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

So, according to my math (adding up the values shown in the task manager), I should only be using about 15% of my total memory. However, the system is reporting about 60% usage. Earlier, while installing a game, this shot up to 95-97%, when my math told me I should only have been using about 30%. I've tried clearing the memory cache and that made no difference. Where else could the problem lie?


TIA.

How much memory does your video card have?

512MB

But none of that should be used by normal processes.

Yes, it does.

Really? Why?

And regardless, why would this affect my main memory usage?

Are you looking at all user's processes and adding those up or just your own users?

There are a few things that will suck up your memory while booting up, the largest is your vid card, followed by some of the drivers that get loaded. If you have a 2 gig vid card, 2 gigs of your system memory get “stolen”. Its just a fact of life that's the way PC hardware works, the video memory is mirrored in the system memory, and while ugly, and hackish, it is the way things are done.


Think of it as the system draws on a whiteboard the same size and shape as your vid card has, but your vid card has to look at this whiteboard from outside the room, and copy the picture to its own whiteboard for you to see.


The next thing to take a look at is the following 3 views of the task manager. Note that on startup (from a fresh cold boot) I have almost 4 gig of memory in use, this is the single panel screen shot.


Now be sure to look at the second set of screen shots, note the button circled in red, click it to get the stuff that is “non user space” stuff, you should see LOCAL, SYSTEM, and NETWORK , with possibly some others.


The other thing to be aware of SI (1000x) units, vs "PC" units (1024x).


If you can show us the same 3 screen shots, we can get a better understanding of what is going on in your system.


-charlesView attachment 37810

Thanks for your replies. Here are the screenshots. As you can see, this problem is occurring with an uptime of three days, so it's not just when booting up. I always have the "show processes from all users" box checked. These are the values that I added up.

charles3,

I notice some weird about the svchost.exe is taking up 318,00K.

That's way off the scale . Do you know the reason why?

jvincent08,

You need to remove some programs from startup, Go to Start > Run, and type msconfig. Uncheck all entries except for your anti-virus, spyware detector, and personal firewall if you have one.

Also make sure you are not using any Virtual drives that are auto mounting an image or something, I mention this because you said you noticed 95% usage while installing a game and I have had the same thing with virtual drives when installing games from an ISO.

Just looking at your screen shots, things appear to be on the mark for a 2 gig system.


How much memory does your vid card have, about 512k?
When you totaled up (by hand) the memory usage, what was it?


There are 2 more tools that you can use to see where your memory is going,
Windows Resource Monitor and Process Explorer by www.sysinternals.com .


If you take a look at my examples you can see that my drivers are using up 1gb of space, for more definitions in Windows Resource Monitor, hold your mouse over the color of the item in question.


If you feel that your running out of memory, get some more (physical) memory, or cut down on the things you are loading/running.


Windows also has a lot of “slop” in how it reports things, don't take any figures as gospel, depending on where I look, my system has 62 to 64 gig. I'm “missing” around the amount of memory you have installed in your system, its just the way windows works.


-Charles

reghakr said:

charles3,

I notice some weird about the svchost.exe is taking up 318,00K.

That's way off the scale . Do you know the reason why?

Click to expand...

superfetch.... at idle.... 64gb... you should see it when I do domething...

reghakr said:

jvincent08,

You need to remove some programs from startup, Go to Start > Run, and type msconfig. Uncheck all entries except for your anti-virus, spyware detector, and personal firewall if you have one.

Click to expand...

With all due respect, no I don't. I only have the things I need/want running at start up, and none of those things can account for the hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes that are being unaccounted for. Even if there were unnecessary start-up programs running, they would be listed under the processes tab in the task manager.

Mr GRiM said:

Also make sure you are not using any Virtual drives that are auto mounting an image or something, I mention this because you said you noticed 95% usage while installing a game and I have had the same thing with virtual drives when installing games from an ISO.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion. The particular game I was installing was from a self-extracting exe, not a virtual ISO, but I have used the former method before and will look out for it from now on.

charles3 said:

How much memory does your vid card have, about 512k?

Click to expand...

Yes.

charles3 said:

When you totaled up (by hand) the memory usage, what was it?

Click to expand...

I can't remember exactly. Somewhere around 350,000, I believe.

charles3 said:

There are 2 more tools that you can use to see where your memory is going,
Windows Resource Monitor and Process Explorer by www.sysinternals.com .


If you take a look at my examples you can see that my drivers are using up 1gb of space, for more definitions in Windows Resource Monitor, hold your mouse over the color of the item in question.


If you feel that your running out of memory, get some more (physical) memory, or cut down on the things you are loading/running.


Windows also has a lot of “slop” in how it reports things, don't take any figures as gospel, depending on where I look, my system has 62 to 64 gig. I'm “missing” around the amount of memory you have installed in your system, its just the way windows works.


-Charles

Click to expand...

Thanks for your help. I guess I'll have to chalk it up to drivers and Windows' bad reporting. IMO, *everything* taking up any resources should be listed in the task manager, including drivers. This would help clear up a lot of confusion, I think.

Thanks again. I'm off to buy another 2 gig stick of RAM

No disrespect, but...........

Even if there were unnecessary start-up programs running, they would be listed under the processes tab in the task manager.

Click to expand...

No they wouldn't because they would not be starting up.

jvincent08 said:

Thanks again. I'm off to buy another 2 gig stick of RAM

Click to expand...

If the problem can be solved by throwing more memory at win7, great!

Just remember that memory should be installed in pairs, or triples for best performance. Let us know how things go.


If you must absolutely”I gots to hazz 2 orz ill splode” see what exactly is sucking up all your memory, and are willing to do a great deal of learning, you can examine the contents of, hiberfil.sys ( You could also do a core dump/memory dump and get the same flavor of file.) after you put your computer in hibernation, but do not reboot from hibernation (cold clean boot).


If you chose to do this, you will find out what is where, and why things are, BUT you are pretty much on your own, and it will take a long time to trace where a memory entry came from, if you not fluent in the ways of memory allocation in windows.


I (personally) would only go this route if there was something icky bad that was bugging the hell out of me, that I was being paid (very well) to fix.

emm since when would you fit tripple dimms on a c2d setup ? or any board other than a core i7 (the ones that first came out) ??

even then it was proven on many many hardware sites to not have much of a performance gain , especially for the extra cost

and whats to say he was overclocking his memory ? by the looks of his system specs hes running his ram at standard spec so why would adding ram in pairs be of any benefit to him than perhaps adding to what he already has if he has a spare dimm socket ?

its nice and all to upgrade them in pairs but if he isnt using the full potential of his components then i doubt he would notice the difference if he just stuck in an extra dimm to work alongside what he currently uses.

also could you show a screenshot of your ram usage and how windows is allocating your ram when "you do something" ?

charles3 said:

There are a few things that will suck up your memory while booting up, the largest is your vid card, followed by some of the drivers that get loaded. If you have a 2 gig vid card, 2 gigs of your system memory get “stolen”. Its just a fact of life that's the way PC hardware works, the video memory is mirrored in the system memory, and while ugly, and hackish, it is the way things are done.


Think of it as the system draws on a whiteboard the same size and shape as your vid card has, but your vid card has to look at this whiteboard from outside the room, and copy the picture to its own whiteboard for you to see.


The next thing to take a look at is the following 3 views of the task manager. Note that on startup (from a fresh cold boot) I have almost 4 gig of memory in use, this is the single panel screen shot.


Now be sure to look at the second set of screen shots, note the button circled in red, click it to get the stuff that is “non user space” stuff, you should see LOCAL, SYSTEM, and NETWORK , with possibly some others.


The other thing to be aware of SI (1000x) units, vs "PC" units (1024x).


If you can show us the same 3 screen shots, we can get a better understanding of what is going on in your system.


-charlesView attachment 37810

Click to expand...

First off, the system memory doesn't mirror the video. That's the whole point of having a video card with it's own GPU and RAM. So it's GPU can handle it's memory and manage the images without the CPU having to do any of that work. Otherwise what benifit would we have of adding a GFX card? Why not just have dual cores do every thing!? Right now my computer is using 64% RAM, and I've got a 64bit system going... 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.

The reality? The GFX card was made so that it handles all of the drawing of the images and the "objects". So that the computer can be used to work on everything that's not Video related (though physics is technically a video related problem, it's not related to what you actually see, just how it works). What you see is supposed to be done by the GFX card, and that alone. 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? 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!!!

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

gordyboy said:

emm since when would you fit tripple dimms on a c2d setup ? or any board other than a core i7 (the ones that first came out) ??

Click to expand...

the triple reference was mostly for some one trying who does have memory in triples who just happens to be looking through these forums later, perhaps 2 or 3 years from now (unlikely, but it would be nice if people looked through the forums before posting a question)

gordyboy said:

emm
why would adding ram in pairs be of any benefit to him than perhaps adding to what he already has if he has a spare dimm socket ?

Click to expand...

Simple problem solving, you have memory and slots, if there is some part on the board that is not soldered correctly, the issue may not come up until both slots are filled. So in troubleshooting you eliminate the most likely things, until you get to the unlikely. Sometimes a stick and slot don't get along, but it works fine if you swap things around. Troubleshooting is a process of elimination, and since the big MB testers are at the factory, us regular people have to swap things around until we believe we know what the issue is.



I run into one or 2 boxes a year that just putting a different stick in the same slot results in ram happyness. (and the old stick works in another machine, or slot) We are here to offer some ways as to what/how this person can do to get the box up and running, right?

gordyboy said:

emm
its nice and all to upgrade them in pairs but if he isnt using the full potential of his components then i doubt he would notice the difference if he just stuck in an extra dimm to work alongside what he currently uses.

Click to expand...

true, most people wouldn't notice slow memory from fast.

gordyboy said:

emm
also could you show a screenshot of your ram usage and how windows is allocating your ram when "you do something" ?

Click to expand...

sure.

Charles, could you provide a source to what you're saying about video card memory being mirrored against system memory? That bit seemed a little dubious to me, but I didn't care to ask before.