Abnormal amount of RAM usage?

Question

I recently installed an extra gig of ram ontop of my original 256 m (a total of 1280). I ran Cacheman to see what my ram usage was and its a whopping 280-300megs right now. Considering the only app Im running on my computer at this moment is IE (and that I only had 256 megs a couple days ago), well that seems to stick out. But Im a computer idiot so I want to make sure. I have all unneeded services disabled (thanks to blackviper.com) and cleaned up my startup. Is this still normal? The only thing Ive changed recently is the virtual memory to compensate for the added ram (which I set a little over the same as my physical ram (per recommendation from dell). Could that be it? It says my pagefile usage is around 8megs with an allocation of 143.5 megs. Keep in mind I havent had any trouble with any programs or games, I just want to make sure my system isn't being drained unnecessarily.

starman99 · Answer

Did you check how much RAM was being used before you added the extra?  I doubt it was much different, XP needs a lot of RAM just to do the basics.  The  figure you have is typical for my pc.  Given your position with 750Mb to spare is it really an issue?  PCs don't get tired or bored!

zestyllahma · Answer

'Did you check how much RAM was being used before you added the extra?' No, but thats whats confusing me. If I only had 256 to begin with and wasn't running any additional programs it certainly wasn't using the 280-300 it is right now. With the extra memory (and virtual memory) does Windows just decide it can induldge itself in RAM or something? :) Like I said it hasn't caused any problems yet but Id like to be sure something isn't wrong first.

starman99 · Answer

I don't know how the amount of used RAM is measured but I suspect the amount of committed memory is less than indicated. Sometimes you can start an application and the amount of free RAM goes up. That could only come from RAM that was supposedly being used.

XP will run basic applications with 128Mb of RAM. 256Mb is the minimum for a mostly-pleasant experience. With heavier applications, 256Mb systems will mostly work but are going to be doing more disk read/writes. For whatever reason that seems to increase the risk of conflicts.

zestyllahma · Answer

Thanks for the help starman, appreciate it.

"I don't know how the amount of used RAM is measured but I suspect the amount of committed memory is less than indicated."

Thats what I kind of figured. 128m for XP sounds about right. Maybe that plus the 140m allocated for virtual memory is whats being accounted for? Then again Im sort of confused about what virtual memory does exactly.

RichardLusignan · Answer

I would consider this abnormal, in my case, a freshly booted WinXP with internet connection activated will use (right now as I'm typing...) about 90 megs of RAM, and that's with AV activated.

Agreed that I tweaked my system a little, but nonetheless, freshly installed XP in my possession rarely use up more than 120 megs of RAM total.

just trying to give you numbers, but IMO 200-300 megs is way too high.... unless you're running many many many applications at startup...... and have loads of useless programs active in the system tray.

anyways, I would recommend a check-up on http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm to see which processes/services can be terminated and free up RAM.

Regards,

Rick.

zestyllahma · Answer

Thanks for the reply and the link Rick. I thought it seemed way too high. Keep in mind Ive already turned off many uneeded services and startups. Norton Internet Security is the only major app I have running at all times. May I ask how much RAM you have and what your virtual memory settings are?

starman99 · Answer

Not to deflect from the issues but the applications listed below I am using all the time. It illustrates how quickly ram usage can build:

Opus 14Mb
ATi multimedia 27Mb
Internet Explorer 22Mb
ThumbsPlus 30-50Mb
MacroExpress 7Mb

That's about 120Mb out of 260Mb in use. There are smaller ones on the list too.

Zestyllahma, I re-read your post and I must have been snoozing first time round. Is your pagefile size quoted in error - did you mean 1.435Gb (1435 Mb)? Just observing my processes, even though there is free RAM, my page file usage is still significant.

zestyllahma · Answer

Oops, I misread you as well. Thats what the page file actually is under load. If you mean what do I set it to manually its what windows recommends, about 1533 for my setup.

zestyllahma · Answer

No no, basically 144 megs. Didn't mean to throw you off with the.5. :) Thats just the allocation though, the actual page file fluctuates anywhere from 5megs to 30.

RichardLusignan · Answer

Hi zestyllahma,

I basically set a static pagefile of 512Mb, and I have 512Mb of RAM installed on my system. I've used higher/lower settings, but I get optimum performance under this one.

With a high amount of RAM (such as 1Go in your case), I would recommend a static pagefile also, and maybe set somewhere from 512 to 1024Mb, unless you frequently use high memory demanding apps, in that case I would suggest somewhere from 2 to 2.5 X amount of RAM. That way, Windows won't take up ressources resizing the pagefile as memory needs change, and it is unlikely that it would need more memory than your RAM and pagefile combined (about 1.5 to 2Gb....). Anyway, I get the best benchmark results under this setting.

I agree that AV is maybe the common app that takes up the highest amount of RAM (I use McAfee, and the combined services with on-access scanner enabled take about 25-30Mb).

Windows General

Abnormal amount of RAM usage?

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