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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.'"
Computerworld should just close up shop for this worthless piece of journalism, or at least give their author the boot for doing any work with Craig Barth who represents a team of morons. samzenpus should be given a troll rating for getting this to Slashdot.
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.
So yeah, it doesn't seem like the author really knows what's going on...
If the memory was freed up dynamically as needed then no processes would ever be forced to resort to disk-based virtual memory.
The trouble is, the TFA doesn't actually say (at least not clearly) that the Win7 machines are indeed turning to swap more regularly. It just states that fetching stuff from the swap file is a consequence of running out of RAM and causes perf degradation. So if the Win7 machines are indeed utilizing all available RAM and yet not swapping at a significanly higher rate, it means they're making more optimum use of available RAM.
Totally agree. If you don't want Windows 7 to use the 4GB of RAM you've paid for to speed up your computer, take out 2GB and put it in the drawer. Otherwise, be thankful that it's actually making the most of the RAM you're using.
What next? People complaining that games use 100% CPU to give them maximum framerate when it could just use 30% CPU and give them 10 FPS?
Yep, that would be a problem - but neither the TFA nor xpnet mentions if this is actually happening, it seems that they're looking almost exclusively at "free physical memory", which isn't a useful stat in this regard. The xpnet site does say they factor in "how often it relies on virtual memory", but not how they do this (there's multiple metrics to choose from, some fairly uninteresting) and the fact that they seem to factor this in as a part of "memory usage" rather than keeping it as a separate stat makes me pretty wary of trusting any analysis from them.
Coffee-driven development.
actaully the windows 7 caching model is great. on games the difference between the first loading of a level and subsequent loads are night and day thanks to it's caching model.
That's the windows cache system generally, from way back in the NT days... Vista and later SuperFetch is more than that.
btw, regarding the article more directly: they shows no figure about the actual _swap_ usage, a thing that may or may not disprove their theory.
Indeed. The xpnet site does mention that they factor in paging somehow, but that's still pretty useless - paging activity needs to be a separate statistic. Also, simply looking at pagefile usage isn't terribly useful, an inactive app can have it's working set trimmed and pages flushed out to disk, and this won't matter much in the big picture.
What you need to look at is the rate of pagefile activity (ie., pages/second) as well as how often it happens - not just static numbers (even if having 1gig of data in the pf is probably a warning sign :))
Coffee-driven development.
Yeah. I don't have low mem problems with Windows 7. There's stuff I don't like about Windows 7 but "memory hog" is not on the list.
;).
For work I'm using Windows 7 64 bit on a 4GB notebook PC with tons of windows open e.g. a few Explorer windows open, a few Excel "windows"[1], a few Word windows, one Visio doc, Notepad++, Google Chrome, Firefox, putty, Outlook (a resource hog), Communicator, MSN Messenger windows, a Virtual Box Linux vm machine, Microsoft Security Essentials (it's my work PC so it's supposed to have AV) and it typically says 1700 to 2000MB _available_ (depending on how many firefox tabs, how many word docs and virtual machines etc). But overall no mem problem.
And guess which is using the most RAM? Not Virtual Box, not Word, outlook or Excel. It's Firefox with a 173MB working set and 142MB Private Working Set!
Yes it only has 500MB free memory, but so what? The O/S says there's 1700MB available. And so far I haven't had much slowdowns due to low memory issues.
To me the relevant metric for "low on memory" is "Pages Output/sec" (go launch perfmon.msc and add that counter). If that's a constant zero when you or the O/S switches from app to app, window to window, it means it's not swapping out. If it's not swapping out and not getting "out of memory" messages, it's not low in RAM no matter what some random "expert" thinks. And it's zero for me.
The equivalent in Linux for that is the swap "so" column when you run vmstat 1 (or vmstat 2). Same thing there - stuck at zero = not swapping.
I don't think my usage can be considered "light", as it is, what are those users running that's using up so much memory? Symantec or McAfee antivirus?
FWIW, my laptop is not running any of the "OEM crapware" - I did a clean install of Windows 7 months ago when I got the laptop.
If that "expert CTO" can't even give an example of one memory hogging program (or show where Windows 7 itself is using so much memory that it's a problem), then it's likely he's full of crap.
Lastly, it's true my taskbar looks messy with two rows of task buttons, but I don't see the advantage of closing and reopening documents or programs if I'm not running out of RAM yet. I close them if I really do not need them (e.g. the document is out of date and not used for comparison). Otherwise it's much faster to just click a button to show the desired doc, rather than have to reopen it again from scratch (uses less battery power too - except in the case of MS Word which seems to use CPU even when "idle" - haven't figured that one out yet).
[1] By default Excel actually just has one window which changes to display the relevant document depending on which Excel taskbar button you click, whereas Word actually has separate windows for each doc.
Windows gets really cranky when it doesn't have a pagefile. We tried it for performance reasons and we saw an almost 40% drop in performance despite the server not being under any kind of memory pressure.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.