Vista - Lots of unused Memory - why ?

Hi,
I have read many posts on memory space and addressing, but haven't found anything that answers my question....
I have 8Gb fitted, but on checking it's useage, it appears that the max I have seen in use is less than 3Gb.
The swapspace and paging file are being used - why ? when I have plenty of memory left unused ?
Is there a way I can force Vista to use more physical memory (which is faster), rather than perform swapping.

Thanks & regards,

MB - ASUS P5B Premium (skt 775)
CPU - Intel Quad Extreme X9650
Mem - 8Gb GeIL
OS - Vista x64 Ultimate SP1

Screenshot as attachment:

You could try to run more memory-intensive applications (Video editing & rendering, photo editing, etc.), or even more applications at once (it's not uncommon on my system to run out of taskbar space with the number of applications I have open).

The swap file being used even though you still have free memory available is because some parts of the OS that are not being used too much is swapped out to the page file to allow a greater amount of free physical memory.

Hi,
Thanks for that, but I didn't just want to fill up the RAM with just anything, just to see it full !
However, as suggested, I did open loads of proggys, video, PSP, word, excel, etc. and I managed to get the RAM useage upto 3.4Gb (there were 10Gb of pictures in PSP), so, what I am asking is, why doesn't Vista make use of the RAM, but just keeps using the disk ?

Regards,

Hi Fish-Man,

With 8 Gigs of RAM, you can turn off the Virtual Page File to see how it runs without it. This will show you how. You can always just turn it back on if it does not help. I would recommend leaving it on though, just in case Vista may need it.

Virtual Memory Paging File - Change

Shawn

I'm not suggesting that you fill it up with junk. If you're going to have that amount of memory in your system, you've got to be able to justify it's use. And trust me on this - Windows has some pretty remarkable memory management code that makes it very, very difficult to "run out of memory". I've tried!

How many documents did you open with word an excel? I've just checked - A freshly opened Word 2003, with no open documents, has a memory footprint of 25,336KB (24.74MB). Excel's footprint on memory was a measly 9,128KB (8.91MB). You're going to have to open a huge number of files in either program to even begin making a dent in your 8GB ram.

Simply opening the programs is not enough - make them actually do something.

And the one reason why you loaded 10GBs of photos into Paint Shop Pro, and you couldn't get past 3.5GB memory in use, is because you can only work on one image at a time, and the memory used by the other images is swapped out to the page file, in favor of the one being edited. You can work out how much memory a particular JPG file will take up in ram using this formula - ((X x Y) x 3) / 1024 - where X & Y are the dimensions of the image, and the 3 is each of the bytes for Red, Green and Blue color bits, and 1024 is the number of bytes in 1KB. A JPG image of 1600 x 1200 pixels will then take up 5625KB of memory, or 5.49MB. But it doesn't really matter, does it? Because the memory used by an inactive image is swapped to the page file anyway..

The one biggest factor here in your case is that PSP is a 32-Bit program, and despite the OS being 64-Bit and able to address the full 8GB of memory, 32-Bit programs are architecturally limited to a 2GB memory space allocation for both code and data. 64-Bit applications do not suffer from this limitation.


Are you using Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 to do you web browsing? You can push IE7 to a memory footprint of between 900MB and 1.200GB (before it chokes) by browsing to some graphically intensive sites (desktop wallpaper galleries is my favorite acid test for this), and then open lots of pictures in IE7 and save them to disk (using either "right click->save as" or Drag-and-Drop to an open Explorer window). Eventually, IE7, after about an hour or so, will quit rendering pages correctly, and JAVAScript won't work properly.

The only thing I've found that pushes my Ram is Google Earth and that takes time.
The only thing I've found that really pushes the CPU is rendering video (what I got it for). I don't do any gaming.-Gary