Vista's "Dark Memory"?

[tao muon]

...

I does more damage then any good.

No comment.

[Malisk]

A memory leaks happen all over with Vista. It happens with alcohol, adobe reader, and other apps... Well, i don't think all these companies are doing something wrong. I think memory management in Vista is totally messed up, and other things.

It's just amazing how much of performance and problem free you get by disabling superfetch, for example.

Windows memory management was never perfect, but it's worst with Vista. Even with XP when you load up app, and then you exit a lot of garbage stays in the memory. It never completely frees, so there were tools like memory free which would force Windows to unload the crap...

Now, somebody from Microsoft figured that it's good to preload the things in the memory. What a stupid idea. I hope they realize hard drives are so fast today that really superfetch is not worth of any performance hit, overhead, because when i start a game to load up from the scratch it is just damn fast.

I'm not sure you understand all things that's going on when you seem to think hard drives are even in the same ballpark as RAM. I think I'll rather trust an OS kernel designer over that. Anyway, if Vista itself had actual problems with memory leaks, it would hardly be usable... There isn't really a problem for an OS to free reserved pages once a process exits... After all, it knows the exact moments when processes exits and it was the same OS that allocated the memory after all, so it can take whatever action it needs at that point. The problem is usually that a process don't free its resources properly. If Vista doesn't return RAM immediately after exiting something, it's most likely because it doesn't have to. It'll page out unused stuff to disk if memory would actually do run scarce.

Edited March 13, 2007 by Jugalator

[freak_power]

Are you experiencing actual problems or just reading numbers in the Task Manager? I'm not sure you understand all things that's going on when you seem to think hard drives are even in the same ballpark as RAM. I think I'll rather trust an OS kernel designer over that.

I'm not experience any problem. My Vista idles at 250MB of RAM (Too much crap installed by default), and as far as I'm concern OS flies.

[lgratian]

I encountered exactly the same problem today when I was burning a DVD. I have 2 GB of memory and SuperFetch seemed to take all my memory. I closed the burning software, and after about 3 minutes, all data cached by SuperFetch was freed and I had only ~300 MB used memory.

Edit:

Ok, there is definitely something wrong... it happened the second time. When I canceled the burn process, all went to normal.

Edited March 13, 2007 by lgratian

[AltecXP]

I'm not experience any problem. My Vista idles at 250MB of RAM (Too much crap installed by default), and as far as I'm concern OS flies.

You do realize that the MORE RAM Vista prepages the better right? If the OS (correctly)used 90% of my ram I'd TOTALLY buy it. ram is MUCH faster then HDD, so the more in the ram the better and the more RAM allocated the faster it can be refreshed fro another program.

You seem to think LESS ram is better. If you do then I have a few friends at Intel and IBM you should talk to to straighten you out.

[freak_power]

You do realize that the MORE RAM Vista prepages the better right? If the OS (correctly)used 90% of my ram I'd TOTALLY buy it. ram is MUCH faster then HDD, so the more in the ram the better and the more RAM allocated the faster it can be refreshed fro another program.

You seem to think LESS ram is better. If you do then I have a few friends at Intel and IBM you should talk to to straighten you out.

More RAM Vista prepages for something you're not gonna run is wasting CPU/HDD/RAM time, and making overhead. In order to preload the things into RAM, it has to be loaded from HDD anyway. So, it really there is no point of preloading it. Also more RAM Vista prepages less RAM you have left to run your program or game which is not prepageted by Vista which means, Vista has to free a ram which really does bad becase a lot of junk is left...the bottom line your are going to experience problems with the apps and games which are RAM demanding.

If you have 16Gb of RAM, it's not gonna really matter but it just you have to wait like 20 minutes after system is loaded to wait for stupid superfetch to load all the crap from HDD, because if your game is located in the same drive...you're going to enjoy 20 minutes of stuttering.

[PermaSt0ne]

just a thought

if vista pre-fetches stuff that the program will use, and most burn programs copy whatever you are burning onto the HDD temporarily, then will vista prefetch the entire dvd image into the ram?

i don't know anything about vista or prefetch but yea, like i said, just a thought

[da.pwns]

Vista sucks for games period.

[da.pwns]

Vista sucks for games period.

[myzar]

just a thought

if vista pre-fetches stuff that the program will use, and most burn programs copy whatever you are burning onto the HDD temporarily, then will vista prefetch the entire dvd image into the ram?

i don't know anything about vista or prefetch but yea, like i said, just a thought

Yup that's what exactly happens, after you close the burning program that memory is freed , superfetch is very happy to see 1g of freeram and it will thrash the hd trying to refill the memory cache.

Superfetch is a good idea in an office enviroment when you always run the same programs but if your behaviour is not predictable aka you love to run random crap or games superfetch preloads useless stuff.

It's a shame that there isn't any way to select or to exclude what is preloaded

[HawkMan]

If your Vista is trashign for 5 minutes at boot. somethign is wrong, and it's not vista, it's your computer.

As for Superfecth you have no idea how it actually works as you have proven by your wonderful descriptions of how you "think" it works.

As far as Nero and superfetch go. I dunno, I stopped using Nero ages ago, and if Nero causes superfetch to use up all yoru ram, Nero is doing something dodgy, and I'd bet my last empty can of cola that it has to do with Nero using your comptuer memory for a second Cache. somethign that with todays aocmputers and the extra cache in modern writers is completely useless in itself.

As for htinkign yoru Vista is faster because it only uses 250 MB of ram well feel free to give me any ram sticks you got above 512 then, I'll use them to let superfetch do it's job extra well. oh well these self proclaimed memory experts are allways funny. especially when they start claimign widnows memory management is bad and that windows has memory leaks. when even most experts agree that windows and vista in particular happen to have one of, if not the, best memory management around... ah but what do they know, they're just the real experts the ones who know what they're talking about, and not the crazy theory they invented that memory shouldn't be used.

FYI since you're so afraid of your memory being used, do you know HOW fast it is for your memory to simply release information back to nothing whent he OS tells it to, because it's unecessary data and the OS needs it for something else. yeah it's pretty much instant, in fact for you it's faster than instant. for the computer it's basically instant. and as far as superfetch trashign on the HDD and such, Superfecth is a low priority IO process, it will only grab information when there is available resources to do this without slowing other processes down. might be hard for you to understand, but basically it means that Superfetch speeds up your computer and doesn't slow it down.

The fact that Nero built their own screwed up memory management cache code into their application is something completeley different and not related. disable that and I bet you'll be brunign as well as ever. but either way I'd suggest to get imgBurn or somethign you can trust. Nero lost my trust ages ago.

[haxaco]

lol go easy on them hawkman, although the ops problem was actually with alcohol it doesnt really matter anymore as he can just find another program to burn cd/dvd

[Mordkanin]

All yer comps are borked. I'm running 33 procs in full use (with a P2P client, firewall, and AV soft), and my lappy is running 25 with AV. Even though those procs arent fully active on your comp they still consume CPU and slow your memory access.

Lawliet, check all the options for the listview. There was a Viz for WMP10 that was doing this to me 2 years ago. Was using like a gig of pagefile memory, I had a thread on it. Check for error data on those procs to find the faulty one.

Also check your event management console.

Right click My Computer > Manage > Event Viewer

HTH is firefox using 80megs? That screwed. IE never goes over 50.

Make sure you have a pagefile enabled.

33? On Vista? You're either not looking at processes from all users, or heavily crippled your system be disabling things...Or not running Vista. Which is entirely possible. You called it My Computer, and MS dropped the 'My' from everything.

[CCRATA]

More RAM Vista prepages for something you're not gonna run is wasting CPU/HDD/RAM time, and making overhead. In order to preload the things into RAM, it has to be loaded from HDD anyway. So, it really there is no point of preloading it. Also more RAM Vista prepages less RAM you have left to run your program or game which is not prepageted by Vista which means, Vista has to free a ram which really does bad becase a lot of junk is left...the bottom line your are going to experience problems with the apps and games which are RAM demanding.

If you have 16Gb of RAM, it's not gonna really matter but it just you have to wait like 20 minutes after system is loaded to wait for stupid superfetch to load all the crap from HDD, because if your game is located in the same drive...you're going to enjoy 20 minutes of stuttering.

You have no idea how os's work and I doubt you are even a programmer. Please do not make comments on things you have no idea about. You do realise that linux does the same thing. My dev workstation running RHEL almost always caches up to ~1.7GB on my system with 2gb of ram. Its the intelligent thing to do.

[MrCobra]

My machine boots up Vista in like 5-6 seconds. Battlefield 2 is loaded in 2-3 seconds...heck i don't need S of superfetch.

It takes longer than 5-6 seconds to do a POST let alone boot Vista.

[Lawliet]

From what I've read here, the memory SuperFetch use should not appear under the graph. It should appear under "cached memory" or something to that effect.

I've stopped using Nero because twice I've tried Nero and twice it made my whole system stop responding. No HDD activity and I couldn't move anything on my system.

And I think Freak Power's timing excluded POST and only the part from when the loading bar appears to the time the logon screen is ready.

[lgratian]

From what I've read here, the memory SuperFetch use should not appear under the graph. It should appear under "cached memory" or something to that effect.

I've stopped using Nero because twice I've tried Nero and twice it made my whole system stop responding. No HDD activity and I couldn't move anything on my system.

And I think Freak Power's timing excluded POST and only the part from when the loading bar appears to the time the logon screen is ready.

I don't think it has something to do with Nero. The exact problem (see above) happend to me using Roxio Central (it's an beta application written in WPF, it's probably based on Roxio Easy CD Creator).

[raskren]

It takes longer than 5-6 seconds to do a POST let alone boot Vista.

More drama from freak_power. Just ignore his noise.

[chavo]

/ignore freak_power

[Dmitry71]

Lawliet,

I only see 4 svchost processes on the picture!!! You must have disabled a whole lot of essential services. I suggest that you go back to the original config with your services first, of course if you exported the list of services before tweaking them ;)

PS: I also suggest that you read the pdf Vista Guide. REALLY useful thing. Search forums here in the "Customise Vista" thread. Look for chapter Services.

PPS: By the way, that "0" that is showing total free memory is familiar. I always had the same "0" before I re-installed Vista a couple of days ago. But it didn't cause any slowdowns.

[Mark Schieldrop]

Yeah, I don't know why you guys are bothering to reply or even read freak_power's posts. He's obviously a troll trying to stir people up or he really is a clueless noob. I suspect he's a troll, but it's quite possible that he's just some adolescent or teenager who thinks he's some kind of pro because he knows how handle a screwdriver.

[freak_power]

You have no idea how os's work and I doubt you are even a programmer. Please do not make comments on things you have no idea about. You do realise that linux does the same thing. My dev workstation running RHEL almost always caches up to ~1.7GB on my system with 2gb of ram. Its the intelligent thing to do.

That's why Linux performs like crap...

From what I've read here, the memory SuperFetch use should not appear under the graph. It should appear under "cached memory" or something to that effect.

I've stopped using Nero because twice I've tried Nero and twice it made my whole system stop responding. No HDD activity and I couldn't move anything on my system.

And I think Freak Power's timing excluded POST and only the part from when the loading bar appears to the time the logon screen is ready.

Yap. You don't count POST into your boot process, because it's part of BIOS initialization so there is no point of talking about.

And yea...5-6 seconds from when the loading bar appears to the time the logon screen is ready. When I enter password it takes 3-4 seconds to load up desktop and some background apps.

My fastest boot is with Windows XP 64 edition. From time when progress bar appears till it hits logon screen only 3 seconds.

[Witt3439]

I just read this entire post, and FWIW I currently have a total of 25 processes running when I look into Services. I can boot from completely turned off to having IE open in around 35 seconds. I am only using 305MB of RAM with IE open and Kaspersky IS Suite running (and that's after running my system for five minutes or soand then checking it).

It may not be the fastest, but I'm happy with it!

[ccuk]

That's why Linux performs like crap...

Yap. You don't count POST into your boot process, because it's part of BIOS initialization so there is no point of talking about.

And yea...5-6 seconds from when the loading bar appears to the time the logon screen is ready. When I enter password it takes 3-4 seconds to load up desktop and some background apps.

My fastest boot is with Windows XP 64 edition. From time when progress bar appears till it hits logon screen only 3 seconds.

If you correctly set your system up you wouldn't need to disable superfetch...

What exactly are your specs?

I have super fetch turned on as do a large number of people I know... and it significantly improves operating speed. And FYI... superfetch learns which apps you want opening so if you kept with it for a while it would load all your regularly apps into memory ready for you to use, and this pre fetching does not hinder performance whilst you open other programs.

The memory manage ment in Vista is very good.

[LittleNeutrino Veteran]

what angers me about vista's memory issues is the fact that with windows xp there were only about twelve processes you HAD to have running where as with vista when i kill all of the ones that you do not need i still have 30-35 processes running when i am just sitting there. on my xp partition of this same machine the computer runs almost a full 100% faster however, i would rather run vista on it because of the features it has to offer. the only time i even use XP on this machine anymore is when i want to play dark massiha