 443076 (i might be off). Which is around 500MB 25% of your total RAM being used, and I'm guessing it's really more like 30%+ that's being used. Your seccond image I didn't bother as the all users isn't checked. As for the third image, it shows 1/2 used 1G cached and 1/2 free. Now you also realize that 1024 is what MS uses for measuring standards and isn't always accurate. Also it's reporting 2047 total... You see a problem? No? Maybe nobody caught that, but it should be 2048! 1024x2 or 512x4 right? No? Yeah windows has problems with reporting space and memory, a quick google search found this:
Why Vista Windows reports less memory than your PC has - Consumerist - Lifehacker
Though that isn't too new, it's been an old subject and topic for a long time. That's why hard drives report space differently on the physical device as upposed to what windows is saying it has.

Anyways, your also forgetting memory that's being used by the kernel... You see 158MB cached by kernel? They don't have memory that's being used by drivers, or directly by the NT kernel does it? Taksmanager doesn't show you all the memory that's being used and what is using it, so always take what it reports with a grain of salt. Your memory is probably being used somewhere by something important and I'm doubting you should worry about it. Really unless you are showing huge performance issues with the memory then I wouldn't complain about where it's going. You know Firefox can eat up to 200MB ram? AIM can eat up to 50MB!? Yahoo messenger eats another 50 or so!?! People don't realize that all that little stuff adds up and affects performance. You don't have 713 programs open, but you have 713 threads, do you question how many threads a program uses and why you have 700+ threads running which also affects cpu performance, which end case causes lag... I have under 600 threads running and probably could cut it down to under 400 after a cold boot. If you really want to know what's using your memory get a better program to report it. I don't know of any but I'm sure they have better ways than taskmanager.

[edit]
http://www.osnews.com/story/21471/SuperFetch_How_it_Works_Myths

People don't realize that windows uses ram when your not using it for a lot of other things as well, that's what it was designed for so everything works quicker. If your not using it for a program why not have the OS use it? If you really want to free memory, why not prune services that you won't use! Did you ever install things like the ask toolbar? it runs a service, what's that do? Uses mem! how about windows defender? Do you use it or do you use outside AV? Windows firewall? Do you use it? I don't. Windows error reporting service? Do you hate it when a program crashes and it says "send this error to ms"? Yeah I disabled that too. All of those services take up space in your svhost.exe and can be made smaller. How about workstation.

Awh lame, workstation is tied to explorer. I wonder...

 

[charles3]

your answer is still irrelevant your so called advice relates to a server enviroment , not a home user using a single core DESKTOP

HUH? It is basic troubleshooting, sorry you don't understand that. The same troubleshooting that works on servers, also tends to work in the home environment. Card not working in one pci slot, put it in another, run out of slots, try a different machine. Same with USB , try different USB ports. If it doesn't work on any try a different machine. Got a handful of USB thingamajigs and you want to use that slot, try a different USB device. Works the same with memory...



Please explain, step by step, how the solutions I offered do not apply. I'd like to see where the error is.

also you will be using totally different ram for a server

The main differences between “server” and “desktop” memory are ECC and Chipkill (and features such as those), not “does the BIOS/system see it”. See Do I need ECC or non-ECC Memory?

so why do you even make the comments you do when they have no relation to whats being asked ?

You asked for it, remember?

like what boxes do u come accross once or twice a year that needed your magic touch of moving a dimm around to get them working ?

 

[mushroomboy]

Actually he's right, servers are no different than desktops as far as physical troubleshooting goes. Hardware is hardware once it comes down to how to troubleshoot it. Software is the huge difference... Yes server racks are set up differently but ram is ram and a gpu/cpu is the same thing all around. It's just how it's used is different.

 

[gordyboy]

emm i wasnt talking about your troubleshooting i was talking about the rubbish you speak like telling a guy whos using a dual channel system to upgrade using 3 dimms or in pairs for best performance when the guy was more concerned about his ram usage and judging buy his system he isnt too worried about bleeding edge performance

i really dont know why you would suggest to him a triple channel upgrade can you explain please ?

and again you run off talking about server stuff polluting a thread thats about a desktop machine , you keep running away with your storys , all that will do is confuse people who dont really know when they start seeing other kinds of ram ecc ram sounds the way for everything for reasons i wont go into but it doesnt get used on desktop boards so again you have added more irrelevant information to the mix!


i never asked for you to write random information to people who seek a simple answer!


and mushroomboy if that was the case then we could all build machines fit to be in the top 500 supercomputers since they are basically the same , apart from as you say the software..... lets just forget about the airconditiong units the watercooling for chips and chipsets the infiniband interconnects the fibre connections etc etc , yeh i see your point , how silly of me servers are basically just desktops and people who only need desktop tailored assistance should be told advice relating to server class troubleshooting and building !

 

[mushroomboy]

emm i wasnt talking about your troubleshooting i was talking about the rubbish you speak like telling a guy whos using a dual channel system to upgrade using 3 dimms or in pairs for best performance when the guy was more concerned about his ram usage and judging buy his system he isnt too worried about bleeding edge performance

i really dont know why you would suggest to him a triple channel upgrade can you explain please ?

and again you run off talking about server stuff polluting a thread thats about a desktop machine , you keep running away with your storys , all that will do is confuse people who dont really know when they start seeing other kinds of ram ecc ram sounds the way for everything for reasons i wont go into but it doesnt get used on desktop boards so again you have added more irrelevant information to the mix!


i never asked for you to write random information to people who seek a simple answer!


and mushroomboy if that was the case then we could all build machines fit to be in the top 500 supercomputers since they are basically the same , apart from as you say the software..... lets just forget about the airconditiong units the watercooling for chips and chipsets the infiniband interconnects the fibre connections etc etc , yeh i see your point , how silly of me servers are basically just desktops and people who only need desktop tailored assistance should be told advice relating to server class troubleshooting and building !

I wasn't saying his advice was relative just that they are the same. As for them not being the same? Hardware wise they are generally pretty close to the same. Infact you can take the same cpu's you'll find in servers and build a high performance desktop. You'll just be paying out your ass for the thing... why? Because they are built more for stability but that has an extra cost, although it doesn't mean they are any different. AMD's server cores... Opteron's are all out for consumer use, same with Intel's server cores I think the Itanium? Don't post something things that will give the OP the wrong idea. You can buy server hardware for a home pc, it's really just quality of parts your paying for.

[edit] Oh and what's highlighted has NOTHING TO DO WITH IT BEING A SERVER! You can do all of that on a desktop... Why? Because the hardware is THE SAME.

 

[gordyboy]

the op is not using server hardware nor does he need his question polluted by server stuff as he doesnt know about it he just wanted an explanation to where his memory seemed to be disappearing !

yeh show me a desktop user that uses typical stuff , you see i have never even on the internet saw someone who used the kind of tech i mentioned just for an everyday desktop , one or two people may use some of the tech but those kind of people dont need to ask questions on forums like the op has because they are using it as a WORKSTATION not ur typical everyday websurfing desktop and they will know fine well all about the ins and outs

im quite aware that some parts of servers can be used in desktops iv been using opterons since they were released !

itaniums on a desktop ? i think not .