Tested Vista and...

Num3 · Post by **Num3** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 1:04 pm

It's nice...
Everything installed well and worked out of the box.

After some tweaking of the OS (disabling unneeded services, etc) i got an OS that uses 470mb of RAM :S ouch, my XP box, with more running services uses only 270mb of ram (and that includes the anti-virus on both systems)...

I've noticed Firefox was eating a big chunk of ram....
~50mb on vista against 27mb on XP, both firefox with same settings (about:config edited)

The major process that steals ram is the Windows Audio Controller, that cannot be disabled, or you get no audio... 37mb...

This process does not exist on XP...

Never the less, the system seems to work well, no major hick ups and seems to work at the same speed of my xp box...

Final conclusion...
Back to XP... 200mb are 200mb

and since i got Vista Inspirat installed on XP, it visually looks like Vista

AND51 · Post by **AND51** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 1:21 pm

Sometimes, I don't understand, why the amount of available/used RAM is so important.
Personally, I have 2 GB RAM installed, it's there to be used not to be kept free!

Your FireFox uses 50 MB on Vista or 20 MB on XP? Haha!
At this moment I've opened manymanymany tabs and my IE 7 is currently wasting 120 MB on XP... (Trick with IE 7: re-open it to free the memory)
Well, doesn't matter since I've got 2 GB available...

I can still play Crysis while having the heavy IE opened in the background...

What about you?

Final conclusion:
My RAM is there to be claimed; if I had only 64 MB, I would think&act like you: back to Windows 98!

thefool · Post by **thefool** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 1:49 pm

get some more ram. With my 4 gb i don't run into such trouble at the moment

Bonne_den_kule · Post by **Bonne_den_kule** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:45 pm

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

I'm perfectly fine letting SuperFetch have its way with my system memory. The question shouldn't be "Why does Vista use all my memory?", but "Why the heck did previous versions of Windows use my memory so ineffectively?" I don't know. Maybe the rules were different before 2 gigabytes was a mainstream memory configuration.

Num3 · Post by **Num3** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 3:44 pm

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

Didn't know, and it is a logical explanation for what's happening.

Vista is just reserving memory for the task.

I've tested this a bit further and when i change the disk cache size on Firefox, the reserved memory increases exactly the same amount on RAM!

Default Firefox cache is 50Mb + 27Mb 'normal' consumption.... = 77mb it all adds up correctly...

So it seems Vista does smart caching, using a ram disk instead of the actual file on HD...

Don't take my point wrong, i'm not being critic about vista, i just reported my findings, it does consume more memory than other versions.

"SuperFetch" isn't very smart... A smart SuperFetch would know which apps to cache on ram... But that's ok, i can live with it!

thefool · Post by **thefool** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 3:47 pm

personally i have good experiences with vista (64 and 32bit), but for my studio i have to run windows xp due to drivers

pdwyer · Post by **pdwyer** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 4:03 pm

Using memory & using memory effectively

it's hard to know the difference without being able to see under the hood completely

Is a vanila OS using 1gb of RAM out of 2gb, bloatware or is it ready to fly at 10x the speed as important files are cached and the disk won't slow it down

Okay, I'm not using a whole chunk of memory, if the OS can use that to speed things up then great... but is that what it's really doing? Is there a way to really find out or do you just have to trust M$?

Benchmarks suggest its slower, but they will generally test an app doing something, not necessarily switching and starting apps, the responsiveness...

Actually I have no answers for this either

I'm just posing more questions as I don't know myself

Num3 · Post by **Num3** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 7:56 pm

After disabling unnecessary services....

Just saved 200mb of ram....

Rook Zimbabwe · Post by **Rook Zimbabwe** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 9:40 pm

Which level of Vista? Home? Pro? Business? Enterprise? Ultimate?

I have hears a wild rumor that Ultimate was better organized and self optimizing. I only have HOME now (got it for free...) and I don't like it.

Derek · Post by **Derek** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 9:46 pm

I'm using Vista Business with 2gb memory and although it only has 72mb free, due to the caching, it never has any problems with it's memory allocation etc and although it has been reported that Vista runs slower than XP (and probably does) it still seems to run perfectly well and some of it's features are very good.

Inf0Byt3 · Post by **Inf0Byt3** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 11:36 pm

I don't understand a thing with this super-dooper caching system. If it gets all the data in the RAM and you run a memory hungry app, vista will have to force paging somehow in order to let the new program load. Obviously, this will take some time and it would normally make the new launched apps load much slower. How can they know what I will load next? IMHO they are trying to replicate linux's memory manager here, but this ain't such a good solution.

hellhound66 · Post by **hellhound66** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 11:57 pm

Removed.

pdwyer · Post by **pdwyer** » Tue Feb 26, 2008 12:20 am

Inf0Byt3 wrote:I don't understand a thing with this super-dooper caching system. If it gets all the data in the RAM and you run a memory hungry app, vista will have to force paging somehow in order to let the new program load. Obviously, this will take some time and it would normally make the new launched apps load much slower. How can they know what I will load next? IMHO they are trying to replicate linux's memory manager here, but this ain't such a good solution.

I don't think it will page the cache to disk, I would suspect it would just drop the lower priority parts of it out of memory to free up more for apps on an as needed basis.

SQL server as I recall has a similar feature where it allocates a huge chunk for itself and gives back to the OS when the OS is getting low for other apps. you have to actually check paging counters in perfmon to see if you are really running low on memory or not. I believe superfetch is more along that sort of line

maw · Post by **maw** » Tue Feb 26, 2008 10:26 am

pdwyer is correct, when a program allocates memory Vista will simply drop as much cache as needed. There is no swapping involved.