RAM Defrag tool

[pacaveli420]

Does anyone know of a RAM defrag tool that works in windows 7?
yes I'm aware that an actual defrag of RAM does not improve access performance and that rebooting will clear the RAM, etc etc.
I want it because usually a ram defrag can recover unused memory.
or if someone knows an alternate solution to accomplishing the same thing....
basically after windows has been running for quite a while there seems to be a lot of RAM that is not available....but not in use either.
for example, right now, I only have about 1.2GB out of 6GB free
this is not because I have ~5GB worth of memory being dedicated to open applications and windows.
I could restart...open up the same applications and only be using like 2GB vs the current ~5GB

back in XP days I would use system mechanic's ram defrag and it'd work fairly well. I don't believe they have it in their software any longer though. any ideas?

 

[stormy13]

Those ram/memory optimizers are nothing but pure snake-oil. As good an article about it as any,

The Truth About Windows Memory O

Do yourself and Windows a favor, let Windows manage it.

 

[pacaveli420]

yeah none of that is really news to me. I still appear to have ram 'in use' that's actually not though
so 'letting windows manage it' is not really the best solution in this situation

 

[stormy13]

Where are you looking that it is showing it "in use"?

 

[pacaveli420]

task manager / memory usage

 

[stormy13]

Post a screen shot. Also hit the Start button and type in resmon and hit enter and post a screen shot of that as well.

 

[pacaveli420]

Task Manager:

Resource Monitor:

 

[Dwarf]

Something doesn't look right here. This is what mine shows:



Have you disabled your virtual memory (paging file)?

 

[stormy13]

Up time 35 days? Let's have one of resmon after a restart. And even after 35 days it still shouldn't look like that unless you're running something that has a massive memory leak.

Mine after 3 days of up time,



And that is with playing several different games, converting a few movies, general usage, etc.

 

[zigzag3143]

yeah none of that is really news to me. I still appear to have ram 'in use' that's actually not though
so 'letting windows manage it' is not really the best solution in this situation

win 7 uses paged memory differently than XP, and it may seem like there is a leak but there isnt.

By rebooting you are just making the page file rebuild itself again.

 

[pacaveli420]

Something doesn't look right here. This is what mine shows

mine 'looks' fine. I see nothing that yours has that mine doesn't
except I have a triple core and 2GB more ram

I haven't disabled my page file...and that's not really relevant. this is about the physical ram

Up time 35 days?

awesome right?
and I know a restart will trash the ram and it'll look a lot different
that was one of my first points.
I just want a tool that allows recovery of any ram that's no longer actually in use...as obviously I'm not using ~5GB of ram...but yet windows / my pc seems to show that I am
I'm not sure if this is due to programs not properly clearing out the ram when they are closed or what

 

[stormy13]

Or instead of looking for a band-aid you could try and figure out which program is causing the problem and check for updates or an alternative.

If you want to try and figure out what is causing it start with this,

Process Explorer

provides more info than Windows own tools.

 

[pacaveli420]

what if it's something I can't replace, or it's multiple applications, or just windows itself?
I keep most of my stuff up to date if possible. I know firefox sometimes has some leak issues...but I don't know if that's the same as it not removing memory it has allocated for itself. and I'm not giving up my firefox =)

I don't think that software will be of any use. it's only going to tell me about currently opened processed....dlls they have loaded and so forth.

 

[pacaveli420]

for anyone else that this may be helpful too:
it seems the main program responsible for over allocating all my RAM was the windows indexer
I rebooted and decided to kill some processes prior to see if any of them were the culprits
upon killing it my RAM use dropped about 1.5GB - 2GB even though task manager reported it as using only 100MB or so
this was undoubtedly related to me rebuilding the index database earlier that day (I guess indexing ~2million items takes a good chunk of RAM =P)
it'd still be nice to have a RAM defrag / scrubber for situations where (closed or open) applications unnecessarily still have allocated space though. so if anyone knows of anything, let me know

 

[Layback Bear]

It looks to me you just have to many things running at the same time. Winamp, several browsers, ect. Your ram and Windows 7 looks like it is working properly you just have a lot of things open all at one time.

 

[Johnson]

so if anyone knows of anything, let me know

CleanMem v.1.5.1 | PcWinTech.com

If the problem is that processes are holding on to RAM, this works quite well.

 

[pacaveli420]

thnx for the reply Johnson, will check that out!

 

[Greg S]

so if anyone knows of anything, let me know

CleanMem v.1.5.1 | PcWinTech.com

If the problem is that processes are holding on to RAM, this works quite well.

For full benefit, Right click and select Run as administrator.

 

[MilesAhead]

thnx for the reply Johnson, will check that out!

This program was mentioned on another board. Apparently it works by enumerating running process and calling EmptyWorkingSet() API call on each process.

A better solution may be to set Superfetch to cache only boot files by setting
EnablePrefetcher and EnableSuperfetch registry keys to 2.

See this link and my comment at the bottom:

Change SuperFetch to Only Cache System Boot Files in Vista - How-To Geek

 

[Vertex]

Well if there are still a lot of free RAM space, let Windows take care of it. If you feel you are getting a little bit low on free memory, close any programs that are not in use or consuming a lot of resources. Doing a quick Goggle search will make a lot of results.

I have used RAM cleaners. Apparently, if you have cleared too much RAM, your PC might hang for a while.