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Extremely High Memory Usage


quinriva

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I'm running a reasonably fresh install of Windows 7 64bit (stripped down), but my system is using 1Gb of memory even while idling, by comparison WinXP (32bit) on the same system, uses about 130Mb of RAM. Yes, I understand that Win7 uses more RAM, but 8 times as much seems ridiculous.

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The primary problem I am encountering, is that many games are simply unplayable in Win7. A prime example is Dawn of War II, if I have the task manager up on another screen while the game is loading I can monitor the memory usage of the game/system, the system often reaches 98% memory usage well before the game finishes loading. When it has finished loading and it gets to the press any key to start, the game is using ~950Mb of RAM, pressing any key to start the game seems to drop the RAM usage down to about 80Mb, where it slowly increases to about 450Mb before the game actually starts. Regularly while playing the game everything will just freeze for 5-10 seconds - generally occurs when scrolling across the map.

Any ideas as to what would cause such high memory usage? I have disabled all but the most essential items in msconfig, and I have very few services running.

Startup:

  • Logitech Setpoint
  • Daemon Tools Lite
  • Display Fusion

Non Standard Services:

  • Apple iPhone services (Apple Mobile Device, Bonjour Service, iPod Service)
  • Nvidia Display Driver Service
  • FLEXNet Licensing Service

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Looks like he has 2GB of RAM.

Windows 7 and Vista use RAM more efficiently, in that they follow the principle of free RAM being wasted RAM. The memory usage you see is due to Windows putting commonly used apps and files into RAM so that they launch faster. When you launch a game, Windows will reduce memory usage by these apps and files, so that's nothing to worry about. I have 3GBs of RAM, and Windows is taking up 1.5GBs of it. Nothing to worry about. I don't believe this is related to your games problem though. Could be drivers? Try updating them.

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Task manager is a *horrible* way to track memory usage. Try resmon and perfmon instead - however, looking at the "Available" number, it says you have 1024MB free for use, although most of that is being consumed by cache (which is normal - cache will be dumped as needed if applications with pages not in the cache require memory). Given this, I would be suspicious of the fact games are unplayable - it's most likely not a system memory issue, although drivers would be a good place to start.

Remember, task manager is a good quick overview of running tasks and windows, but don't use it for determining memory management - use resmon for a quick overview, and perfmon if you need to go deeper.

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