Report: Most Windows 7 PCs Max Out RAM, Choke

[madass]

My Win 7 x64 idles at 23%...the highest I've ever seen it go was 58% in GTAIV with all the bells and whistles.....and don't forget, GTAIV must be the buggiest game of the century. Crysis only pushes upto 45% or so...

 

[haze4peace]

I've never had these results. 4GB of ram on Win7 x64. Currently using 1GB of it. Never see it go over 50%... maybe it does while I'm playing a game though, but that's to be expected.

 

[Zerk]

" Barth Said "?

Anyway, Win 7 64 uses a lot more then XP 32, but I never have any trouble.

 

[kelemvor4]

LOL 6GB? well.. I'd consider that a bare minimum these days. And with ram priced where it is, you should too. Even my laptops have 8Gb in them (18Gb in my desktop).

 

[spectrewind]

Something about this article stinks. More hearsay for Markus to write about.

Markus: Show some facts to back of the crap you report on. Hearsay is worthless. Your quality is edging on Kevin Parrish (that was not a compliment).

 

[srhelicity]

[citation][nom]jimmysmitty[/nom]I am a tad suprised at two things:1. That the guys doing this are unfamiliar with SuperFetch.
2. That THG would post this without acknowledging SuperFetch.
SuperFetch has been known since Vista. Its nice to have it utilizing the free RAM the system has to load frequently used programs. If you do not like it you can disable it.[/citation]

THIS (prefetch and superfetch). As others have noted, Windows INTENTIONALLY loads often-used programs and data into available RAM during the boot process, and it keeps them in memory unless the space is needed for another open application. You can go ahead an run an OS that's using 10% of your available RAM, but that just means that you'll need to wait longer for an application to open because it needs to be read from the HDD before being loaded into RAM. I'd rather my OS use a prefetch/superfetch system to save me time. I have the RAM, so I might as well get as much use out of it as possible.

 

[evolve60]

Currently at 31% of 8GB of memory usage, but even when gaming, I never see my memory usage go past 50% let alone 40 even when under heavy load, and on boot up it doesn't even use close to 25% of my memory it only uses 20%. I always have F@H running also, so I don't see where this article is going.

 

[danielgr]

Running W7 on 4 configs, all of them with the typical myriad of background services running since start up(MSN, Antivirus, LiveSync, BackUpsoft, Logmein, etc. etc.):
- x64 4GB+i5 : Right now is 39% of RAM used (running Firefox with several tabs + LogMeIn)
- x64 4GB+Ath2 620 : 40% of RAM used (running Windows Media Player+LogMeIn)
- x86 2GB+Pentium-M 1.6GHz : 35% of RAM used after startup (running only Logmein)

Obviously those guys are simply bashing for the sake of it. W7 doesn't use that much memory by itself, it depends on what you are running. One RAM killer app is IE8, but that's the same in XP than in W7 or Vista. If you like to open many tabs and don't have lots of memory, simply use another browser.

Right now I'm writing from an 2GB+T2300CoreDuo XP machine running similar user services + Outlook + 1tab in IE8 : memory use is 35% as in the previous laptop using W7. There is really not so much to talk about here... One thing is for sure, contrary to XP, the more RAM you have the more W7 uses, which is nice for me because it helps making out the most of good configs while sparing the weak ones.

 

[back_by_demand]

People may think that RAM is expensive, but in real terms it is cheaper than ever.
6 years I bought 2 x 1Gb of Corsair TwinX DDR1 and the set cost me £375.
Last year I bought 3 sets of 2 x 2Gb OCZ Gold DDR3 at £95 each (£285).
So at the same time inflation has gone up I have got 6 times more ram, each running 3 times faster for roughly 25% less cost.

Go out and buy some more ram.

 

[m-manla]

Hmmm. I barely go over with W7 64Bit with 4GB of RAM. I do virtual machines, music production, and video. Most of the time my machine stays at a 37% usage.

 

[gmuser]

XPnet obviously is not able to distinguish between "available" and "free" memory, as shown in this article where someone checked how their "monitor" program works:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/behind-the-windows-7-memory-usage-scaremongering.ars

In conclusion: Win7 has as much available memory as XP, and use free memory much better while not used by other apps.

 

[apache_lives]

ram is there to use not collect dust and limit overclocks - big deal most of the ram was uses IT SUPPOSED TO BE USED

 

[bustapr]

My laptop has Win7-64 and 4gb ddr2. Right now it is currently using 1.17gb of that ram. Ran a game (UT3) and it went up to 1.80, never seen it go higher. But if someone knows how to raise this Id be happy to know how.

But Im not happy with Win7 because it is unresponsive until about 5 minutes after login, is this a ram problem also?

 

[Guest]

My PC has 8GBs of DDR3 RAM to it's name on an i7Core 900 CPU. When idle Windows 7 consumes alone 2.1GBs of RAM and up to 3.**GBs of RAM during intensive multitasking. Luckily for me this dose not effect my video games as they only need about 1GB of free RAM respectively, 2GBs when on Ultra settings. However this dose effect my middle-ware tools for game development (a little bit, UDK takes longer to load then my 3D applications like MAX and Cinema4D). Truthfully is necessary to have 12 to 16GBs of RAM for development and digital media productions when running Windows7, 3GB to 6Gbs free simply doesn't cut it when it comes to ultra high poly modeling. Luckily my Crossfired ATi Radeon 5770s make up for this with their combined 2GBs of DDR5 RAM to cut the slack. If your running Windows 7 on a gaming or media computer *You* need top of the line GFX cards (Such as the ATi Radeon 5XXxx series or the Nvidia GFX200 series) OR alternatively more then 4GBs of RAM to cut the slack. However at the end of the day, Windows 7 is designed to take full advantage of what you have for best performance. One of my friends has an older laptop which only has 2GBs of DDR3 RAM on it running on a 32-bit system. Windows 7 Actually uses less RAM then Windows Vista did on his system, a total of 200MBs less. I think people should stop crying to MS when they have workstations and simply buy more RAM. Most industry programmers and digital media artists have 8 to 16GBs of RAM on their systems respectively.

 

[apache_lives]

[citation][nom]bustapr[/nom]My laptop has Win7-64 and 4gb ddr2. Right now it is currently using 1.17gb of that ram. Ran a game (UT3) and it went up to 1.80, never seen it go higher. But if someone knows how to raise this Id be happy to know how. But Im not happy with Win7 because it is unresponsive until about 5 minutes after login, is this a ram problem also?[/citation]

Do the usual tweaks - enable disk caching, disable system restore, manually set page file 4000/4000, turn off uac, restart then do a disk cleanup and defrag.

 

[luxiphr]

[rant]
seriously, this is FUD...

*of course* windows vista and 7 tend to "use" nearly all the ram avaliable, but rather for caching than as "actively" used ram (private memory of applications) and that this cache has the lowest priority, when it comes to assigning memory which means that ram used for caching is instantly given up by windows, when a program needs it...

i've used vista back then and i've used windows 7 since the beta with no "low mem" issues on different computers (having worked with machines with 1gig, 2gig, 4gig and 8gig of ram - the latter even ran without a page file without problems whatsoever)

on the box i'm currently on:
total ram: 2038
cached: 1168
avaliable: 1117
free: 5
running task manager (of course), firefox with loads of addons and loads of tabs open, lotus notes and symantec antivirus and associated 3rd party services + novell client and associated 3rd party services

44% of 2gigs used... big deal -_-

maybe the author of that claims read the value on "free" (which means nothing less than "unused" and therefore "useless") and boldly ignored the value on "avaliable", which is what's *avaliable* for programs to use (who would have thought THAT)

computerworld seem to continue lowering their niveau afterall...
[/rant]

 

[xrodney]

I have 8GB eam and windows 7 x64 professional with swap set to 100MB (for those lame applications that require it).
Mostly i have 2-3.5GB really used, with 10-200MB modified (those need to be saved) cached data, 100-900MB free and rest used as cache.
If some application need more data windows will just overwrite part of cache that do not need any saving so i would say performance lost is minimal, but performance gain when using data that are cached already is huge.
I have often dozens of application opened at same time and dont have any problem with performance at all actually its much faster then XP/windows 2003 were before (or vista was before I did wipe it out after testing it for few months).

 

[rhino13]

Errr... I actually want RAM saturation. Do you think I want to buy up 4GB of ram just to see it go unused?

 

[gaborbarla]

Does this article considre the fact that they should not really count the "Cached" counter? In Task manager one can see "Physical memory" at the bottom which shows the real percentage of RAM is being used.

My 7 says: Total 3325, Cached 1440, Available 1474, Free 87. Physical ram:55%
Still it's very fast and never stutters.
There is no way that with today's programs and 4 gigs of ram people often run out of RAM especially considering that a single process can only address 2gigs of RAM, and that is extremely rare.

On the other hand I have a laptop with 4 gigs of ram and Vista Enterprise, which only stops churning my hardrive after some 15 minutes of bootup, it is a relatively fresh install (I redone it to remove bundles) and the harddrive is a 2.5" 500gb 80mb/sec (HDTune) throughput so its not too slow. I disabled superfetch and indexing but I think im gonna have to upgrade to 7 just to stop the churning.

 

[sagansrun]

8 gigs on my 64bit version of Win7, no issues here.

Why dont these boneheads finally put 32bit to sleep? How long did everyone hold on to 16bit after 32bit was released?

 

[luxiphr]

it seems that these "xpnet" guys are using a methology based on the book "Inside Windows NT" and that they're not meassuring the ram saturization but the accesses on the ram... they're calculation "memory pressure" (as they call it)... total bogus, if you ask me...

here's a quote from them:

The Peak Memory Pressure Index is calculated by comparing a series of 4 independent Windows metrics – the Memory\Committed Bytes counter, the Memory\Pages Input/sec counter, the PageFile\% Usage counter and the aforementioned event duration value – against a set of user-defined threshold values. The resulting individual ratios are then weighted and combined to create the single number Peak Memory Pressure Index value.

 

[tommysch]

Another case of dumb admins running next gen software on legacy crap.

I have Windows Ult x64 and 4 GB of RAM. I use 40% when idle, and up to 80% with a game loaded.

And btw, windows XP look like DOS to me.

 

[Nik_I]

during general use, my ram usage never goes over 35%. Right now it's actually at 28%, with nearly 3 full gigs free.

 

[icemunk]

My 8GB has no troubles whatsoever, I can alt-tab out of Crysis and surf the web watching videos at the same time if I feel like it, no complaints here.

 

[-Fran-]

Bottom line for me is:

In XP, if I disable Virtual Memory, I've never ran out of Memory to spare (even playing games). In Win7, if I do that, I get the "out of memory" warning right away.

I only have 2GB and until I decide to change the machine (Athlon 64 X2 4400 s939, DDR400, nF4SLI) that won't change, but it works flawlessly in Win7 with virtual memory on, though.

Now, those observations are for "better use of resources". Having more, doesn't mean that you don't have to pay attention to "doing it right".

I'm also interested in MS's response on this one.

And BTW; that % on your task manager gives you this (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong):

memory usage / (system memory + virtual memory)

So your task manager showing 50% means you're already (prolly) using 100% of your system memory (RAM).

Cheers!