Windows 7 strange RAM usage

a10112

New Member
my system has 8GB of DDR2 800MHz RAM. I *thought* half of it had gone bad because speccy and task manager were telling me only 4GB were available. Cautiously, I left speccy open to monitor RMA usage while i play a RAM-whore of a game (minecraft). My RAM had gone down to 1MB and I thought minecraft would crash or something else would crash- NOPE, 4GB became available. I really wanna have all 8GB available at all time since I sometimes start up a VM of a unix OS or something that would require dedicating an amount of RAM to it, etc.

any ideas?

OS: win7 64-bit
CPU: AMD 7850 (stock clock) cooled by noctua d14
GPU: MSI 430 (overclocked to 855/1710/1110)
RAM: OCZ DDR2 800MHz 4x 2GB sticks
 
Have you looked to see what programs and services you have running that aren't needed? Things like automatic backup can be real resource hogs. Some AV programs cause problems gaming too. Does overclocking eat up ram?
Joe
 
it's not about the amount being used it the way the RAM becomes available is the issue. when i hit 4GB usage the other 4GB become available. I'm trying to figure out why that's happening.
 
i'd kinda like to get a chrunchbang vbox going but i still can't allocate the ram. anyone have an idea?
 
right click my computer > click properties, what does it show in the RAM bit?
 
info.png
here's what i see ^
 
well the good news there is that you have no ram marked as "bad"

you have 2.5gb mapped and only a tiny portion of that is locked

you also have 2.1gb of ram which is driver locked and 1.9gb process private so 6gb of your ram is already being held ready and cached by your system for faster access.

If you then look at your file summary tab and click total and standby the programs/processes caching the largest amounts of ram will be at the top ?

In summary I think your system is just being very efficient in its use of ram and maximum caching and if its needed for other processes it will be freed up on demand

If you want to make some sense of it take a look here at a simple guide :cool:
 
so... basically, I still have 8GB of RAM but a fair size of it is being cached? hmm... file summary page turns out quite a bit of useless files in the RAM for no apparent reason. like, uh, a VBox save i did yesterday- it's using 1,223,776K. there also seems to be a fairly large number of game files, images, and programs loaded in as well. is there a way to unload all of this? i really don't care if my OS gets a few more reads from my SSD.
 
so... basically, I still have 8GB of RAM but a fair size of it is being cached? hmm... file summary page turns out quite a bit of useless files in the RAM for no apparent reason. like, uh, a VBox save i did yesterday- it's using 1,223,776K. there also seems to be a fairly large number of game files, images, and programs loaded in as well. is there a way to unload all of this? i really don't care if my OS gets a few more reads from my SSD.

I am not sure you are understanding the advantages of ram caching here ?

Windows 7 memory management is an improvement over earlier versions of Windows where any unused memory was quite simply wasted memory !

What Windows is doing is making use of the free Ram space to store data and making your system run faster, this data always ready on demand is retrieved from RAM instead of the much-slower HDD.

It's important to remember that Ram is faster than your SSD flash drive not just because it has faster read write speeds "with a memory clock frequency of 100 MHz, DDR3 SDRAM gives a maximum transfer rate of 6400 MB/s" so "DDR3-1600 = 12,800MB/s with SSD = 100-250MB/s" but also because it is positioned directly in-line with your processor just after L1, 2 & 3 cache.

Remember that when you run an application that requires this memory space, then the management routine relinquishes that space and makes it available for your application !

It's a win win situation :thumbs_up:
 
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