10 Windows speed tips that DON'T work.

Aphelion said:

HellionDarklord said:

I understand that services being stopped or disabled doesn't do much, and I would not stop superfetch. Registry tweaks are risky too.

Superfetch is more of a convenience and not applicable for the situation I've been describing. But...but..but.. I've been tweaking the registry since Win95... can't stop now! :)

I suspected you were a closet "tweaker". They have rehab facilities to help with that!

P.S. Thanks for the info!

Dinesh said:

The only thing that will speed up your computer is more RAM.

Do you really believe this? I suppose you must or you wouldn't have posted it.

If this is really the case, how can I get my system to use all of its memory? I have a 2 x Quad-core Opteron system with 16 gig of ram; 8 gig per CPU. However, it never uses any more than 3 gig. I keep ResMon running on my second monitor and even with 75 processes, 900 threads and almost 22000 handles in use, only 2076 mb (2 gig) of ram is used.

Right now I'm running 2 index update programs as background processes (I was able to get a performance increase by changing the task scheduler's priority setting to "background processes" rather than programs) used memory varies only slightly, even when hard faults are seen. One would think that as a "hard fault" (i.e. not finding the requested data in memory cache) that the memory allocated would increase as the new data was loaded into memory.

Btw, I'm not running a swapfile. I have the OS and very few programs installed on a 60 gig SSD. Removing the swapfile made absolutely no difference in performance...and I still have programs "graying out" for up to 30 seconds as if the system is trying to reload data into memory. Now since there's no swapfile, (I just double checked) I'm at a loss to explain how the memory manager could be waiting to reload data, unless it's static data from a file and it's discarding it and then reloading it while the program "grays out."

I'm very much aware that certain data types (in memory) can be discarded when more RAM is required, such as a disk's read buffer, (I also know that a lot of that is done in the disks and controller) but if there's a huge amount of RAM marked as Standby and/or Free (I confess that I don't know the exact definition of this distinction) why would it be discarded rather than just storing the newly required data into RAM and using ALL of memory rather than just 2 gig?

This apparent limitation is driving me nuts. Well, maybe I was there to start with for building a box like this. But this situation was the underlying reason for building it. I was running a dual-core box with 4 gig RAM under XP which could only see 2 gig. Its performance was terrible, so I decided to go all-out. Many things are better, but the memory limit seems to be one of the 2 bottlenecks (the other being disk drives...which I could probably fix if I took the time to reconfigure the system to a RAID 3 or 4 setup, but I don't have that time at present.)

If anyone can offer insight here, especially the definition of Standby and Free memory in ResMon (this is what the ResMon Help says about Standby memory: "
In Physical Memory, review the Available to Programs value. Available memory is the combined total of standby memory and free memory. Free memory includes zero page memory.") I'd be very grateful.

Ok. I found the answer.
Take advantage of tools to monitor memory usage in Windows 7 | Microsoft Windows | TechRepublic.com

Here's what it says about memory and its different status labels:

Hardware Reserved: Memory that is reserved for use by the BIOS and some drivers for other peripherals.
In Use: Memory used by process working sets, drivers, nonpaged pools, and operating system functions.
Modified: Memory whose contents must be [written]to disk before it can be used for another purpose.
Standby: Memory that contains cached data and code that is not actively in use.
Free Memory that does not contain any valuable data and that will be used first when processes or the operating system needs more memory.

Looking at the attached image (screen dump done just prior to this post) it shows 3365 mb In Use, 223 Modified, 11638 Standby and 1157 free.

Apparently it IS working just the way it "should." Since the Free amount is slowly decreasing, it'll be interesting to see if the memory manager starts kicking chunks outta Standby as it requires more space for new data.

This is the first time I've seen this amount of free memory so low. I think I understand this better and I'm gonna quit looking for any setting that would allow the system to use all RAM, since it apparently is.

I find the "Labels" for the different status of memory to be awkward and less than intuitive, but I guess I can stop worrying about it...unless it crashes when it runs out of "Free" memory.

Sorry, I guess I need to add that to my sig. It's Pro 64-bit. I'm running a XFX Radeon HD 4890 Video Card and M-Audio Audiophile 2496 Sound Card so I believe that a lot of the video memory is handled by the GPU...at least that's why I went that route. I hope the sound card takes some load off the CPUs. As an aside, I'm a freelance photographer and web developer (2nd and 3rd careers...I'm supposedly retired) and I spend one hell of a lotta time editing and managing high resolution photos. So far, the Radeon card is acceptable as a driver for two Acer flat panel monitors. I spose it'd be a little better if they were the same size (the secondary is slightly smaller) but it works ok. The sound card is great, although I haven't connected it to a midi device (I dabble at organ and keyboard as well as blues bass) and I'm curious to see how it's gonna work for mixing digital audio. Right now I just use it to play mp3s thru my component audio system. It's great for that purpose.

I'm happy to report that as "Free" memory got down to a very low level (about 3mb) the memory manager seems to be working fine and is discarding "Standby" chunks as it requires new space. And it's done so with no apparent performance degradation. I'm using it hard and it seems to be doing exactly what I'd hoped it would when I built it: running a lot of processes without degradation. I'm going to chalk the "graying out" of certain programs (Firefox is where I see that behavior the most) to their own internal thread management. I think that several things have contributed to performance optimization in my case: The first is the change I made to the task scheduler. That really seemed to help. Second is not using Windows Explorer. I'm using Free Commander and/or Xplorer2. They both have some shortcomings, but it seems to have helped performance and stability. Finally, I've turned off many of the Aero whizbangs that are more of a "designed slowdown" like zooming dialog boxes and fading things in and out. I prefer not to wait while this effect is displayed.

I'm not sure why this is the first time I've seen this behavior with Standby/Free memory, but I'll take what I can get.

Since I'm gonna be hammering on this thing for the rest of the (non-existent) spring, the summer and the better part of the fall, I'll have plenty of time in "production mode" to see how it goes before I jump into the RAID conversion.

Maybe I can do the RAID setup in the late fall when my busy season is over.

I've taken this one off my "things to worry about" list.

I just re-read the portion about the GPU memory rendering CPU RAM unusable. That seems pretty strange. I'll read the article and do a little more testing. But for the moment, it's ok...and I gotta get a web site update done.