Microsoft Releases Windows 10 Build 14942: Increases RAM Usage

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You may be the only one cheering for increased RAM usage in an OS. Android user? ;)

This won't impact many desktops, and I'll certainly be happy to see exactly what process each svchost was handling. However, this could negatively impact Win10 tablets as many only have 4GB RAM.
 


Yeah, google svchost high cpu usage and watch the carnage. I've experienced a couple of them on Win 7 machines. Windows update maxing a core 24/7 while it ran it circles. Audio driver that wouldn't quit gracefully after alt-f4 out of games. Netsvcs too. I think is more of a sandboxing thing, like when Chrome first started running Flash instances as separate processes.
 

wrightleft

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Windows should use all the RAM. There's no point for unused RAM. I didn't buy 32 GB for it to sit free.
 

razor512

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They need to make a stripped down version for netbooks. While they are low end with often 2GB of RAM, they are often decent for really basic stuff. For example, a basic PC that you can for taking notes at random worksites since they are passively cooled, and are cheap to replace (often costing around $130); they also don't really get stolen.
 


Systems that have less than 3.5GB of RAM that run Windows 10 will continue to use svchosts to conserve system memory. This was a wise decision by Microsoft, as even a slight increase in memory usage would hurt small systems with just 2 GB of RAM like the ones you are talking about. Systems with 4 GB of memory will fair better, but may have a slight performance impact as well due to the increased RAM usage. You might be able to compensate for that, however, by closing down rarely used services.

It should prove helpful on systems with more than 4GB of RAM, however, as the slight increase in memory usage likely won't effect them.
 

hst101rox

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The end of svchost.exe, quite surprising. Should be a registry entry to manually keep it on PCs with >3.5GB RAM.
svchost is annoying in that you can't see which service is using all the CPU And/or HD and/or network easily. Have to use cmd 'tasklist' to find what might possibly be causing the issue. And can't just kill the svchost since it may be housing many services in one.

Good riddance.
Now Microsoft just has to get full support for file paths longer than 255 chars like NTFS does. and the base 2 number system.
 

3ogdy

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Thank God they're putting an end to svchost.exe Now we could possibly finally see what actually takes up so much CPU more easily. It's a great move. And having 32GB of RAM doesn't hurt either. leo2kp, finally Windows 10 will require minimum 8GB of RAM to boot and recommend 32 for optimum performance. hahahaha

I would've loved to see the same situation in the VRAM department as an option. Theming under Windows 95, I mean Windows 10 (these days it's hard to tell which is which) is horrible.
 

MaCk0y

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File Explorer just crashes and restarts as soon as you browse a folder that contains a file with a long name. Sometimes it crashes and restarts when trying to modify that file or even just trying to change the folder view or enabling the preview pane. It has become much more frequent with the Anniversary edition. Works fine with third party file explorers. What does the MAX_PATH function do exactly?
 

bit_user

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It uses the remaining RAM as a disk cache. So, it's not sitting free, depending on how much data you access and how long you leave it on.

But don't blame MS if you waste money on hardware that's overkill for your needs. I first installed Win 7 on 4 GB, then had to upgrade to 8 (too much swapping).

I'm not yet running Windows 10, but I think the real-world impact of this change will be minor. The decision to group them dated back to a time when PCs had like 64 MB. So, anything that saved a couple MB was a significant win.

BTW, you can see which service is eating your CPU in Resource Monitor. In the CPU tab, you can restrict the list of services to a singe svchost.exe by clicking the checkbox next to that process. Otherwise, I think the list of services is from all svchost instances. I didn't know this for years.
 

none12345

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Its not an end to scvhost. If there were 100 dll only services/apps/modules/whatever loaded under a dozen scvhost.exe before now there will be 100 instances of scvhost, 1 for each dll.

Thats the only difference. Its both good and bad. Mostly good. You still have the some of the unnecessary baggage that comes with svchost, but you can atleast tell which dll is hogging recourses, or you may be able to easier tell a rogue dll from a good one. At the cost of a tiny bit of ram. svchost.exe is only a couple kilobytes, it really will be a tiny amount of ram.

I will say this article title is pretty darn misleading. It should be a really minor ram usage increase; its not really about the ram, its about the grouping of service dlls into scvhost instances.


More bothering then the ram usage however is the processor usage. I mean sure these services dont take much, and more core utilization is good. However task switching is expensive on windows. Having 100 processes instead of 12 for instance is a lot more task switching. So i really really hope they changed the task manager to put all the low resource usage svchost instances into the same core. As well as the issue of core thrashing, i hope they dont have the task manager constantly bouncing them between cores, another expensive operation.

Id run some tests, but screw windows 10. Until they end their massive data mining scheme i have no desire to use it.
 

azraelle

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Windows STILL caches web pages on the HDD instead of (or in preference to) RAM--no matter how much RAM you've got. The only way I know "around" this (more like through) to speed things up is to install an SSD instead of a HDD. Any thoughts? Linux, btw, can be forced to prefer RAM to swap file by reducing default "swappiness" of 60 down to 6.
 

bit_user

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Um, there's no task switching for services that are idle. And task switch vs. thread switching have pretty similar costs.

So, in terms of CPU resources, this change is pretty much free. I agree with you that the impact on memory should probably be quite small.

If you had used Resource Monitor, you could've found the offending service. Then, disable it or take other appropriate action, depending on which one it is.

But it uses RAM to cache disk. So, except for the extra disk writes, you still get the benefits of RAM caching.

Do it! If you're still on rusty hard disks, SSD is worth the upgrade!

As for the swappiness trick, that's puzzling. My understanding is that it should reduce the amount of RAM available to serve as a disk cache, by reducing the amount of process memory that gets swapped out. Either way, I wouldn't expect it to have much impact on the caching of programs like web browsers.

BTW, even if you disabled disk-based caching, you'd probably still see a lot of disk activity coming from your web browser. You see, HTML5 allows web pages to store information on your hard disk. So, depending what websites you visit and what ads they serve, you might get a lot of I/O that has nothing to do with caching.
 

Hupiscratch

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I'm exploding in happiness with the end of svchost. I hate to see the PC using lots of resources without giving a clue of what's happening.
 

computerguy72

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The change to get rid of svchost is a really good thing. Being able to actually see what is sucking up resources instead of a generic tag is long overdue. This is genuinely a good change.
 

azraelle

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RE: Swappiness--
Default setting of 60 in most Distros means that when 40% of available RAM has been used, Linux will start swapping out to whatever you've set up on the HDD as the "swap file" (I generally specify somewhere between 2 and 4 GB). Reducing it to 6 means that Linux will wait until 94% of available RAM has been used. Which for most tasks NEVER HAPPENS on systems with 2GB or greater RAM.

 
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