Little to no Free Physical Memory??

Imogen · Sep 14, 2009

Hi, I just recently bought a desktop which came with Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit. I have one question though. I notice that even when idle, my free Physical memory starts decreasing, while my cache memory starts increasing. At one point, I saw that my free memory had dropped to 0 while running a game.

I found this weird as I figured that my RAM would be sufficient to run most games, while still having some free RAM leftover.

Is this a bad thing? Will having little to no free Physical Memory hinder my playing of games?

With no applications running, my Physical Memory (MB) status shows:

Total: 6134
Cached: 2574
Free: 2750

My other information, although i'm not sure whether it's needed, are:

Processor: Intel i7-920 2.6ghz
Ram: 6gb DDR3
GPU: Nvidia GT230 1.5gb dedicated ram

Any answers at all would be appreciated. Cheers!

zigzag3143 · Sep 14, 2009

Imogen

Hi and welcomeo to vistax64

If you have 6 gigis and that much memory "disappears" its not normal. do you have any applications open like a browser, or windows index, or sidebar gadget,etc.

Could you use the built in snipping tool (type snipping in search) to make a screenshot and use the attaching tool (shaped liked a paperclip) to upload the screenshot to us?

thanks

Ken

Imogen · Sep 14, 2009

Hi Ken, thanks for the quick reply. What screenshot would you require?

zigzag3143 · Sep 14, 2009

Imogen said:
Hi Ken, thanks for the quick reply. What screenshot would you require?

These would work. they are from task manager (right click task bar)

Ken

Imogen · Sep 14, 2009

Ok, here they are. hope they are what you're looking for.

H2SO4 · Sep 14, 2009

That's normal and it's called SuperFetch.

Memory is never actually empty in the there's-absolutely-nothing-in-here sense. Vista takes advantage of currently unassigned memory to try to predictively load content that it thinks you'll be likely to use soon, based on its observations of your behavioural patterns (no joke

). If it guesses right - great - ApplicationX will start very quickly because its componentry is already preloaded into memory at the point where you click the app start shortcut. If the guess is wrong - no big deal - no particular penalty is incurred because the memory would've been doing nothing but generating heat anyway.

That explanation of SuperFetch is vastly (over)simplified but it's essentially valid for your situation. Don't worry too much about memory usage in a modern OS, unless you're experiencing performance degradation of some sort. The equations which govern memory usage have long ago gone past the simplistic "free+used=total" of yore.

zigzag3143 · Sep 14, 2009

Sulfuric is correct as usual. The ram is both being prefeched, and svchost.exe has grown to about 350mb but with your ram thats not a problem and completely normal.

the prefetching is making you computer feel more responsive and svchost is a normal process.

Hope this helps clear it up for you

]Ken

Imogen · Sep 14, 2009

Great, many thanks to both of you for your answers. One last question though, why is svchost taking up that much RAM?

zigzag3143 · Sep 14, 2009

Imogen said:
Great, many thanks to both of you for your answers. One last question though, why is svchost taking up that much RAM?

svchost is like the traffic cop for all kinds of apps and processes. You comm apps (wifi and wired) your scheduler (backups) and many more all use svchost together. You often have multiple copies of it running see my picture

Ken

Imogen · Sep 14, 2009

So for my system, it's alright that it's so big?

archie123 · Sep 14, 2009

H2SO4 said:
That's normal and it's called SuperFetch.

Memory is never actually empty in the there's-absolutely-nothing-in-here sense. Vista takes advantage of currently unassigned memory to try to predictively load content that it thinks you'll be likely to use soon, based on its observations of your behavioural patterns (no joke ). If it guesses right - great - ApplicationX will start very quickly because its componentry is already preloaded into memory at the point where you click the app start shortcut. If the guess is wrong - no big deal - no particular penalty is incurred because the memory would've been doing nothing but generating heat anyway.

That explanation of SuperFetch is vastly (over)simplified but it's essentially valid for your situation. Don't worry too much about memory usage in a modern OS, unless you're experiencing performance degradation of some sort. The equations which govern memory usage have long ago gone past the simplistic "free+used=total" of yore.

where the hell have you been hiding!!??

H2SO4 · Sep 14, 2009

archie123 said:
where the hell have you been hiding!!??

I was suffering from a bout of Real Life while under the influence of committments and Global Financial Crisis. All better now

Frostmourne · Sep 14, 2009

Svchost is actually a container for dll's that have no executable. To run and make your pc functional they are wrapped up in that process. You can use process explorer to mouse over the processes and see what's in them.

H2SO4 · Sep 14, 2009

Frostmourne said:
Svchost is actually a container for dll's that have no executable. To run and make your pc functional they are wrapped up in that process. You can use process explorer to mouse over the processes and see what's in them.

Or TASKLIST /SVC from a command prompt.

JimJoe · Sep 15, 2009

Unless I missed it and someone already mentioned this...

Free Store Memory is the available memory locations, not actual physical memory. You can run out of it due to programs not exiting cleanly. Many don't.

The only way I know of to reset that is to reboot. sometimes I have had to shut down, wait a minute or two, then boot back up.

Suddenly, you have the ability to run programs on your computer again.

Think of it as a list of database locations. Programs run, exit, run exit. The database locations become confused. Reboot, the database locations get cleaned up. You can then run programs again.

H2SO4 · Sep 15, 2009

JimJoe said:
Unless I missed it and someone already mentioned this...

Free Store Memory is the available memory locations, not actual physical memory. You can run out of it due to programs not exiting cleanly. Many don't.

Thankfully, it doesn't work that way

Imagine the chaos if it was up to each (mediocre) app to clean up its virtual memory allocations before exiting. Everyone would be rebooting umpteen times a day! Instead, the OS keeps track of virtual memory allocs for every process so that a full cleanup can be performed on exit, irrespective of how much the process itself released in its final acts. (In very exotic circumstances the OS cleanup may fail partially or completely, but we're talking about a vanishingly small percentage of cases which are interesting enough to be worth studying individually.)

JimJoe said:
The only way I know of to reset that is to reboot. sometimes I have had to shut down, wait a minute or two, then boot back up.

That's almost always a pool (kernel-mode) leak and it's not caused by an app - only drivers can (directly) allocate pool memory. What makes pool leaks nasty is that there's no process you can simply terminate to get all that memory back. Once it's been leaked (by a driver or rarely a buggy OS component), there's nothing for it but a reboot.

Troubleshooting pool leaks is an interesting exercise but it's not the same as app-related memory utilisation/leakage.

Frostmourne · Sep 15, 2009

H2SO4 said:
JimJoe said:

Unless I missed it and someone already mentioned this...

Free Store Memory is the available memory locations, not actual physical memory. You can run out of it due to programs not exiting cleanly. Many don't.

Click to expand...

Thankfully, it doesn't work that way

Imagine the chaos if it was up to each (mediocre) app to clean up its virtual memory allocations before exiting. Everyone would be rebooting umpteen times a day! Instead, the OS keeps track of virtual memory allocs for every process so that a full cleanup can be performed on exit, irrespective of how much the process itself released in its final acts. (In very exotic circumstances the OS cleanup may fail partially or completely, but we're talking about a vanishingly small percentage of cases which are interesting enough to be worth studying individually.)

JimJoe said:

The only way I know of to reset that is to reboot. sometimes I have had to shut down, wait a minute or two, then boot back up.

Click to expand...

That's almost always a pool (kernel-mode) leak and it's not caused by an app - only drivers can (directly) allocate pool memory. What makes pool leaks nasty is that there's no process you can simply terminate to get all that memory back. Once it's been leaked (by a driver or rarely a buggy OS component), there's nothing for it but a reboot.

Troubleshooting pool leaks is an interesting exercise but it's not the same as app-related memory utilisation/leakage.

As for leaks and hard faults, open up lots of apps you use daily and check out reliability monitor to see what could be causing page faults. Process Monitor can also check this.

archie123 · Sep 16, 2009

Your all getting a little technical.........its superfetch!!!

Frostmourne · Sep 16, 2009

archie123 said:
Your all getting a little technical.........its superfetch!!!

Nothing wrong with a bit of technicality:D

archie123 · Sep 17, 2009

but it makes my brain hurt................

Little to no Free Physical Memory??

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