Solved How do I kill standby memory?

[hinst]

Here is my problem: I want to disable standby memory.
Reasons
There are several reasons why it should be disabled:

• Windows reads hard drive to fill cache. Not only it stores files which are being read by some application and therefore they had to be read anyway, but it also reads some files which were not actually demanded yet... Such policy stresses HDD.
• I get "Low memory" message boxes from Windows asking me to close some application. Which is strange. I've read that standby memory is being released by Windows as soon as it is needed. But it seems like Windows don't take into account that I still have standby-aka-free memory when showing me these messages
• Games which tend to allocate large amounts of memory start freezing for 5-10 seconds from time to time as soon as RAM is filled by "standby" memory and no free memory left. This is also strange. I've read that Windows releases standby memory as soon as it needed... But it looks like it causes freezing. This is especially bad for games which load levels dynamically

Attempts

• I've disabled SuperFetch service in service control panel
• I've set EnablePrefetcher and EnableSuperfetch to 0 in Windows registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

But I still see standby memory blue bar continuously increasing in Windows Resource Monitor

 

[marsmimar]

Hello hinst and welcome to Seven Forums.

The short answer is there's no provision to turn off standby memory because it is being used in conjunction with the pagefile and is managed by Windows 7. Windows 7 uses memory in a totally different way than previous operating systems. The Windows 7 philosophy is, "Unused memory is wasted memory." This Microsoft forum thread has some additional information that may help.

how do you shut off standby memory in windows 7 - Microsoft Community

 

[hinst]

lol. so there's no way to turn it out after all. I thought disabling those "prefetch" and "superfetch" things turns it off.

 

[Wishmaster]

By turning things off and limiting memory use you are essentially breaking Windows and making it slower.

In regards to your Low memory error, when does this occur?
Its quite possible theres a faulty application that has a memory leak and Windows is unable to unload it as its "In Use"
The next time you get this error, open the performance manager and see what is using the most memory.

In regards to stressing the HD, having Superfetch/prefetch OFF stresses the drive more.
Why? Becuase everytime you open a application of any kind, the HD needs to seek to find all the DATA it needs and load into memory. When you close it, it unloads it it amd therefopre repeats the process everytime you open it again.

The Standby takes into consideration what you use most often and keeps in in memory. Niow when you go to open that app, most of it is already loaded into memory.
And yes, it does unload older things in Standby as more memory is needed.


What you need to be looking at is "AVAILABLE Memeory" as this is what windows has avaialable to use at any point.
"Free" is how much thats not being used for anything at all. Free=0 is the best thing to see.
"In USE" is whats actually being USED.
And standby of course is what it knows you will use in the future.


The issues you are are facing are quite likely not related to memory management. It may be a memory leak or something else. The only way to fix that is locate the app causing it and remove it or update it.

 

[janvan]

Ram keeps on loading...

Greetings all..new here.
Don't know if this is the right place for my prob..but it is related.
I've been reading all the old threads I could find about the ram increase prob that I have myself now.
I'll give a short as possible description of what happens.

First boot..taskmanager shows 1.42 GB for O.S nothing open.
Then I start my DAW little added 1,54 GB.
Load VST Spectrasonics Omnisphere single instance ( is memory hog ) but normal in Synth/Sample land.
Taskmanager shows around 2 gigs now.

From this point on the Ram starts to eat away until around 10 gigs ..I have to close down..out of juice.
Now..the strange thing is when everything is closed Taskman still shows usage 10 gigs.
Only a reboot brings back the normal 1.42 O.S load.
Then I can start the whole proces again..ending up with the same results.

So..it is a huge prob and it came out of the blue ( working on the machine for a year without issues ).
Nothing has been changed since new..it's a music machine and used only for that.
I'm a studio musician working on large projects..so I'm practically crippled because of all this.
Can anyone here shine some light over this?
Thx in advance.

 

[hinst]

omg it must be a memory leak
You should look through the list of running processes to find out which one is leaking
When you close a window it does not necessarily mean that the process associated with this window ends immediately as soon as the window disappears. I believe this is what happens in your case. I mean, you close the application, but the process still runs. Something prevents it from terminating. And it leaks. The easiest way to "fix" this is to kill the process, then the memory would get released. So you will have to kill it like that every time it starts to use too much memory. You can use standard Windows task manager both to examine memory usage by each process and to end leaky processes

 

[janvan]

Thank you for the reaction..

Taskman shows me app is closed..nothing running at all.
I know I can search for the eating proces as suggested,but it doesn't explain how this weird thing can
happen on a system working fine with nothing changed for a long time.
I've been reading many threads and different forums providing a multitude of suggestions,but no solution.
At the moment I have 1,47 GB in taskman..stable..nothing open but the browser.
When i open DAW and load a plug it begins to fill ram to the brim.
Never seen anything like it..and it worked fine before with the same app's.
The same everything actually.

 

[hinst]

So you say that you open your application, then you work with this application, then you close this application, then you are sure that process responsible for this application is terminated... So which process consumes memory then?

BTW weird things happen. modern software has incredible complexity, so anything can go wrong anytime

 

[janvan]

As you said..exactly,app is terminated completely..but the feed of it remains in memory.
As far as I have seen by now,this thing in several forms exist for years in Win7 x64.
Peeps have been searching for the reason but found nothing.
B.T.W..did you manage to kill the standby memory thing?
Because..when I monitor when working it's precisely that what is increasing all the time.
Until the point it's filled up completely using all ram.
I hope I make some sense..I'm a musician not some computer geek.

 

[hinst]

omg I believe standby memory is ok after all.
It turned out that the game was freezing because, well, this game is buggy, not because Windows was reallocating memory not fast enough
And when you look at "Memory" bar in task manager (not resource monitor), it shows how much memory is allocated _not_ taking into account standby memory
As for unnecessary HDD reading I've been complaining about, it stopped after I disabled both superfetch and prefetch, but it didn't disable caching completely

 

[Wishmaster]

Glad to hear you found the source of the problem.

On the issue of HardDrive thrashing, I did have 1 other thought.
Indexing will do that for awhile untill everything is indexed.

But, was just wondering if that may have been the cause? Just a thought.

 

[Paul Hughes]

Wishmaster if your looking up websites / porn / youtube / shopping i agree. putting in memory to make these run faster is a good thing. but cached memory isnt free, it cached. Video games "REQUIRE" free memory to run properly, not cached. it means your computer is trying to cache and run a memory hog video game at the same time with minimal free memory. meaning your game lag like crazy ruining the experiance. i want my computer to run my game as best it can, not have website pre cached, understand?

 

[Paul Hughes]

@Wishmaster if your looking up websites / porn / youtube / shopping i agree. putting in memory to make these run faster is a good thing. but cached memory isnt free, it cached. Video games "REQUIRE" free memory to run properly, not cached. it means your computer is trying to cache and run a memory hog video game at the same time with minimal free memory. meaning your game lag like crazy ruining the experiance. i want my computer to run my game as best it can, not have website pre cached, understand?

imagine going to the store and all you want are ten items, as you walk down the ilse for your ten items your basket randomly files with random stuff and at some point theres nomore room for your ten items. its supposed to leave you space for stuff but it doesnt.


some of us dont want 100% of our memory mapping youtube videos, i want the purpose of my computer to be a server or play games with as much ram as it can use.


purpose of RAM (random assesed memory) is to be random memory, not mapping youtube videos so they run faster. standby memory is used memory, for some people thats a good thing, for me its a waste. it cant be good for your computer system to be mapping then dropping stuff in a constant battle over what memory is used for. every time my system hangs up, lags, or studders this has to be bad for my computer system.

 

[Jake65535]

Imagine going to the store and all you want are ten items; as you walk down the aisle for your ten items, your basket randomly fills with random stuff and at some point there's no more room for your ten items. It's supposed to leave you space for stuff but it doesn't.

Some of us don't want 100% of our memory mapping YouTube videos so they run faster; I want the purpose of my computer to be a server or play games with as much RAM as it can use.

I think you are spot on. A new feature of a recent Windows 10 update is that SuperFetch has been replaced by SysMain. This is a new AI-based memory-management service that tries to predict what programs or files you will run or open, so that they will run or open more quickly. As you can guess, it is an abject disaster, and seems to horrendously slow down the normal opening of files/programs or switching between them, as well as totally unnecessarily transferring data from disk to memory at every available opportunity. However, all is not lost: you can easily (and probably should) disable the `SysMain` service.