Most Windows 7 PCs max out memory.

[JMH]

Most Windows 7 PCs max out their memory, resulting in performance bottlenecks, a researcher said today.

Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks.

The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory "saturation" point, said Barth. The most recent snapshot of XPnet's 23,000-plus PCs -- taken yesterday -- pegs only 40% of XP systems as running low on memory.

Source -
Most Windows 7 PCs max out memory

 

[zigzag3143]

Jan


Nice Article and interesting stats, thanks

 

[whs]

That is something I do not understand. When I walk thru the computer stores, most Win7 systems have 4GBs and more - and they all have 64bit. No way to find a 32bit system which we were looking for because a friend needed that to run a bundle of very expensive programs for her business from 32bit Vista. My win7 systems usually run around 1GB of RAM usage. So where is the problem.

 

[omegatron]

Hmmm...

My internet PC has 2 GB of Ram. Idles between 23-25%. Programs running ~ 30%. Anti-virus scan ~ 40%...

Wonder what software those people are running to get it to run out of memory...

 

[madtownidiot]

I find it a bit amusing that the average machine running xp now has over 1.7 GB of memory, as according to this article, windows xp started with a minimum requirement of 64 MB.

With 8 GB of memory, and even without running a pagefile, there is still an average of about 3.5 to 4 GB available on my laptop.

 

[pparks1]

Hardly anybody ever ran XP with 64MB of RAM. While it was the minimum...I don't think it was normal. I didn't know many who had less than 256MB.

 

[BWK]

Is there a memory leak somewhere in windows undiscovered as of yet?

 

[whs]

The XP numbers probably got pumped up by all those double booters on a Vista system.

 

[madtownidiot]

Hardly anybody ever ran XP with 64MB of RAM. While it was the minimum...I don't think it was normal. I didn't know many who had less than 256MB.

Neither do I, but I do remember that when XP went RTM the average PC shipped with 128 MB of memory

 

[pparks1]

i've not noticed heavy ram usage in Windows 7. Before my SSD when I ran with prefetch enabled, it would cache a ton of stuff and my ram was utilized...but my page file wasn't getting hit. Since moving to my SSD, with prefetch disabled...i don't usually go over 30% of my RAM...except when I run virtual machines and then I fully expect it.

 

[BWK]

My physical mem is running roughly 36% with a 1% cpu right now resource monitor/network/tcp connections firefox has got it going on.

 

[madtownidiot]

I suppose if the article was published, it must be happening to somebody. I think tomorrow I'll try a little experiment if I'm not too busy. I'll check memory usage 15 minutes after startup with 2, 4, 6, then 8 GB of memory on the system in my specs using default settings. It may be that the article is referring to factory configured systems with minimum required memory

 

[noobvious]

I don't think I have ever gone over 50% RAM usage with my 4GB. I have done things to max the CPU, but never broke 50% on the RAM, I don't think....if so, only for a matter of moments.

Very interesting!

 

[eXc450]

Not sitting in front of mine right now, but I do remember thinking it was rather high when I first installed (3 weeks ago)

It had I think 1.7gb used of my 4gb, directly after bootup. No other apps running (well...AVG sitting idle..)

 

[madtownidiot]

I would rather have more of the memory utilized, as it would mean fewer read/writes on the HDD, making my laptop less likely to freeze when it's bumped or moved.

 

[stormy13]

What a crock. This paragraph here pretty much sums up just how much,

Barth acknowledged that XPnet's data couldn't determine whether the memory usage was by the operating system itself, or an increased number of applications, but said that Devil Mountain would start working on finding which is the dominant factor in increased memory use.

Sounds like their "software" can't determine the difference between something that is actively using ram and something that is cached.

 

[dmex]

Sounds like their "software" can't determine the difference between something that is actively using ram and something that is cached.

thats exactly what Im thinking too, More likely, their software has a memory leak...

The cached ram doesnt cause bottlenecks, when an Application requests memory, Windows gives it the address used by a cached address and the application simply over-writes whatever was located at that cached address. it doesn't do any deallocation or realloction or paging for that address and whatever was stored there.

 

[seekermeister]

"I think this is something that everyone in their gut knew, but now we have data," said Barth. "The metrics don't lie."

Users who want to compare their computers to the current WCPI numbers can do so by registering with XPnet and then installing the DMS Clarity Tracker Agent from Devil Mountain's site.

Metrics don't lie, but people do. Somehow the name of this organization just doesn't inspire me to believe them. If this were true, I would expect to see warnings from the OS about low memory, and I have not seen one, even on the rig that I only have 2GBs running x64 on.

 

[Luckystar]

Yeah, in my system, i have 6gb and never see windows go over 2gb, i think i average out about 1.8 mb used, even in games i never even hit the maximum.

 

[Barman58]

I do despair at times over the memory myths that are spread about

I bought my memory, (all 2GB of it LOL), to be used, not to sit idle, just in-case something may need it a week next Thursday :sarc:

The memory management in win7 works and it works well, using the default cache settings. If the cache settings were actually set to use more available unused RAM it would not cause me any issues. Un-used RAM is wasted RAM.