none12345 :
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.
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.
turkey3_scratch :
I've had to reinstall my OS before because SVChost was using up like 25% CPU usage.
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.
azraelle :
Windows STILL caches web pages on the HDD instead of (or in preference to) RAM--no matter how much RAM you've got.
But it uses RAM to cache disk. So, except for the extra disk writes, you still get the benefits of RAM caching.
azraelle :
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.
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.