Boost your Maxtor Performance, FREE!

[Woozle]

Originally posted by: Jarhead
Armethius

Well, so much for graduate level....


When a program has memory leaks, especially under Win98, it doesn't get recovered.

Also, some programs do not release all the memory when you exit them.

This leads to less and less memory left, and it starts impacting your system.

Once you get down to no resources left, your computer starts crawling, and is prone to crashing.

All versions of Windows since NT/95 allocate a memory space for each process which is destroyed when the process ends. Therefore a memory leak will only affect the process with the leak. All memory is recovered when the process ends.

 

[SimMike2]

Originally posted by: Woozle

Originally posted by: Jarhead
All versions of Windows since NT/95 allocate a memory space for each process which is destroyed when the process ends. Therefore a memory leak will only affect the process with the leak. All memory is recovered when the process ends.

I disagree. Windows 95, 98 and ME all had serious problems with memory leaks which would eventually have your computer crawling. This is why with Windows 98 I rebooted at least two or three times per week. With XP, I can go weeks without rebooting and the computer still runs great.

 

[fustercluck]

does this app have to stay on my system tray 24/7 to work?

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: jacktackle
does this app have to stay on my system tray 24/7 to work?

I think so unless you run it as a service.

 

[Armethius]

Thanks for jna for a little defense. Of course I don't have enough time to fully explain how memory works in an anandtech post...therefore anything that I post is going to be oversimplified in some way.

As jna pointed out, programs DO NOT decide how much memory they will use...they just decide how much memory to request from the operating system. If a program has a "memory leak", the "stale" data that is sitting in ram will eventually be spilled to the hard drive as other programs have memory "misses" causing the os to load new data into memory. This means that although a "memory leak" will cause memory to increasingly ALLOCATED, it doesn't mean that RAM will be increasingly used. ALLOCATED MEMORY != RAM (allocated memory may also come from virtual memory == hard drive)

By using a memory refresher, you are spilling data from ram that HAS BEEN USED MOST RECENTLY (depending on the caching algorithm). The only reason that RAM exists is to hold data so that it may be retrieved much faster than from the hard drive. After "refreshing" memory, it is empty and for the first several memory request you might as well be operating without ram at all.

The OS will automatically overwrite old data with new data REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THE MEMORY IS EMPTY OR FULL.

The only way for these programs to be beneficial is if they went around freeing actual "dead" allocated memory, but only the leaking program will know what memory is important and what is not...so I doubt this is the case.


jarhead: you should read up on the difference between allocated memory, virtual memory, and physical memory...I think you have them confused.

Go here: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cache1.htm for a decent caching tutorial.

With regards to the tutorial, memory refreshing would be like periodically making the librarian return all of the books to the shelves.

After doing some digging I found this gem at the analogx site:

What MaxMem basically does is ensure that a certain amount of physical memory is always available to your system - want some more? Simple, just click on the icon in the tray, and voila - you've just free'd up some memory!

It doesn't fix memory leaks, it just hides them from the user.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Here's a really interesting thing though. On one of the "memory refresher" programs that I tested, under W2K SP2, that had a visible scrolling graph of allocated RAM and pagefile usage - it appears that Windows has it's own internal "low water mark", in terms of free RAM pages that should be available, at the bare minimum, at any given time to service memory allocation requests. You of course can set whatever particular low-water-mark you want in the memory-refresher program, under which (depending on the update frequency), it will force-page out the contents of RAM, until the high-water-mark is reached. Then it idles until it detects that free RAM is under the low-water mark again. The drawback is, during the forced-pageout, the system definately suffers in terms of response times. Whereas, if Windows simply flushed pages to the pagefile during idle-time, system responsiveness isn't impacted much at all. But it seems that during excruciatingly low-memory (thrashing) conditions, Windows doesn't swap pages out to the pagefile as fast as it possibly could, causing programs with pending memory allocations to pause, and impacting their response times.

I know that this has digressed slightly off-topic here, but the way I see it, the _ideal_ solution, would be to somehow set Windows' own internal free-RAM low-water mark to something higher, on my system it was around 4MB, for a 256MB system with a 768MB pagefile. The other one would be to monitor interactive application responsiveness, or alternatively latency for fulfilling memory-allocation requests, such that if application responsiveness was negatively affected by "idle time page-out", that Windows would switch temporarily to a more "active" page-out algorithm, even if it could impact I/O performance of other running tasks at the time. Another idea, would be to use idle I/O time, to speculatively page-out pages, based on their LRU timestamps, such that, assuming sufficient free pages in the pagefile, the memory pages could be written out to the pagefile, before they would absolutely need to be paged out, and then they could simply be flushed from RAM instead of paged, when the RAM was called for. Then again, maybe Windows already does this as part of the "idle time" page-out algorithm.

 

[jna]

I really like this quote I think I should always have 256MB free. That's why I bought 4 sticks of PC4000 instead of 3

What MaxMem basically does is ensure that a certain amount of physical memory is always available to your system - want some more? Simple, just click on the icon in the tray, and voila - you've just free'd up some memory!

 

[roamerr]

I have tried MaxBoost for the last several days. I have now disabled it. Seemed OK til I did a reboot due to lack of internet response (no big deal thought it was my dsl). Anyway upon reboot WinXP went into Disk Consistency check on my 160gb Maxtor. Freaked me out since in 1+ yrs with WinXP I have never had that happen. The drive is only 1 month old.

Everything works fine now but that was odd.....

 

[conehead433]

"Here's a really interesting thing though. On one of the "memory refresher" programs that I tested, under W2K SP2, that had a visible scrolling graph of allocated RAM and pagefile usage - it appears that Windows has it's own internal "low water mark", in terms of free RAM pages that should be available, at the bare minimum, at any given time to service memory allocation requests. You of course can set whatever particular low-water-mark you want in the memory-refresher program, under which (depending on the update frequency), it will force-page out the contents of RAM, until the high-water-mark is reached. Then it idles until it detects that free RAM is under the low-water mark again. The drawback is, during the forced-pageout, the system definately suffers in terms of response times."

You will find that W2K is not nearly the resource hog that XP is. Running the exact same programs in W2K will keep 70 to 100 more free KB in memory. I should determine the percentage, since obviously this will depend on the number of programs running.

 

[Frykun]

I tried to install MaxBoost, I only have one processor and I received the following message "This version of MaxBoost supports single CPU system only". What is wrong?

You probably have a system equipped with Hyper-Threading. The current version of MaxBoost software does not support Hyper Threading.

doesn't that suck >_<

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: conehead433
"Here's a really interesting thing though. On one of the "memory refresher" programs that I tested, under W2K SP2, that had a visible scrolling graph of allocated RAM and pagefile usage - it appears that Windows has it's own internal "low water mark", in terms of free RAM pages that should be available, at the bare minimum, at any given time to service memory allocation requests. You of course can set whatever particular low-water-mark you want in the memory-refresher program, under which (depending on the update frequency), it will force-page out the contents of RAM, until the high-water-mark is reached. Then it idles until it detects that free RAM is under the low-water mark again. The drawback is, during the forced-pageout, the system definately suffers in terms of response times."

You will find that W2K is not nearly the resource hog that XP is. Running the exact same programs in W2K will keep 70 to 100 more free KB in memory. I should determine the percentage, since obviously this will depend on the number of programs running.

My (surprising) experience, after installing WinXP Pro + SP1 on a couple of machine, is that, with only basic OS stuff loaded, XP only takes up around 80MB of memory. W2K SP2 seems like it takes 110-120MB. But XP definately feels more "sluggish", on the same class of machine. I think that XP loads so much stuff running in the background (extra services and whatnot), that it definately takes more CPU power.

I suppose that what I wrote above about the low-water-mark was slightly confusing. What I was trying to say was, if there was some way to set Windows' internal free RAM low-water-mark, instead of using some 3rd-party program, it would be much preferable, and there would be no need for such programs at all. When Windows' own low-water-mark is reached, it pages out old/stale data to the pagefile, but doesn't cause a noticable performance hit. When a 3rd-party program does it instead, it affects interactive response time significantly.

 

[straubs]

Originally posted by: Woozle

All versions of Windows since NT/95 allocate a memory space for each process which is destroyed when the process ends. Therefore a memory leak will only affect the process with the leak. All memory is recovered when the process ends.

Exactly. With 2k/XP, you don't need silly "RAM saver" programs. With 98, they definitely worked. I wish people would stop propagating win98 problems onto 2k/XP. Those programs are definitely up there with Snake Oil these days.

Note: My FreeBSD box usually keeps 90% of the RAM "in use" even though the processes running don't need that much. If the average windows user saw that they'd say: OMG!! I need to reboot cuz my resources are gone! In reality it is a design choice based on what was discussed earlier in this thread--unused ram is wasted ram AS LONG AS the OS is capable of efficiently freeing it. Which BSD and 2k/XP are, but not win98.

I'm also wary of those "disk speedup programs" even though they may be from the drive vendor themselves. Go install Western Digital's totally unneeded Lifeguard (version 11) and watch in amazement as spyware is loaded onto your computer after it boots. The spyware file is "BackWeb lite" and locates itself in C:\Doc & Settings\All Users\AppData\Lifeguard. SpyBot says that the informaiton collected inlcludes browser being used, the OS, and IP address. It also says that CameoCAST pushes content to your hard drive while your on line.

More info on this here and here

 

[seaotter]

Originally posted by: Dantzig
I've been running this for a little while now and I'm about to uninstall it. My system stability has gone downhill. I've had the Maxboost program disable itself a few times and shortly after, my system spontaneously reboots. Also, if the program disables itself and then you attempt to re-enable it, your system will reboot. The program is too buggy to justify a few points gained in some benchmarks.

This is off topic, but Win XP installs w/ a default setting to reboot in the event of a serious system error. Makes it hard to ID problems. Uncheck 'Automatically Restart' in the Startup & Recovery 'Settings' button on the Advanced tab of System Properties (right click 'My Computer' & go to Properties).

At least that way you might really get to see what actually caused the error.

 

[XiZiT]

Two questions... first, since this is 'Trialware' does this mean we only have x amount of days before we have to pourchase a full version? Second, anyone think Maxtor hd's are unreliable? I have had 3 different 80gb models in the past 5 years and each one after a few months just get disk sector errors and windows stops reading them. I use them mainly for backup so I can't even blame it on any software because it just houses zips and images.

 

[lispsux]

you know when you are playing one of those new games that needs way too much memory, and you pick a new gun and it is kinda hangs for a tiny bit? The hard disk was accessed for the graphics/sounds to that gun, switching back to another gun and then to the new one you do not see the same 'lag' because the graphics/sounds are now in memory.

You do not really need a program like this since ...well, windows does this all ready.

The best thing you can do to improve hd performance is to have a large cache.

 

[mdcrab]

This is off topic, but Win XP installs w/ a default setting to reboot in the event of a serious system error. Makes it hard to ID problems. Uncheck 'Automatically Restart' in the Startup & Recovery 'Settings' button on the Advanced tab of System Properties (right click 'My Computer' & go to Properties).

Thanks, just reset mine.

Still debating on whether to install MaxBoost. Right now I am leaning toward not installing, as I don't think the risk is worth the possible gain.

mdcrab

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: straubs
I'm also wary of those "disk speedup programs" even though they may be from the drive vendor themselves. Go install Western Digital's totally unneeded Lifeguard (version 11) and watch in amazement as spyware is loaded onto your computer after it boots. The spyware file is "BackWeb lite" and locates itself in C:\Doc & Settings\All Users\AppData\Lifeguard. SpyBot says that the informaiton collected inlcludes browser being used, the OS, and IP address. It also says that CameoCAST pushes content to your hard drive while your on line.

More info on this here and here

Yep!

Data Lifeguard 2.6 installs it automatically, while 2.8 prompts you to hit a key to avoid uninstalling it. (any other key installs it - be careful not to buffer keystrokes while getting past the EULA/disclaimer screens)

I posted on StorageReview about the WD backweb-based spyware, and someone responded that they contacted WD, and their rep claimed that they were phasing it out. I'm disappointed that WD continues to bundle it with Data Lifeguard 11.0.

Another comment, I found that their new DLG 11.0 bootable CD-ROM version, included with most of their newest drives, DOES NOT work. The boot disk image fails, as it assigns the RAMdisk to I:, and I have more HD partitions present than that. Really sad, MS's own Win98se bootdisk works properly, no matter how many drive letters/partitions I have.

Here's another link describing WD's backweb-based spyware.

 

[ams30gts]

Originally posted by: ValsalvaYourHeartOut
doesn't support RAID arrays...DOH

Valsalva

booo. no good for me then

 

[NogginBoink]

Originally posted by: conehead433
"To all of you who are running that AnalogXmem program. Take it from a graduate level computer engineering student...those programs actually hurt performance.

The whole point in having RAM is that you are hoping that it will always be full, and therefore you can have a high probability of having data in it that you need. If you keep ram empty, then the cpu has to go to the hard drive all the time for data, therefore slowing the computer down.

If ram is ever needed, the OS spills some data back to the hard drive to make room."

The point of using a memory refresher program is not to keep your RAM empty, it's to remove data already used making RAM available for new data. Windows XP does at fair job of memory management in comparison to 98SE, but having a refresher program helps when running a number of A/V processes. And if you have the program adjusted properly it doesn't interfere with tasks like CD burning, etc. Of course I could buy another 512K stick of RAM. So yes if you are trying to completely free your RAM continuously you could hurt performance, but otherwise a number of those programs work quite well thank you. In particular the AnalogX program is one of the best, and I've tried a few. Your opinion has been duly noted,
so if you are in fact a graduate level computer engineering student you can back your claim up with some empirical evidence. Obviously the results will vary depending on the levels that any program of this type is set at, including the level at which the memory refresher works and the amount of RAM the program attempts to recover, etc.

WinXP's memory manager is probably one of the most optimized pieces of code on the planet. As for WinXP's ability to "remove data already used, making RAM available for new data," that's what the zero-page thread is for.

The guys who write the WinXP/2K/2K3 memory manager are very, very smart people who have a very, very intimate knowledge of how memory management on the platform works. I'd trust Windows' memory management over any third party solution you try to sell or give me.

(edit for spelling)

 

[Salvador]

I tried it and it's always shutting down on the machine that I'm using the Maxtor drive on because it says that I'm running low on memory. Maybe because I only have 256 mb's of PC133 memory in that machine?

Sal

 

[OulOat]

Originally posted by: lispsux
you know when you are playing one of those new games that needs way too much memory, and you pick a new gun and it is kinda hangs for a tiny bit? The hard disk was accessed for the graphics/sounds to that gun, switching back to another gun and then to the new one you do not see the same 'lag' because the graphics/sounds are now in memory.

You do not really need a program like this since ...well, windows does this all ready.

The best thing you can do to improve hd performance is to have a large cache.

But the larger the cache is the longer it takes to search the cache, so it's a tradeoff.

 

[elkinm]

On a slightly different note. Anybody know of a way or a program that can harmlesly limit the cache usage in Win XP like you can in Win 98. I know that XP has much better chaching but it is still bad. Now with 1 GB of ram I have enough to run nearly anything and not notice this but with only 512 MB my system would always slow to a crawl after some time, and the reason was always dew to windows failing to release the massive amounts of disk cache or simply the time it took to write the cache to disk befeore releasing it, I just know that after recovering my memory with cachemem my mem was restored and my system became normal again and as far a memory usage the only thing that changed was that the cache usage when dows to almost nothing temporarely. I don't experince this with 1 GB but I would still like a fix.

 

[CQuinn]

since this is 'Trialware' does this mean we only have x amount of days before we have to pourchase a full version?

Unknown, but when this was first introduced as a beta, many users (myself included) speculated
that Maxtor was aiming this to be an additional free utility like the MaxBlast software and
acoustic management util.

Second, anyone think Maxtor hd's are unreliable?

Until recently, I bought nothing but Maxtor drives for over ten years. I now own a couple of
Western Digitals as well, but those are run secondary to the Maxtor/Quantum drives in
my systems.

But the larger the cache is the longer it takes to search the cache, so it's a tradeoff.

Caches seraches are measured in nanoseconds, while drive searches start in the
milliseconds range, several times slower.

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: OJ
Trialware that disable itself on June 30th, 2004 ????????????????

I know, I thought he said this was free.

 

[Pudgygiant]

This works, but I don't see much of an improvement. Maybe I'm not doing anything hdd-intensive enough.