Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Windows 8 To Reduce Memory Footprint

Posted by timothy on from the those-sound-like-good-ideas dept.

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."

5 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Re:About friggin' time... by tech4 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Except for the services part, Windows memory management has been improving a lot with each version. It made a huge difference when they let the OS decide more intelligently where to put resources not in use to.

    Most people who don't really understand memory management will just look at the processes and start bitching how much memory each program uses, or how Windows shows there isn't any memory available (while in fact it's just used for caching things). They're only half-intelligent, which hurts them even more than not knowing at all. The fact is, non used memory goes to waste. Every time there's memory that's free, well, it's just wasting it. It's much better approach that OS tries to use it all intelligently.

    This same pattern of stupid comments can be seen in browser comparisons too. It's always full of people going "omg Firefox/Opera/IE is using this much memory!" while it shows that they don't understand what is really happening. The browser and OS reserves that memory because it speeds up things. If the memory is needed elsewhere, it can and will free it up. That's something that seems to be really hard for people to understand, as the same thing always happens in every browser story or story about memory management.

  2. "let services start on a trigger" by Rufty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So windows is finally getting inetd?

    --
    Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
    1. Re:"let services start on a trigger" by mustangsal66 · · Score: 5, Funny

      So windows is finally getting inetd?

      and I hear Windows 8 SP1 will run the 2.6 kernel

      --
      Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
      Sig changed for readability by G.W.
  3. Hope so... by IANAAC · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:Hope so... by tgd · · Score: 5, Informative

      The vast majority of people -- even those who think they know how to interpret windows memory statistics -- don't know how to interpret Windows memory statistics. The common tools (like Task Manager) give meaningless numbers for both process and total system usage. Sysinternal's Process Explorer is better, but you still need to understand how the Windows kernel and memory management works to properly interpret the numbers.

      I wouldn't read anything at all into the numbers you were seeing. 900M memory usage for two programs in Task Manager is just fine -- you quite literally *can't* get the real information through Task Manager.

      Modern OS memory management is one of the most complicated things an OS does, and unfortunately no one has ever come up with a good way to distill all the information about what is really going on in your physical memory into a single number or statistic that lets people know if something is wrong. The only real statistic that matters is the percentage of pages that the total sum of processes are actively using relative to the commit charge... a process with a gigabyte of memory mapped files, or a hundred megabytes of shared code pages, or hundreds of megabytes of allocated and populated pages that only infrequently use them is running just fine.

      Reducing memory usage in Windows 8 is more about reducing the churn of pages through the various kernel data structures in the memory manager. As the article says, that involves things like optimizing old code to not trigger page faults all the time, or to suspend threads or otherwise idle background services that aren't being used. (A thread waking up, and going immediately back to sleep because it has nothing to do will still potentially cause a page to be re-loaded from disk.)

      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.