Out of memory errors with a ridiculous page-file usage...

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amnesiaaisenma

amnesiaaisenma

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Feb 15, 2012
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I have been using Windows 7 for quite some while (2 or more weeks) on this new PC. Now...problem is, Task Manager shows a massive page-file usage. 1.40 GB used as soon as my PC starts (without loading any programs). I have 4 GB RAM, out of which, 3305 MB is usable (Microsoft licensing issues keep messing around with 32-bit Windows), and the page-file usage slowly gets to around 3 GB. I have 4 partitions on my 1 TB HDD, and I had 2-4 GB page-file on each. I disabled the page-files on all the partitions, but TM still shows a massive usage of 2.5 GB as I am writing this article. I mean, there's 4 GB RAM, and even without running any programs, it's still around 1.40 GB page-file usage.

I disabled Superfetch and the page-file on all the drives, now Windows is giving me out-of-memory errors. The only things open are Google Chrome, Windows Live Messenger, mIRC, Windows Media Player, Task Manager, Yahoo Messenger and Bit-Torrent, and none eat memory. TM is showing 710 MB RAM available out of 3304 MB, and 70 MB free. IDK what is using the RAM and causing this big a page-file usage. My PC is gone very slow, and it sucks. Any way to reduce this much disk-activity, and actually use the RAM? Nothing in the TM shows active (CPU is always at 0-5 %), so nothing is eating memory. What's causing this much RAM and page-file usage?
 
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"The other physical drive already has data, which is a sort of a back up for my main HDD, so can't use that for PF. "

... You should always have atleast 10% free, how full is that drive to not be able to fit 4gb on it 0_0.

If it aint broke don't fix it.
 
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Smeg, stop saying it's physically limited. If it was, PAE would be no benefit and no use.

Read this link, then tell me, OK? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Design

Licensing policies are what got this 4 GB limit, and the drivers. It still can support more than 4 GB. And why are you wanting me to run 64-bit? Most programs are written for 32 bit. And I'm not among the "Everyone who SHOULD run it." I will get x64 when it's time and money available, both of which aren't right now...

OK, I'll try getting a pagefile on the other HDD. I wanted to start Windows XP on it, but can't, since it gives me a BSOD. The installation disk won't run either, so guess I'll make a PF there.
 
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It has absolutely nothing to do with licensing. 32-bit address space is 4GB, period. PAE is nothing more than a kludge. It's just an advanced version of page flipping, just like we used to do on the old 8-bit systems. It does not extend address space and has a negative impact on performance.

As to page files: Windows absolutely requires a page file as it pre-allocates page space during operation. Unless you want to thrash the disk mightily, only one page file per physical drive. If you want full memory dumps at crash then page file size must equal installed memory size. Just set paging to be system managed and leave it alone. Unless you have the Windows source code in your back pocket you do not know better than the OS how to manage it.

 
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Then why does Microsoft AND Wikipedia say it does? I mean, I'm neither of those, and the millions/billions using their software say it. Maybe Microsoft, being a corporation, can lie, but Wikipedia? That's managed by users, like you and me. Are they all liars? And even if I were to believe you...the whole issue of this thread is NOT to see what or how much memory is better for Windows...the whole point here is that I'm trying to find out the invisible thing which uses up the RAM and PF. And, for the record...I'm an explorer, so I keep exploring. Is it wrong for me to ask for help for something I don't understand and is it necessary for you all to keep telling me I've done something wrong, when I have not? OK, for once, I agree with all your points about what I did wrong...but that's not the issue of the thread.
 
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Wikipedia is the LAST place I'd look for any definitive information, on anything, for precisely the reason you mentioned, anyone can put anything up there, right, wrong, or otherwise.

There is no "invisible thing" out there using up your RAM and page file. It's Windows utilizing your memory such as to get the most out of what you have. Windows caches frequently used data in RAM for faster retrieval. The longer the system is up the larger & more efficient this cache becomes. Any RAM seen under "free" means that Windows could not find a use for it at present. In other words it's wasted memory. Same with the page file, pre-allocation is lumped together with in-use and presented as a single value in Task Manager. Pre-allocation ensures that there is enough virtual memory to satisfy demands.

Is it wrong for me to ask for help for something I don't understand and is it necessary for you all to keep telling me I've done something wrong, when I have not?
Click to expand...

It is when you've been told how and why you are wrong by those that know and you insist on arguing the point. But such is the folly of youth.
 
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I'm perplexed as to what may be the actual issue that you are reporting on.

You have 4GB of RAM, however once the OS is installed and up and running, you are concerned that there is less than half of the 4GB of RAM available?

The OP's issue is not that his RAM is being misreported due to the limitation of 32-bit OS but the fact that he has a concern about the memory usage of his rig.

Currently my memory usage is 2451 with only 5460 available and this is after a reboot.

I guess my question to you is how much available memory is reported by your system? Please refer to Resource Monitor and select the Memory tab.

...

 
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Wrong again as everyone else has pointed out. You want to "fix" this issue, double the RAM and get x64 Windows. I swear you are the only person on this board I've seen running 32-bit.
 
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Smeg, why don't you give me the money to buy x64 Windows and more RAM? If you can't, then stop asking me to change the system. Didn't I just say that I can't change it? If you're sending me the x64 version and 4 more GB of RAM, then you can expect me to switch to 64 bit, OK? And you don't know what the conditions are HERE, where I live, so why don't you shut that "only person on this board who uses 32-bit" and come and have a look here, eh? You don't know what's the conditions, so how can you say anything in the first place?

Bubblehead, you're talking about the folly of youth? Yea, I'm always the person who ends up being a fool here...OK, I can go with the PC using resources for something...but NO DAMN PROGRAM uses anything; guess it's the shared memory of the graphic card which does use up memory. If I'm wrong, why not come here, have a look at the PC, and ONLY THEN tell? I told you so many times, the older and worse PC used to work with the same amount of RAM, same load, same settings in the PC, same OS and same graphic card and HDD...if the same of all the above 5 ran flawlessly on the worse PC, I don't find any reason any problems should arise in the much better PC. If the old PC ran faster on the old system with the same settings, then it's not my settings which seem to be wrong, are they? The same settings on the new PC and it should work even faster...

But anyways, since I'm the fool, there seems to be no use in searching for help, right? After all, you're not getting my point, and your solutions are for something entirely different than my problems are...and isn't technology supposed to be progressing? If a PC 5 years back NEEDED 4 GB of RAM, and needs at least 8 GB now, then isn't that progress going in the reverse direction? Instead of NEEDING 8 GB now, it should be progressed enough to run on just 400 MB of RAM. Guess progress is going in the reverse direction...anyways, I'm not here to put out any philosophical discussions here, since all of you people here are "learned" enough, much more than my folly can grasp, and learned enough to suggest solutions for entirely different things than the actual problem...so I'll just leave it at that.

And for the record, my PC's power box had a blast, so the PC is out of commission right now. My mistake I asked for help here, but I thought the internet would be a cheaper alternative to calling a PC professional here...See ya "learned" people around. Later.
 
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Ahahaha, those home support people are the biggest jokers on the planet, If you have the money for "geek squad" then you have enough money to upgrade the ram.
 
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Yeah, it uses more ram simply because it can and apparently needs to. If you want to customize every little thing please go to linux.

Theres a video floating about on the internet: basically, news company wanted to test out geek squad (and various other) tech shops so they unplugged the hdd cable and let them have at finding out whats wrong. Most of them found out whats wrong within 2 minutes and some didn't even charge. Geek Squad on the other hand charged the "customer" 500 dollars and said they needed a new hard drive... wut...

Now don't get me wrong I'm definitely not saying they are all like this, but most of what you see advertised on tv are utter rip offs.
 
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Who's talking about a "geek squad" or of the TV? Yea, well, maybe you don't know the difference between a geek squad and a PC professional. And yea, the guy is a family friend, so he does it for free. Better than all of your crap and constant be-rating me. Ah, well...who am I to judge? You people are the know-it-all, so I'd just say "You're right, I'm wrong, end of the line", since it's no use telling a blind man that he's blind. Better to just agree with his crap and go on about your own work...yea, guess that's just what I'll do...
 
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I would have to say YOU are the know it all type of person, you had atleast 10 established members of this community who are trusted for there knowledge tell you whats up and you basically said "thats not the answer I want to hear, im out, peace."

Well, do come back and tell us what your "professional PC guy friend" tells you.
 
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I agree - a saying comes to mind re the OP

"There are none so blind as those that will not see"

May be his sig explains a bit... he feels "constrained" by the rules on how PCs work... and wants to go his own way. May be he wants to "abandon the concept of rules" on how windows manages memory.. and this confuson/dichotomy is why he feels the need to anger/rage as us... who are only trying to help?
Bit sad really 🙁
 
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Fact is, Windows aggressively pre-caches RAM (as of Vista/7). Not unusual for 1-2GB to be eaten up, just by the OS. This is considered normal usage. The high amount of paging is almost certianly due to the pagefile being split between for HDD's. There's no reason for that; keep the pagefile on the OS partition. (If data exists split on two HDD's, and both need to be loaded into RAM, you can easily run into issues with high amounts of paging/thrashing of the HDD's)

And no, 32-bits is a hardware limitation; nothing to do with licensing. 2^32 = 4294967296, or 4GB. Thats all the H/W can physically access under a 32-bit addressing scheme.

All PAE/AWE does is flip pages around, but its a cludge that causes a LOT of headaches with certain drivers. This allows more then 4GB to be used in total, even though the per-application limit is still limited to just 2GB.

I note that all Win7 installs should come with both a 32-bit and 64-bit CD key.

Also, games run fine in Win64. Only 16-bit .exe's won't start (due to the removal of WOW16), and those a few and far between these days. Can confirm GTA:SA runs fine on Win7 64bit.

So I'm seeing nothing out of ordinary here. Windows uses a lot of RAM by default as a speedup mechanism. The high amounts of paging are almost certainly due to the HDD/partition setup.
 
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I wanna dug this thread because I have very similiar problem and amnesiaaisenma dont tell everything.
At start:
Problem is not caused by 32 or 64 bit system - it can be in both.
I have 64 bit Windows 8.1 ( i know is preview but the bug is not caused by system, not the system itself).
I checked it after 4 format :)
PID 4, process System is eating about 4Gb of RAM.
After installing only drivers, UX, and Spotify.
The most suspect are drivers. But it is not as simply to check it as it seems.

Soo... in resource monitor we can se somethink like that:
Memory usage: With system working set at almost 4 Gb!
brt1.png

And disk usage . Now its nothing special, but sumetimes page file have around 4-5 Gb of Total (B/sec).
v2u.png



I have all this info but still dont know how to figure out what cause this high system memory usage.

 
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try this one,open task manager, select "Process" Tab,select "View",click "Select Columns" and check "Handles" column..locate the program(s) that has the highest value in "Handles" column,mostly they're the ones eating memory and forces the page file to cope up(enlarge) due to memory loss..
check what programs boot during start'up,esp windows media center/media player,they're mostly the culprit trying to connect to the internet..(for file sharing i guess)
 
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There is an enormous amount of misinformation out there about how page files and so on work *In Windows*. That is, most assume a programming ideal that's unfortunately a lot like economic theories. They fall flat on their face when hit with the reality of the street and bad people (or bad programming in Microsoft's case).

- Windows requires a page file. If you run Office or most Microsoft applications, or anything that's a 32 bit program, it won't work without at least some type of page file. It's hard-coded into the OS and is configured to be as abusive of space and resources as possible so that your machine can run for weeks or months without ever running out of memory.

- Windows uses the page file all of the time in the background, even if you have many gigabytes free. It seems to be close to about a 50/50 split for most common applications, and a bit better efficiency for something like games. I've put 8 or 16 GB on a machine, turned on Office and couple of applications like Photoshop and Acrobat, and left it alone for a couple of hours. The page file utilization ends up being nearly as large as the ram usage.

With Windows, it actually moves pages around all the time in order to keep as much ram available. This is due to an executive decision almost two decades ago where performance was considered expendable compared to keeping the machine from never crashing due to memory issues (90%+ of BOSDs are memory related). BSODs are bad for their image and stock prices.

Windows pages a portion of the application for future use. So when you switch between windows in IE, you swap between Word and IE, you do any sort of multitasking... some of it goes into swap "just in case". And to always have free ram so that it never can crash. You can imagine how astoundingly inefficient this is on a 64 bit OS with way more than the "(lowest) average denominator" 4GB that Windows (even 64 bit versions) is designed around.

- The practical issue of all of this is that every time it writes to the page file, even if it doesn't really need to (but does anyways), it is using the hard drive or SSD as ram. This is many many times slower than actual ram, and is why modern PCs hardly run any faster most of the time than computers from a decade ago for normal applications. When half of your "memory" is running at 2005 speeds, you're effectively crippled down to the lowest common denominator. Essentially your system is constantly waiting on the hard drive to give it data. You can run more and more applications but all of them run at about the same speed. (and processors aren't really getting much faster, either - just more cores)

- Buying more ram won't solve it. You could have 64GB of ram to use and it still will create a swap file on your hard drive. It's quite simply junk programming by Microsoft.

- Many solutions exist, but the best effective method seems to be to have a lot of memory and also force the swap file to reside in real memory so that it never touches the hard drive (or SSD) at all. As you might imagine, this is impossible to accomplish without at least 16gb and a 64 bit OS* Yes, it's counter-intuitive to many and a lot of people say that it won't work/do anything/etc, but it's Windows we're talking about. Not BSD or Linux or Wikipedia.

*Note that your Windows system has to be able to properly place the swap file and utilize it without creating another one on the C drive during the boot process. Which it will do if it doesn't find swap file on boot on one of the drives. This is problematic for most users as ram typically loses power and is cleared when you restart. This can require specialized ramdrive applications to get to work properly, even in Windows 64 bit (7 and 8). Gigabyte and others came up with ram based drives in the past that were pre-powered and configured on boot, but they were hideously expensive and used slow interfaces or slow memory.

A typical compromise solution for many people is to use something like Readyboost or a small SLC SSD and put the swap file on it. Note that if you do this, you need to make the swap file fixed size and about 1/4 to 1/2 the drive's capacity due to eventual wear issues. (careful configuration is also required) Thankfully, 16gb and 32gb SLC SSDs are now fairly inexpensive.

Another even simpler "fix" is to put a fixed size swap file on a second drive. Be sure to also put this on a separate SATA controller. Your machine won't run any faster, but it will release the process' instantly as is cleans up the cached files and memory allocations while leaving your main drive's heads free to do other tasks. This especially makes an enormous difference to background applications like your AV and similar applications which tend to hammer your cache in the background. All the cores in the world mean nothing if your entire world is going through one set of heads that's constricted to a single SATA cable.
 
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I've got Vista 32 bit running, just installed it this month as an upgrade to XP, so all my old programs are still on here, yay. (No clue if they all work yet.)

XP was always using up my RAM with the Chrome browser, and around 4.5 GB of memory usage things would start getting too slow, which was quickly. A few times I got it up to around 7 GB of memory being used and that's when the browser would just crash, and I'd have to reboot to refresh the RAM logjam. There's only 3.25 GB of RAM available. So with Vista, the RAM doesn't run out nearly as quickly which is amazing, but I just noticed my SWAP file is running over 5.4 GB atm, with a maximum set of 6875 MB (I apparently set it for 1X-2X RAM earlier.), so my CPU seems to be busy at around 40% or more quite a lot, supposedly doing SWAP file swapping stuff. Upgrading to Vista has resurrected this dead XP machine, but the browsers were to blame, they have been getting extensively memory hungry since 2011 and even my 8 GB of RAM on Win 7 64 bit isn't much better than this setup atm because the browsers eat up all the memory. I definitely need 12 GB to 16 GB of RAM on the next machine.
 
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I'm switching my SWAP file from the C drive to the D drive and rebooting, hope that helps. Got a nag screen to keep at least 208 MB on the C drive, so I set that for 200 MB - 1000 MB, and 3625 MB - 7250 MB SWAP file on the D drive.
 
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