Vista 64 and Memory Usage Help

[jeaze_mcleod]

Hello All,

Im having a bit of an issue with Vista 64 and how it is handling the 6GBs of ram that I have installed in my PC. I been having an issue with one of my games crashing sue to no memory available for the game to continue working for some reason. It is weird because the game is pretty much the only makor application running and there are at least 5 Gigs of ram available... or so I think. The game takes about 1Gig of ram to run without any issues and it might use a bit more in some cases. What I am seeing in the Task Manager is that out of the 6GBs of ram 4GBs are CACHED with 1GB available without the game running and the rest used by the system or about 1GB used out of the 6GBs.

When I fire up the game it takes ram from the AVAILABLE pool and not from the cached pool as I would have imagined... Why is Vista 65 using 4Gigs of Cached ram for anyways? Is there a way to tell the game to use the ram in the cached portion instead of the leftover free amount of ram? Any help with this issue is appreciated. Thank You.

 

[n3f0ur]

Common misconception. You the user does NOT need memory. The OS needs it. The OS will take care of memory management. Yes, Vista caches a lot of memory, but will assign it to any software that runs.

Vista is a much improved OS in that regard. Linux has had the use-up-all-memory management for ages. It works very effectively.

Food for though:

And the most important rule of cache design is that empty cache memory is wasted cache memory. Empty cache isn't doing you any good. It's expensive, high-speed memory sucking down power for zero benefit. The primary mission in the life of every cache is to populate itself as quickly as possible with the data that's most likely to be needed-- and to consistently deliver a high "hit rate" of needed data retrieved from the cache. Otherwise you're going straight to the hard drive, mister, and if you have to ask how much going to the hard drive will cost you in performance, you can't afford it.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

 

[WR2]

Why is Vista 65 using 4Gigs of Cached ram for anyways?

What is the point of having all that RAM if it's not going to get used?

n3f0ur is right about Vista doing a good job of memory management. It's not like the RAM is being used for any calculations or program operations - its just fast storage for anything your CPU and its own on chip cache might need.

While Vista might be using a lot of RAM it's also very good at freeing up memory as you start up more and applications during multi-tasking. It can actually free up more RAM for user applications, shrink its own RAM usage to less than XP can free up in similar circumstances.

Your game might have some issues and since you didn't mention what that game was it's hard to offer specific help on that issue.

Have you used the Run as Administrator option?
Have you tried using the Compatibility Mode options?

 

[jeaze_mcleod]

What is the point of having all that RAM if it's not going to get used?

n3f0ur is right about Vista doing a good job of memory management. It's not like the RAM is being used for any calculations or program operations - its just fast storage for anything your CPU and its own on chip cache might need.

While Vista might be using a lot of RAM it's also very good at freeing up memory as you start up more and applications during multi-tasking. It can actually free up more RAM for user applications, shrink its own RAM usage to less than XP can free up in similar circumstances.

Your game might have some issues and since you didn't mention what that game was it's hard to offer specific help on that issue.

Have you used the Run as Administrator option?
Have you tried using the Compatibility Mode options?

http://ericappel.net/blog/content/b...io2005onVista_141C0/run_as_admin_thumb[8].png

What difference will Administrator option make on this case?

 

[killerzuchini]

Although they gave some interesting information, neither of them actually addressed your problem, but I had a similar experience. Do you have a Nvidia branded motherboard? AKA Nforce, 750i or whatever board it may concern. The "Network drivers" installed with all Nvidia branded boards include a Nvidia firewall, which has some really erratic and random memory issues. uTorrent would take up more than 2 gigs of memory, and Nvidia firewall kills most P2P programs. However, it might interfere with some games, I'm not sure.

 

[subwar]

I have had this problem as well.

Disable the Superfetch and ReadyBoost services. They cause my computer to BSOD frequently when they are enabled and are responsible for the so-called 'smart memory management'.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Best answer selected by mousemonkey.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey