Who stole my RAM?
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6GB of RAM is being used by the two games I have open. The remaining programs on my computer are using 1, maybe 2 gigabytes. 4 gigabytes are free. Where did the other 4 gigabytes go?
The memory comes back when I reboot, but right now most of my memory is used (not cached):
This is a problem because before I stopped all the services I was running, I was using more memory than I had physical RAM available.
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If you find out the answer, let me know. The only thing I recall that causes this normally is running a VM, which uses memory outside the normal purview of task manager.
Either that or kernel leak?
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@ben_lubar
Superfetch (pre-caching programs you typically use into RAM for faster loading) doesn't show usage in Task Manager. It usually frees RAM by just dropping it, not paging to disk, so it's generally a non-issue if Superfetch overruns.But if your Committed pool was over 16GB, then it's probably not Superfetch...
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@ben_lubar said in Who stole my RAM?:
I was using more memory than I had physical RAM available.
Microsoft gave you extra RAM for free and you're complaining.
Geez. Kids these days.
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Ok, here's what it looks like after a reboot without me closing a bunch of services I use:
That's 4.6GB for what was taking 6GB before plus some other stuff that wasn't running before, like SQL Server, IIS, Dropbox, Google Drive, and 3 Inedo services.
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@ben_lubar
Yeah, that sounds like Superfetch behavior there. Especially with the cache pool being that large compared to active and committed.
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@ben_lubar Hey! I'm using as much RAM as you got total!
And more than my current max would be nice too...
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@Atazhaia said in Who stole my RAM?:
@ben_lubar Hey! I'm using as much RAM as you got total!
And more than my current max would be nice too...
How'd you end up with 23.6GB? Some kind of kelly-bootle standard unit-based gigabyte?
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@ben_lubar
maybe 8 soldered and 16 add on? I have this on me laptop (which was delivered with 12gb iirc)
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@ben_lubar I guess the same reason your memory goes up to 15.9GB? Apparently some RAM gets lost to the dark powers that be.
@swayde It's a desktop computer with 6x4GB RAM for 24GB total. Which also is max for the CPU/MB.
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@Atazhaia said in Who stole my RAM?:
Apparently some RAM gets lost to the dark powers that be.
Maybe marketing? How much is 1 GB in the marketing vs in the system monitor?
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@LB_ said in Who stole my RAM?:
@Atazhaia said in Who stole my RAM?:
Apparently some RAM gets lost to the dark powers that be.
Maybe marketing? How much is 1 GB in the marketing vs in the system monitor?
1gB is 1gB for RAM.
Some does get pulled for video RAM shadowing (or out and out video RAM for IGPs) depending on configuration.
That said, I see SQL Server. Make sure it has a memory limit configured. It doesn't by default.
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@Weng
Well, teeeeeechnically, it does ship with a default RAM limit.Of 2 TB.
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@izzion said in Who stole my RAM?:
2 TB.
Man, iif I had that much memory, I probably wouldn't even run an OS at that point..
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ITYM:
Where did the RAM go?
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@izzion said in Who stole my RAM?:
@Weng
Well, teeeeeechnically, it does ship with a default RAM limit.Of 2 TB.
I have access to a server with 1 TB of RAM. I tried to get it pushed to 2 TB when it was bought, but apparently that was a bit too pricy. Oh well.
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Tried to ask Google for answers. Most hits seem to be question related to 32-bit Windows limits or RAM installation troubleshooting. I however found a Bing-translated technical support article from Microsoft, which went about as well as expected. It translated free (available) into free (of charge). So maybe I should ask Microsoft where my free RAM is. :P It also translated aperture (from AGP Aperture Size) into the photography term, which doesn't seem quite right.
But yeah; I'd say the missing tiny amounts of RAM are due to hardware reservations and the like, as they do happen regardless of OS.
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Have you tried looking at Resource Monitor (resmon.exe)? It gives you a nice split between working set, committed, shareable, etc per process. And IIRC one of the columns will sum to the total percentage shown in Task Manager, I can't remember which one though...
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@Atazhaia said in Who stole my RAM?:
It also translated aperture (from AGP Aperture Size) into the photography term, which doesn't seem quite right.
And that's why
operatorword overloading is bad.
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@Vault_Dweller said in Who stole my RAM?:
Have you tried looking at Resource Monitor (resmon.exe)? It gives you a nice split between working set, committed, shareable, etc per process. And IIRC one of the columns will sum to the total percentage shown in Task Manager, I can't remember which one though...
I think it should be Working Set - Private.
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Last time I had that problem I had to resort to poolmon.exe from Windows Driver Development Kit to find out that the leaked memory was tagged as handles. Verified using Process Explorer that there were lots of handles belonging to System, steadily increasing in number.
By random experimentation I replaced a driver I had installed from motherboard manufacturer's website with a different version from Windows Update and the leak vanished.
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Speaking of.
I'm interesting in increasing my RAM, I'm currently at 8 gigs. :(
What's a good way to determine what to get without cracking open the box?
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@xaade
Is the box a Dell/HP, or a custom build?
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@xaade said in Who stole my RAM?:
Speaking of.
I'm interesting in increasing my RAM, I'm currently at 8 gigs. :(
What's a good way to determine what to get without cracking open the box?
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Download HW Monitor
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Run it
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???
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Imitate @perverted_vixen
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Avoid getting arrested
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GOOGLE THAT MOTHER TRUCKING MOTHERBOARD!
(for my work PC i found this: http://www.gigabyte.us/Motherboard/GA-Z77X-UD3H-rev-10#ov) -
Now i know i can get a 4x kit of up to DDR3 at 1600 MHz
8.Use Windows 10 task manager (might work on older OS but i make no guarantee)
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hey, lookit that. i have 2 out fo four slots used, they're running at 1600Mhz and they are DDR3. this matches the data we got from hwmonitor and google
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Now i know i can buy 16GB in 2 8GB sticks to max out my motherboard
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This kit looks nice.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231746&cm_re=DDR3_1600--20-231-746--Product
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@xaade said in Who stole my RAM?:
I'm interesting in increasing my RAM, I'm currently at 8 gigs. :(
What's a good way to determine what to get without cracking open the box?
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Are you sure it's not chrome? It's always chrome, that sucker loves to eat up RAM.
And probably nodebb in chrome on what.thedailywtf.com that's eating up most of the RAM.
Whenever I am using too much RAM i just close chrome and it frees up like half my RAM.
It can be tricky to see because each chrome tab runs as a separate process so the RAM is not added up anywhere.
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@xaade
So, just from that, your system supports either DDR3 or DDR4-2133 RAM (both speeds exist, and are different memory), so you will need to use CPU-Z or HWMonitor to get more information about your system.Given the cost of RAM at this point, I would plan on buying a matched pair of the biggest RAM your system can buy, and throwing out the existing 8GB stick - you'll wind up spending an extra $30-100 (depending on if the system supports 16GB sticks, which I doubt), but won't have to deal with potential problems from mis-matched memory from different manufacturers or lots.
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Do 64-bit Intel systems still technically have the first 1MB divided between conventional and upper blocks? That could explain why 16GB shows up as 15.9, depending on the number of decimals the dialog shows.
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@izzion said in Who stole my RAM?:
@xaade
So, just from that, your system supports either DDR3 or DDR4-2133 RAM (both speeds exist, and are different memory), so you will need to use CPU-Z or HWMonitor to get more information about your system.Given the cost of RAM at this point, I would plan on buying a matched pair of the biggest RAM your system can buy, and throwing out the existing 8GB stick - you'll wind up spending an extra $30-100 (depending on if the system supports 16GB sticks, which I doubt), but won't have to deal with potential problems from mis-matched memory from different manufacturers or lots.
+1 to all of this.
though if you aren't the one paying for this upgrade i'd be tempted to tell you to throw the whole case out and bild yourself a EATX build with 128GB of DDR4, a i7-6950X, dual custom water loop cooling that mofo of a CPU and dual TITAN XPascal GPUs for MAXIMUM POWAH
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@accalia said in Who stole my RAM?:
hey, lookit that. i have 2 out fo four slots used
This may not be reliable. I just happened to look at this page yesterday and it said I had 2 of 4 slots used, but my motherboard only has two slots.
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@mikehurley said in Who stole my RAM?:
Do 64-bit Intel systems still technically have the first 1MB divided between conventional and upper blocks? That could explain why 16GB shows up as 15.9, depending on the number of decimals the dialog shows.
Doesn't the system need to take some of the ram to map the devices (maybe including the video card). That's why you never quite get the full RAM amount.
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@dangeRuss said in Who stole my RAM?:
@mikehurley said in Who stole my RAM?:
Do 64-bit Intel systems still technically have the first 1MB divided between conventional and upper blocks? That could explain why 16GB shows up as 15.9, depending on the number of decimals the dialog shows.
Doesn't the system need to take some of the ram to map the devices (maybe including the video card). That's why you never quite get the full RAM amount.
That's what I always thought. Then i checked mine:
I seem to have grown an extra 5GB.
Cool.
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@El_Heffe said in Who stole my RAM?:
@dangeRuss said in Who stole my RAM?:
@mikehurley said in Who stole my RAM?:
Do 64-bit Intel systems still technically have the first 1MB divided between conventional and upper blocks? That could explain why 16GB shows up as 15.9, depending on the number of decimals the dialog shows.
Doesn't the system need to take some of the ram to map the devices (maybe including the video card). That's why you never quite get the full RAM amount.
That's what I always thought. Then i checked mine:
You probably don't have any devices.
I seem to have grown an extra 5GB.
Cool.
That's just your swap file size.
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@dangeRuss said in Who stole my RAM?:
That's just your swap file size.
Oh yeah. Forgot about that. Except my swapfile is set to 4GB, not 5.
More Microsoft Math® I guess.
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@El_Heffe said in Who stole my RAM?:
@dangeRuss said in Who stole my RAM?:
That's just your swap file size.
Oh yeah. Forgot about that. Except my swapfile is set to 4GB, not 5.
More Microsoft Math® I guess.
Shouldn't your swap size be 1.5x your RAM? Also are you saying both min and max are set to 4GB?
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@dangeRuss said in Who stole my RAM?:
48GB swap file? You know the old recommendation of setting swap to 1.5x total RAM hasn't been relevant for like 15 years, right?
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@dangeRuss said in Who stole my RAM?:
Doesn't the system need to take some of the ram to map the devices (maybe including the video card).
Usually around a hundred MB. Not really enough to blip a 16 GB memory readout.
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@blakeyrat said in Who stole my RAM?:
@dangeRuss said in Who stole my RAM?:
Doesn't the system need to take some of the ram to map the devices (maybe including the video card).
Usually around a hundred MB. Not really enough to blip a 16 GB memory readout.
Enough to turn 16GB into 15.9GB
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@Atazhaia said in Who stole my RAM?:
You know the old recommendation of setting swap to 1.5x total RAM hasn't been relevant for like 15 years, right?
The correct advice is "don't do any dicking around, the computer's better than you at determining what the best swap amount is".
The "don't dick around" advice applies to a lot of stuff honestly.
I've seen poorly performing SQL Servers where the performance "solution" was just to turn off all the dumb settings the moron DBA made after reading advice from 1998 and just go with the defaults. (Except the DB autogrow default is like 10 MB, which is ludicrously small. That's one default you should change.)
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@blakeyrat said in Who stole my RAM?:
@Atazhaia said in Who stole my RAM?:
You know the old recommendation of setting swap to 1.5x total RAM hasn't been relevant for like 15 years, right?
The correct advice is "don't do any dicking around, the computer's better than you at determining what the best swap amount is".
Well it may not be as important now if you have an SSD, but with rust drives it was a big problem when your swap size grew and shrank as it caused fragmentation which made the swap file perform awful. I know I have enough space to preallocate the swap file and I know that if the swap file is more than 1.5x my RAM I'm in big enough trouble that I would probably need to kill something or reboot, so I set the swap at 1.5x my RAM.
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Just set min and max size to same. Fragmentation issue solved. It was even one advice from back then. Once RAM grew past a point the need for larger-than-RAM swap started shrinking, however. The advice for manual setting I heard last is that the more RAM you have, the less swap you need. I technically have enough RAM to go without swap, but as the OS may get pissy about lack of swap I just set it to 2GB. Linux hardly ever starts using it and Windows just uses ~200MB or something like that. If RAM gets maxed out I know something has gone wrong regardless and no amount of swap is gonna save me from that. For me I'd have to reserve 36GB if I'd follow the ancient recommendations. 36GB that would sit unused. On an SSD I could use those 36GB for better stuff.
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@blakeyrat said in Who stole my RAM?:
I've seen poorly performing SQL Servers where the performance "solution" was just to turn off all the dumb settings the moron DBA made after reading advice from 1998 and just go with the defaults. (Except the DB autogrow default is like 10 MB, which is ludicrously small. That's one default you should change.)
Some of Microsoft's defaults for SQL Server are still pretty ugly. I would not recommend running a "defaults installation" for any except the most trivial of SQL servers... like SQL Express level trivial.
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@accalia
Bwaha...
Mine has one actual physical slot:
I know cause i checked, you see. This is typical for asus.
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While Linux says I got 23.6GB RAM, Windows says I got 24.0GB RAM. Looking at the finer numbers for usable vs total in Windows shows a full 9MB being unavailable to Windows with 24576MB total vs 24567MB usable. Working some Linux terminal magic I get the same numbers there, just showing an extra 0.5MB usable. So I guess the 23.6GB is the system information not counting properly. So my chipset makes a shocking 8.5MB of RAM unavailable to either OS.
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@Atazhaia said in Who stole my RAM?:
shocking 8.5MB of RAM
You could store almost a hundred books in that space!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Who stole my RAM?:
@Atazhaia said in Who stole my RAM?:
shocking 8.5MB of RAM
You could store almost a hundred books in that space!
Not by my math. Assuming 5-character words (so divide by 6 to include spaces) and 100,000-word books on average, you get 14.85 books.
Compression might up that somewhat, but not by a factor of six!
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Who stole my RAM?:
Compression might up that somewhat, but not by a factor of six!
orly?
Assuming english text a good compressor can easily achieve 80+% compression ratios, this is of course because english text is highly predictable.
i found someone who tested over two hundred lossless compression utilities against a standard english text corpus (actually the 1995 CIA world fact book in text format) with an initial filesyxe of just under three million bytes. You can see the full list here but below is five of the better known compression utilities (along with the number one winner) and how they performed
Utility Compression ratio Result Bits per Source Byte WinRK 3.1.2 88.94% 0.8849 WINZIP 14 85.21% 1.1829 WinRAR 4.1b3 85.16% 1.1875 BZIP 0.21 80.84% 1.5331 GZIP 1.3.5 71.13% 2.3100now a 6x compression ratio is 1.666666 bits per byte, which means that only GZIP (of the ones i chose to list here) fails to achieve that ratio. in fact the "worst" lossless compressor that succeeds at achieving a 6x or better compression ratio is
WinACE 2.69which came in 128th place.so there! :-P
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@accalia I bet I could make a better compression algorithm than that.
Step 1: if the source to be compresses is the 1995 CIA world fact book in text format, compress to a 1 byte file that's not a valid WinRK file
Step 2: if it's not the 1995 CIA world fact book in text format then use WinRK.There. At least as good in every situation as the winner, and far better in the test in question. What do I win?
DOWNLOADING HWMONITOR_1.31.ZIP | CPUID
