86% of Windows 7 PCs max out memory | Hacker News Reader

86% of Windows 7 PCs max out memory

computerworld.com

5 pointsprat16 comments

My understanding is that Windows 7 speculatively populates your memory with your most frequently used set of applications to improve startup times. This is on the quite reasonable theory that if your machine doesn't have, e.g., the browser in memory then all the machine is doing for you is costing you seconds the next time you open the browser. (This also reduces the necessity for makers of heavier applications to do various tricks to keep their apps in-memory themselves. IE, Firefox, MS Office, and I think Open Office will all aggressively try to load themselves ASAP to decrease boot time.)

More broadly I think that "zomg my memory usage is too high" is one of those things that a) we should never, ever expose to non-developers because it tells them useless or harmful things and b) even many developers evaluate incorrectly. Consistently having free memory is NOT a good thing in this day and age. It means you're not using the RAM you paid for to do stuff which actually matters to you.

Using a lot of memory could be a good thing. The better the OS, the more effectively it should use memory to optimize it's operation. Could be it is just caching things.

Just because it says "100% of memory used" doesn't imply that there is no memory left for other things.

I can only present an anecdote from Java development, where the VM would often report high memory use. But that was because the garbage collection would only kick in once the memory was really needed (on some mobile VMs anyway). So by instantiating more objects, the memory usage would fall from 90% to 20% (or whatever), because it would trigger the gc.

Therefore I assume this, as well as the constant bickering about "fat FireFox", are a non-issue.

Really? I have 3 PC's running Win 7 Ultimate: A Netbook with 2 GB RAM that I use for developing when I'm on the road. My workstation with 4 GB RAM that I use at home, and my wife's video editing PC with 8 GB RAM. I've been really happy with all of them. I haven't noticed any page file useage on any of them. Then again, I practice pretty good computer hygeine, and I routinely uninstall any programs that aren't being used.

My wife edits 5-10GB video files for a living using Adobe Premiere, and she rarely tops 4GB of memory useage.

Unfortunately I have the opposite problem. I'm running Win7 x64 with 8GB of memory and the only way I can get it to use it is to have at least 2 VM's running. Usually I have more than 4 GB free.

Granted, most of my apps are 32 bit, but I would think that Windows could utilize all the available memory. I paid good money for that memory, and don't want it to go to waste!

Unused ram is wasted ram, always do more caching.

I hope they're not including disk I/O caches in this figure. My (Linux) workstation with 8GB RAM currently reports 250MB free. More than 5.5GB of the occupied memory is acting as a block cache, though.

It's interesting that the average amount of RAM in a Windows 7 PC is 3.3GB. That's a typical maximum that the 32-bit version can actually use.

I'm on a Windows 7 laptop with 4GBs of RAM, but due to chipset limitations in the laptop itself I am unable to use more than 3.3GBs despite running 64-bit Windows. Pretty annoying, but not unbearable.

I'm guessing it is a decent mixture of cheap/old chipsets in the laptops sold and the OS itself.

It's unlikely to be the chipset's fault unless it's a very old laptop - it's the BIOS' job to trigger the "hoisting" of physical memory that overlaps the PCI address space so it lies above 0xFFFFFFFF once ACPI etc. have been initialised.

Laptop/motherboard makers pay notoriously little attention to the BIOS, so features like this often stay disabled. Have you checked for a BIOS update? Interestingly, this also means that any memory that already lies beyond the 4GB barrier will be visible to the OS (64-bit or PAE) even without hoisting (so you'd see 7.3GB of 8GB) - unfortunately, upgrading to >4GB is expensive in Laptops at the moment. (4GB modules cost over 4x as much as 2GB DIMMs)

I have the same problem currently (Lenovo T60, 4gb ram, only 3gb usable, x64 OS). In my case it's not the chipset's fault per se but rather a design limitation put in place by Lenovo. it's very annoying and certainly reduces the chances that my next laptop will be a Lenovo but on the other hand it's not exactly the worst thing in the world.

I can verify this anecdotally. I just bought a cheap Dell laptop with Win7 for my father-in-law. Awesome machine for the price ($400) and it comes with 3GB of RAM. I'm playing around in it and decide to open Task Manager. Holy moly, 1.7GB of RAM is being used and I just have IE8 pointed to the default MSN homepage. I had no other apps open at the time, not even Windows Explorer. I boot my MacBook Pro running OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard and open Firefox and it consumes just around 300MB total. Even WinXP with Outlook 2007 running in VirtualBox on my Linux machine is using only 270MB of RAM. What the heck is using all that memory in Win7? And why? Or is this a case of Win7 using the available/unused memory for caching kinda like what Linux does?

And why?

That's the important question, why? To decrease performance or increase performance? The article assumes that it decreases performance, but provides no evidence to back that up.

Or is this a case of Win7 using the available/unused memory for caching kinda like what Linux does?

And, if so, whose bright idea was it to tell the user that this memory was "unavailable" in the task manager?

The whole thing is rather silly. "Operating system X prints this number, while totally different operating system Y prints a much bigger, possibly unrelated number! Everybody panic!"

whoever wrote this article hasn't been following windows software news for a long time:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/why-does-vista-use-...

A computer magazine scooped on technical detail by a Jeff Atwood post from four years ago... and I thought I was having a bad day.

Why is this a bad thing? Look at the following screengrab:

http://invalid.ed.ntnu.no/~jostein/qupload/files/taskman.png

My laptop is running Firefox, PuTTY, Visual Studio, parts of the Office 2010 beta and I still haven't maxed out, but I do use "massive" 2GBs of memory.

Now let's look further at that: It's says 1019 MB is "cached". This means that things are buffered, ready to use, improving my machine's performance. Why should we have all this RAM if it isn't used for anything? That would be a bloody waste IMO.

As the article only mentions memory usage and not what it is used for (cached isn't mentioned once), I will assume this is mostly cached data improving performance, not the opposite. In fact quite like it works in Linux:

http://invalid.ed.ntnu.no/~jostein/qupload/files/top.png

Until proven otherwise I'd say this article is entirely without merit, or that at best it proves that Windows 7 in fact results in better use of available resources.

> Barth acknowledged that XPnet's data couldn't determine whether the memory usage was by the operating system itself, or an increased number of applications

In that case I call "full of shit"

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