- windows 7 seems to eat up any RAM thrown at it, but in this case, it didn't actually improve it.
something tells me that if I install 32GB RAM, it'll use up 20GB.
- Megahertz. thanks for the link. I'll run that utility with different RAM configs, when I reboot with different RAM configs.
In any intelligently designed operating system, within reasonable limits, the more memory you have, the more the OS will use. This is the way it should be. Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX have all done this for many years. Those limits are heavily dependent on the workload, which varies widely.
Any system with more than 90% memory usage has a serious shortage which will impair performance. At 94% usage, as shown in post #9, the system is starving for memory. Most of the remainder is not free but is in use and contributes to good performance. A memory gauge that showed as used this would be near 100% most of the time and would be neither useful or interesting.
The system memory manager will always try to maintain a reasonable balance between in use and available memory. Remember, available does not mean free. The higher the usage the harder the memory manager will have to work and the less satisfactory will be the results. I like to see available memory in the 50% range or better most of the time. Less and there will likely be some impairment of performance.
Post #9 shows heavy memory usage by the Firefox and Chrome browsers. And it is actually worse than that. The "Memory (Private working set)" column shown does not show the full memory usage of a process. Full usage is even higher.
More memory will improve overall system performance. Will it improve explorer performance with large folders? That is a different matter. You can't expect that a memory upgrade will eliminate all performance problems. That is not how things work in the real world. The NTFS file system has no problem with huge numbers of files but not so for Windows Explorer and most other file managers. What hurts performance in the details listing is the need to sort the display listing and Windows Explorer will always sort. The on disk file structure is not touched by this sorting, it is only for display purposes.
But it is much worse when showing thumbnails. Displaying the thumbnail requires reading it from the image file. If the image comes from a phone or digital camera a special thumbnail image will usually be present in the file and that will help a lot. Images from other sources may not have it. In that case the entire image file would need to be read and that takes time. This is particularly bad with a conventional drive, much better with an SSD. Windows Explorer will only read the thumbnails for images that are actually being displayed, not the entire list. These images will go into a thumbs.db cache file in the folder which helps a lot. But of course with a new folder this will not be present.
