Windows 8 To Reduce Memory Footprint

bheer writes "Microsoft's Windows 8 blog has a good post about the work being done to reduce Windows 8's memory footprint. The OS will use multiple approaches to do this, including combining RAM pages, re-architecting old bits of code and adding new APIs for more granular memory management. Interestingly, it will also let services start on a trigger and stop when needed instead of running all the time."

Comments

Hope so...

[IANAAC]

It's been a long time since I've dealt with Windows other than XP in a VM, and even that is rare.

My old Asus netbook recently died, so I was forced to go out and buy another. I bought an Aspire One loaded with W7S. I really wanted to like W7. Really. I liked the interface. But damn, it was really slow and memory hungry. With no pgms running, it was taking up about 560-580M of memory, compared to Ubuntu (11.04) taking 260-270M with no pgms running.

I really couldn't have more than two programs running in W7 without hitting 900M memory use. Granted, they were big pgms - Thunderbird and Firefox, both latest versions. But contrast that with Ubuntu where I ran TB, FF, Pidgin, Hotot, Tobmoy, LibreOffice and Rhythmbox all at the same time and never go above the 850M mark in memory use (at least not yet).

This release of Ubuntu has its own set of problems (Compiz, anyone?), but I much prefer it to W7. If MS can get Window's memory usage down I'd be more inclined to use the latest version.

Re:Hope so...

[Runaway1956]

I find it difficult to believe that people are buying new machines with less than 4 gig of ram. Memory was cheap by the time Win7 came out - cheap enough to load a new machine with 4 gig, anyway. Maybe I'm something of an asshole, but anyone who invests hundreds of dollars in a new machine, and decides to go cheap on the memory deserves to have a shitty running machine. I don't care if it's an Apply fanboy, a Windows drone, or a Linux nut. BUY MEMORY, or don't complain about performance!

Now, if you had said that you installed all the memory that the mainboard would support, and you were getting 60% to 80% usage before you even started any programs, THEN I would agree that there was a problem, I would sympathize with you, and I would be willing to look for the problem.

A couple of guys have commented on how much memory their browsers use. Well, I've seen FF using around 1.5 gig, while at the same time, Chromium was using in excess of a gig of memory. As someone else commented - the memory is there, why not use it? It's better than waiting for "virtual memory" to thrash the hell out of my hard disks!

Re:Hope so...

[IANAAC]

The Russinovich/Ionescu book "Windows Internals" has some pretty good sections that talk about how Windows memory management really works, if you're curious about it -- it would likely be enlightening about some of the misunderstands that people have about Windows.

I will fully admit to not knowing the internals of memory management. But I can say without a doubt that W7 definitely takes more of a performance hit than Ubuntu with the same programs. Thunderbird and Firefox bring the machine to a crawl in W7, while they don't in Ubuntu. Memory management is the only reasonable cause I can think of. It certainly not the processor - it's an Atom 570 dual core running at 1.66GHz. Add a third largish program (Media Monkey in my case) and W7 becomes unresponsive - REALLY unresponsive.

I don't get this behavior at all under Ubuntu, with more programs running, Granted, Ubuntu makes it slightly easier for me to see how memory is being used - probably because I'm a bit more familiar with it - by showing me buffers/cache. So as a layperson, I come to the conclusion that it's memory management.

And this matters?

[grasshoppa]

With windows 7, memory has become less an issue to me. I just don't care that much; I have 4 gigs, and stuff starts right up when I click on it. As a user, that's all I care about. I could obsess about how much memory is being used at all times, I guess, but what does that metric even mean? I currently have fo:nv, mstsc, 10tabs in ie and ~20 in chrome, everything is still snappy. What does it matter that the system is showing high ram utilization?

What I'd like to see them focus on instead is the file system, and making searches work at least as well as they did in XP. Vista utterly broke file searching ( which is amazing in and of itself ), and while w7 brought back some of the functionality, it's still a crap shoot.