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News Vista updates improve compatibility, performance

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Tim S, 9 Aug 2007.

  1. TheVoice

    TheVoice What's a Dremel?

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    Well no, because it depends what performance you're measuring. As said already, SuperFetch is designed to predict what apps you use and when, and will thus have those apps and files waiting in RAM for you. It's fairly obvious there's a performance increase over it having to pull everything from the HDD.
     
  2. cebla

    cebla What's a Dremel?

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    RAM is never erased. When a program requests some ram and there isn't any available because the cache is taking up too much room all Windows has to do is to mark the cached data as no longer cached in its cache manager and then hand the memory to the program. The data that was cached is still loaded in RAM, but that doesn't matter because the new program will be writing its own data over the top of it before it uses it.

    When your writing a program if you request some RAM and you don’t assign a value to it and then you print the value that is in the RAM you requested out to the screen you will find that it is just whatever it was used for last.

    Of course this would take a few extra CPU cycles to mark that the data that was cached is no longer cached, but this most likely would take less than 1ms. It is also likely if you were running a game that most of the requests for more RAM would be during the loading phase and so it would have almost no negative effect while you are actually playing.
     
  3. completemadness

    completemadness What's a Dremel?

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    atleast linux has a "cached memory" section though, if only MS had done that it would have made alot more complaints go away

    I dont mind if 80% of my memory is used (infact 99% would be better, im sure theres a reason you cant use all 100%), but i would like to know how much of it can actually be freed, and how much is really being used
     
  4. DougEdey

    DougEdey I pwn all your storage

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    you can't use all 100% because you need a space to load programs and data temporarily to cross check that it's correct.
     
  5. Ramble

    Ramble Ginger Nut

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    They do.

    EDIT: There's clearly some ambiguity here as to what happens, so I've taken a screenshot some my mem usage.

    [​IMG]

    As you can see system processes are using up about 800mb (it changes depending on how much ram you've got). The rest is taken up by cache so I've only got 18mb free, however this is transparent so rather than 99% mem usage I have 40%. it changes depending on what you run, for example I did a stress test earlier, it used up 1.88GB of RAM and only a few hundred meg was left for the cache. After I closed the program the cache rebuilt back up to 1 gig or so.
    It's basically free memory.
     
    Last edited: 10 Aug 2007
  6. Woodstock

    Woodstock So Say We All

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    so why does it use more than twice the ram xp does? is 2gb enough for gaming on vista if so for how long
     
  7. Ramble

    Ramble Ginger Nut

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    2Gb is fine for gaming.
    It uses twice the memory due to a combination of things, one thing is that indeed Vista does have more processes and is indeed heavier on the memory. It also has a new memory manager which may be skewing things somewhat, by paging less and such. Memory usage drops as you remove RAM.
     
  8. capnPedro

    capnPedro Hacker. Maker. Engineer.

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    When I had 1GB of RAM, my usage was around 44%. I put another 1GB in and the usage dropped (raised, technically) to 40%.
    Remember (40% of 2) > (44% of 1). Vista actually went ahead and made use of the extra RAM I put in.
     
  9. completemadness

    completemadness What's a Dremel?

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    Ah OK, i see now

    but they should have another row that says "used" or something, because if you actually quote the free figure, you are getting skewed by the cache
    you can work it out, in that SS apparently you are using 542mb memory (total - free - cached) but it should be written down somewhere
     
  10. Bladestorm

    Bladestorm What's a Dremel?

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    :thumb:

    reading through the thread I was feeling the urge to post along the same lines till I got to your post, I probably wouldn't have done it as well and don't feel like I have as much authority on the matter though.

    To check I had it right though, my layman's explanation is something like :

    So you have however possible numbers in an array which always exist regardless of the numbers in them at any given time, it takes some time to enter meaningfull numbers to all the spaces to use, but almost no time to update the list that says what the numbers are to "___ to ___ = available" which just lets the next program to want memory, change the list entry and start replacing whatever numbers are already in the section it wants to meaningfull numbers of its own, taking no longer than it would have because its replacing say a 029 instead of an 000 in an entry.
     
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