Memory not allocating correctly -> Crashing on Win 7 64bit.

Hi Ben

I would suggest you disable the paging on the SSD and set the paging on your HDD.

So as far as I understand you now have 6 GB that is detected properly and shown by Resmon as 6 GB......right ???

Alright will do. Any reason for not having the page file on the SSD?

At the moment I have 4GB installed as marsmimar suggested I should take the 2x1GB set out to check if it helps. Well it didn't in any other way than that a bit less is used when idle and not doing anything. It almost seems like a percentage of the RAM is taken for something that isn't shown anywhere. Therefore with less RAM the amount used seems also to be smaller. Still a lot to just be used for nothing.

How much should I set for the pagefile on the HDD?

This is quite odd. Here all processes are visible and they don't nearly add up to the amount supposedly used. :/

BenLind said:

Alright will do. Any reason for not having the page file on the SSD?

The problem with an SSD is that data is written in blocks. A block may be 256KB: 256 * 1000 * 8 binary digits. To change even ONE of these digits, you must rewrite the ENTIRE block. That is to say, your OS sees 1 bit being written, but the SSD wear is equivalent to 256KB being written: a 2.048 MILLION fold difference.
Windows' page file is meant to keep space free in the memory by swapping out memory data to the disk, this to ensure that the memory doesn't get full when you run too many programs.

However, you might have a computer that only uses 2–3 GB of memory while you have 8 GB of memory. In such case, when you are sure your memory will almost never fill to 8 GB you can really spare out a lot of SSD writes by disabling the page file without any drawback.

When you do run out of memory (e.g., if you run virtual machines), you don't want your computer to thrash your SSD... So in essence this is to save to SSD on the long run

BenLind said:

At the moment I have 4GB installed as marsmimar suggested I should take the 2x1GB set out to check if it helps. Well it didn't in any other way than that a bit less is used when idle and not doing anything. It almost seems like a percentage of the RAM is taken for something that isn't shown anywhere. Therefore with less RAM the amount used seems also to be smaller. Still a lot to just be used for nothing.

I'm bit confused by what you actually mean here ??

BenLind said:

How much should I set for the pagefile on the HDD?

Once you disable the paging file on SSD, select you HDD and set it to "System Managed Size" which means means windows manages it and it would automatically set the amount to the physical memory you have..... ie,, if you have 4 GB, it would set it to 4-8GB and if you have 6GB then it would be 6-12GB.

If you are confident enough, you could also set it manually after looking at you usage at resmon

BenLind said:

This is quite odd. Here all processes are visible and they don't nearly add up to the amount supposedly used. :/

Are you adding up the Commit or the Working set... Because the working set is what you need to add up... as it shows the amount of physical memory used by the processes. Commit is amount of virtual memory used by the processes..... from the image you posted... it looks ok to me..

centaur78 said:

The problem with an SSD is that data is written in blocks. A block may be 256KB: 256 * 1000 * 8 binary digits. To change even ONE of these digits, you must rewrite the ENTIRE block. That is to say, your OS sees 1 bit being written, but the SSD wear is equivalent to 256KB being written: a 2.048 MILLION fold difference.
Windows' page file is meant to keep space free in the memory by swapping out memory data to the disk, this to ensure that the memory doesn't get full when you run too many programs.

However, you might have a computer that only uses 2–3 GB of memory while you have 8 GB of memory. In such case, when you are sure your memory will almost never fill to 8 GB you can really spare out a lot of SSD writes by disabling the page file without any drawback.

When you do run out of memory (e.g., if you run virtual machines), you don't want your computer to thrash your SSD... So in essence this is to save to SSD on the long run

Ok thanks that makes sense. I know how the swap works but I didn't realize it put that much stress on the SSD. Thanks for the heads up!

centaur78 said:

I'm bit confused by what you actually mean here ??

What I mean is that it seems like always 20% is used by some mysterious process that isn't visibly taking the memory.

Let's say I have 4GB installed on my computer then 20% of that is a bit over 800MB. If I on the other hand have 6GB installed then 20% of that is a bit over 1200MB. So it seems to scale with the memory amount installed. I just don't know what it is. :S

centaur78 said:

Once you disable the paging file on SSD, select you HDD and set it to "System Managed Size" which means means windows manages it and it would automatically set the amount to the physical memory you have..... ie,, if you have 4 GB, it would set it to 4-8GB and if you have 6GB then it would be 6-12GB.

If you are confident enough, you could also set it manually after looking at you usage at resmon

Alright thanks!

centaur78 said:

Are you adding up the Commit or the Working set... Because the working set is what you need to add up... as it shows the amount of physical memory used by the processes. Commit is amount of virtual memory used by the processes..... from the image you posted... it looks ok to me..

Well I think neither of them really do add up to the 800MB used. All of the processes running are visible in the image I posted last. As you can see with some simple addition that they do not add up to the 899MB usage which is stated at the bottom but a bit over 662MB. So where has the 237MB gone? 237MB isn't bad but anyway. Now that I counted with Chrome open it actually added up. All the small processes added to eachother actually is a lot more than it looks.

Still I wonder about the idleusage though. Where is some of it gone. Hidden processes or what? :S

Thanks centaur78!
I checked with RAMMap and I don't have anything allocated to AWE so I guess it's not that. Maybe Chrome just uses more memory than Mozilla which I used before a lot. I don't know why it doesn't seem to add up when idle and why it seemed to scale with the memory installed though.

Maybe I'm also just used to the fact that (at least that I can remember) Windows Xp never had 800mb of RAM in use when idle.

Thanks for all the help though, I appreciate it!

Anytime ...

do remember the memory management in Win 7 is way better and efficient than what it was in Win XP and Win Vista..

I hope we have answered all your queries...

Yeah well I guess it is more efficient in using the memory it has available but it sure does have loads more internal processes hogging resources. :/