Slashdot Mirror
86% of Windows 7 PCs Maxing Out Memory
CWmike writes "Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory 'saturation' point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. 'This is alarming,' Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. 'For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.'"
I guess Devil Mountain or whoever don't know about SuperFetch. Or need publicity.
And I guess slashdot editors don't know about SuperFetch. Or maybe an article like this gets them more traffic, revenue, etc.
The fucking bullshit that passes for articles these days..
I think the issue here is that the system is turning to swap. Caching stuff that may be referenced again is fine and dandy, but if the system regularly turns to swap just to keep itself afloat, then you have a problem.
The metric to count is the number of page faults, an indicator of the number of times that the OS addresses memory that isn't in RAM.
As others point out, measuring just the fraction of memory consumption is stupid. I have 6GB of RAM ; my processes are using about 1.7GB of that, but the OS is claiming that 3.8GB is consumed. So that's 2.1GB of cached data that I no longer have to wait for from disk. Hooray.
TFA hints that they may be measuring page faults, and does mention that Win7 is hitting the disk for virtual memory more often. But they should make that clearer if it's the case.
Here we see why /. needs a "-1, Wrong" mod.
Definitely the part about HDD caching slowing things down. Even in the DOS age it was well known that hdd caching utilities (I forgot the names, too long ago) improve disk performance tremendously.
/dev/null
Linux does the same things as Windows: it caches as much stuff from disk into main memory as possible. Try running:
cat large_video_file.avi >
You'll see that after running the command, your memory usage jumps up by the size of the video file. Now try running the same command again, it's now an order of a magnitude faster.
On Linux things like this are stored in main memory in the form of caches and buffers. I don't know about Windows, but Linux clears some caches and buffers if applications need real memory. Caches and buffers show up in memory usage reporting tools like 'free', so it's quite normal to see Linux systems using 90% or more RAM, most of which go to caches and buffers. It seems that most people who complain about memory usage don't know how memory is managed on modern operating systems, so they go all apeshit about "OMG HELP linux is using so much memory it sux0rz!!!" and I have to explain again and again how they're not getting it. Same goes to you. Now, Windows is suffering from the same problem.
FYI, here's the memory usage of my Linux server:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 720 702 17 0 55 510
-/+ buffers/cache: 136 583
Swap: 399 0 399
It says 702 MB of used memory. Now look at "-/+ buffers/cache", it says 136 MB. That's the amount of memory *actually* used by applications.
Read TFA. It just claims that Windows 7 consumes all available RAM. That is the "empirical evidence." System slowdown was NOT measured.
Utilizing all available RAM is a pretty well understood technique at this point. All web browsers do this now, as do many other applications. One would expect a well-designed modern OS to do this. Consuming all memory itself is not a sign of poor programming itself, so long as disk caching of things that should be in RAM doesn't occur. This is not something that the people in the article has measured.
I'm going to side with the guy who appears to make his living testing these sorts of things.
Bad science is bad irrespective of the person conducting it. And whatever the original tester said is getting filtered through the viewpoint of the gentleman writing the article. Considering that he says that "Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is," yet never once compares statistics to Vista (or even mentions it outside of this statement), I'd take the conclusions from these stats with a grain of salt.
The ______ Agenda
You missed the most important emphasis:
Ostensibly means "to all outward appearances." In other words, they're admitting they don't really know the inner workings, the true cause of the delays. They're just supposing it's due to RAM swapping, as opposed to increased networking activity, aero glass, more concurrent programs being run on average, or any other number of other wag'd reasons. Basically, they picked two measurements that are both higher in W7, and just said, "Well, it stands to reason that A causes B." What's that phrase that internet smarty-pantses use all the time about this?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.