Windows XP memory footprint

[Kommi]

In the task manager in WinXP I can see that WinXP taks up something like 60 megs of physical memory when I am running no other processes. Is this normal?  

[swpalmer]

XP uses a lot of RAM dynamically for caching.  As I understand it the cache manager for the filesystems will give some RAM back to  the system to maintain a healthy balance.

[blahblahblahh]

In the task manager in WinXP I can see that WinXP taks up something like 60 megs of physical memory when I am running no other processes. Is this normal?  

NT4 took 30-40Mb by default (or thereabouts).

Win2K (NT5) took 80Mb by default. But, if you disable all the pointless services, it went down to about 45-60. If you also disable services you personally don't like, you could get down to about 30-40Mb IIRC (i.e. exactly the same as in NT-4 - 2k just came with more stuff pre-loaded on boot, to slow down your boot process ).

WinXP is sort of NT-6, so I wouldn't be surprised if you could achieve similar mem savings by taking a long hard look at what services you have running and enbaled. However, by the time XP came out I'd stopped working in jobs where knowing how to do this was useful, and it's quite easy to have 1Gb RAM now, so I've never really tried it  with XP .

FYI, 60Mb is not much; it's small enough that you should be more than merely content (I've seen NT4 boxes that were using more than that on a fresh reboot). Linux takes similar amounts, although in general I find linux needs more memory to do the same things as Windows - e.g. a full-featured windowing system, with all the bells and whistles is usually a blackhole for your RAM to disappear into. Under linux, this is not so bad because you have much finer control over what is and isn't loaded. OTOH, it's sometimes much much worse, because you get processes being auto-killed just because your OS ran out of memory (has happened to me quite a few times when X-Windows and Mozilla have colluded to take 350Mb between them; it shows up in X's process, but is pretty obviously due to Moz; I don't know much about X's architecture).

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[Jeff]

FYI, 60Mb is not much;.

"Noone will ever need more then 640 K." -- Bill Gates

[Kommi]

Jeff did he actually say that one time? What was he talking about?

[tortoise]

I thought that credit to Bill Gates was later shown to be false, he never said that. Although I don't have any source at my fingertips to verify that, just what I remember.

Most/all modern OSes use free memory for caching. Linux will use just about all your free memory for page and filesystem caching.

[oNyx]

Free ram is just that - unused... worthless.

It's not important how much ram is used by the OS it's important how much of that is "unswapable" (that's the point were the usual OS functionality gets to a crawling speed).

Heh... I need more ram so badly (128mb... duh). My usual "bad" multitasking-behaviour needs about 512mb... so yea... basically it's swapping all day long.

However, XP needs more ram for itself than 2k... and 2k needs more than 98 and 98 needs more than 95...

But it isn't all that bad. 2k and XP use bigger amounts (512 and up) more efficiently than 98 (512mb is the upper limit... you can get it working with more ram with some tricks but as long as you dont need all that ram it's much slower than it's with eg 256). Also HDD troughput is usually much higher, because it's managed smarter. The higher memory footprint is a small payoff as long as you have at least 256mb.

[blahblahblahh]

Free ram is just that - unused... worthless.

It's not important how much ram is used by the OS it's important how much of that is "unswapable" (that's the point were the usual OS functionality gets to a crawling speed).

What you mean, I think, is "how much is in the working set". I.e., what is being used by the OS from minute to minute, as opposed to being e.g. an HTTPserver daemon that has no connections all day, but perhaps gets them at night when you're AFK.

Most OS's are rubbish at deciding what to swap to disk when. Most do pre-emptive swapping (NT4 used to try to swap something as soon as you hit the minimize button - i.e. if you liked to used minimize to navigate from window to window, you were ****ed by MS). Linux seems to just say "this app hasn't done anything in X minutes, I'll get rid of it" - which is equally stupid because if you go away from lunch, whne you get back ALL your apps are now swapped out to disk! It *is* a tricky problem, pre-emptive swapping .

IIRC Windows tends to keep everything in RAM unless it runs out. That means that it is important how much memory the OS is using. At the very least, as soon as you load a big app you'll get a sudden slowdown as tonnes of irrelevant cr*p you weren't actually using gets swapped to disk to make way for the app. Rather like simple GCs .

However, the great thing about windows is that your memory-resident-but-invisible apps (anyone recall TSR's ? ) are very easy to manage. Services panel lists all of them, with easy controls to remove/disable/start/stop them. Rather than faffing about with Enlightenment, it would be very nice if Linux devs copied the really simple parts of windows (like this one) that offer the biggest gains in usability and productivity...

[Jeff]

Jeff did he actually say that one time? What was he talking about?

Its in reference to the fact that MS-DOS had an arbitrary architectural limit of 640K.

Boy do I feel old that you people don't know that