Upgrading to 24GB of RAM....

[Makaveli]

Wow!

Wow is right????

I'm on 12GB's of ram and after boot it shows 2GB's of memory used.

I can have multiple Tabs open in chrome then maybe approach 3GB.

I only really use more when i'm working on VM's.

Something is up!

I can confirm that the x58 chipset will work with 48GB of RAM installed. I upgraded a Matlab workstation here at work recently for a doctoral level physical chemist friend of mine. According to Intel's specs 8GB is the realistic max because of pricing and dual rank compatibility.

Agreed someone already posted a screenshot a few months back of an X58 system with 48GB's of ram.

 

[DJFuji]

You guys also aren't running 51 systray processes in addition to the active apps open.

 

[Piroko]

My win7 setup uses about 4-5 gigs of RAM on boot (with basic apps I always have open -- outlook, skype x 2, evernote, etc. -- does not include browser).

My Vista setup uses about 1.8 Gigs of Ram after running 45 hours with Skype, Steam and plenty of preloaded programs. But it also went down considerably when I ditched AVG for Security Essentials, so...

But when I open chrome (granted, with a lot of tabs open), memory usage shoots up to 11-12GB. I've googled around for why chrome uses up so much ram, but everyone seems to say the same thing -- because it's programmed to be a mem hog and thats why the performance is so good.

Opera has been running for 45 hours straight, using a bit over 1h of cpu cycles with consistently over 20 tabs open and an email database of about 2.5 Gigs and it just barely scratches 700 MB here, with more than 5 Gigs of free ram.

Thoughts?

Don't spend money just so your system shows free ram. Look at your windows installation, you're already losing 2-3 Gigs there for no apparent reason. Perhaps your virus scanner or firewall is eating ram.
And at least do a clean reinstall of Chrome, ditch some outdated plugins while you're at it. 8 Gigs for your browser is insane, no matter how you look at it.

 

[Makaveli]

You guys also aren't running 51 systray processes in addition to the active apps open.

I have about 80 processes running on boot up.

 

[DJFuji]

Processes in task mgr or tray icons? Because if we're talking about raw processes, that's a different story. I'm pushing 200 on those.

 

[_Rick_]

I would just upgrade to 48 GB and be done with it.
More RAM really always helps more, and the X58 boards and i7 CPUs should normally support it, especially the 900 series.

RAM is so cheap right now, that it's almost a waste of the shipping cost, to only get 24 GB.

I'm running 32 myself, and while I'm idling around 5-7 GB, I only ever have to wait, when files are being loaded over the network. At work, I am RAM starved, and switching tabs becomes a chore, because stuff gets paged onto disk. At home, I don't have to close apps, except to update them.
I'm not even doing really bad data manipulation, but ever since Opera has gone 64 bit and introduced tab grouping, bad things have been happening
Not having to close games, when starting another is quite helpful. Anyone who ever had to start Shogun 2 will be able to vouch for this. It takes ages. Tabbing back into it, is about a hundred times faster.
If you already full up 12 GB, 24 GB doesn't sound like much, as you'll run out of free space for windows to use as cache, so 48 is probably the way to go.

 

[Piroko]

Not wanna sound mean, but 200 tasks does sound like you have spyware and adware on your system. Especially if these 200 don't include Chromes... "Feature" of starting one task for every page.

 

[davidthemaster3]

Not wanna sound mean, but 200 tasks does sound like you have spyware and adware on your system. Especially if these 200 don't include Chromes... "Feature" of starting one task for every page.

Chrome usually opens a process per tab ... if he has 200 Chrome tabs open he will have at least 200 processes ...

 

[Piroko]

That's why I mentioned it separately. Even so, I'd need to really push my system with open programs to see 100 simultaneous Tasks (typically below 70, fresh start ~60) and then would still have to run Chrome with 99 tabs open to hit 200. That's bordering a layer 8 problem (no offence intended) and will not be solved for long by doubling the ram to 24 Gigs.
It's more likely that either his system or his Chrome install has problems to see such a high usage that often to notice it. Or as a last option, that his usage profile would be better served by a different browser. All these options could eliminate his problem instead of just raising the time until it returns.

 

[Makaveli]

Processes in task mgr or tray icons? Because if we're talking about raw processes, that's a different story. I'm pushing 200 on those.

lol dude i'm not some noob when I say I have 80 processes I mean 80 processes not tray icons.

Is this the ios forum? :biggrin:

 

[NP Complete]

24 GBs sounds a bit extreme to me, but then again I probably have different usage patterns than the OP.

Might I suggest the OP run some perf counters to see if RAM is really bottlenecking his system? As other's have indicated, some RAM may be caching data which will be evicted if another program needs the memory. A handy article on how to measure performance from MS: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.08.pulse.aspx

Free space is definitely one metric to consider, but unless there's a lot of paging going on you may not need to install more RAM.

 

[DJFuji]

lol dude i'm not some noob when I say I have 80 processes I mean 80 processes not tray icons.

Is this the ios forum? :biggrin:

lol sorry, i just wanted to clarify because you replied to my post about tray icons with a process count. Just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.

RE: 200 processes, that's with a light chrome load running. It's not that high without chrome, but it's still not anywhere close to 80ish. I'm at like 130 i think on windows LOAD.

It's not spyware. I know my system REALLY well and can basically tell you what every single one of the running processes do.

I think it's just more of a matter of the fact that I'm a power-power user and I like to run a LOT of things at the same time on a fairly powerful machine.

I'm not running bloatware, but neither am i running my machine lean. Windows startup loads about 2 dozen apps, including outlook 2010, word, evernote, 2 instances of skype, and a huge suite of tray-icon type apps that I use (hence the 50+ tray icons): AV (kaspersky), firewall (comodo), hardware utilities, hard drive monitors, clipboard trays, backup apps, trillian, 4 different file server apps, logmein, VM software, etc.

Keep in mind a lot of those processes consume 50-200 megs EACH (e.g., outlook is currently using almost 300 megs by itself).

That's how I'm running 5-6gigs of ram usage before I even load chrome.

24gigs, or even 48 gigs of RAM doesn't seem excessive to me. Load up 100 tabs in chrome, photoshop, premiere, a virtual machine, and then throw in firefox and my standard work load of apps and even 24 or 48gb won't be that big.

Keep in mind I also have 17TB of hard drive storage, triple 27" WQXGA LCDs on desk mounts, and a motorized geekdesk (the standing desk that lowers/raises using motors), so i suppose "excessive" is somewhat relative.

@ NP Complete: Thanks for linking the article, i've wondered that myself, actually (if chrome would just free up more ram as it was needed), but it "feels" like the system lags a lot more when I'm running at max load. I'll check it out.

 

[Piroko]

If it were my system I would put everything to a simple test: Have I used it at least once today? If no, throw out of autostart. A lean system and a power-power user are not exclusives and will save you money.
But if you've settled for spending the money anyways, then do upgrade. It will help at least a bit, no doubt.

Btw I also do this test: Have I opened a program/file at least once in the last 12 months? If no, delete

 

[Makaveli]

lol sorry, i just wanted to clarify because you replied to my post about tray icons with a process count. Just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.

RE: 200 processes, that's with a light chrome load running. It's not that high without chrome, but it's still not anywhere close to 80ish. I'm at like 130 i think on windows LOAD.

It's not spyware. I know my system REALLY well and can basically tell you what every single one of the running processes do.

I think it's just more of a matter of the fact that I'm a power-power user and I like to run a LOT of things at the same time on a fairly powerful machine.

I'm not running bloatware, but neither am i running my machine lean. Windows startup loads about 2 dozen apps, including outlook 2010, word, evernote, 2 instances of skype, and a huge suite of tray-icon type apps that I use (hence the 50+ tray icons): AV (kaspersky), firewall (comodo), hardware utilities, hard drive monitors, clipboard trays, backup apps, trillian, 4 different file server apps, logmein, VM software, etc.

Keep in mind a lot of those processes consume 50-200 megs EACH (e.g., outlook is currently using almost 300 megs by itself).

That's how I'm running 5-6gigs of ram usage before I even load chrome.

24gigs, or even 48 gigs of RAM doesn't seem excessive to me. Load up 100 tabs in chrome, photoshop, premiere, a virtual machine, and then throw in firefox and my standard work load of apps and even 24 or 48gb won't be that big.

Keep in mind I also have 17TB of hard drive storage, triple 27" WQXGA LCDs on desk mounts, and a motorized geekdesk (the standing desk that lowers/raises using motors), so i suppose "excessive" is somewhat relative.

@ NP Complete: Thanks for linking the article, i've wondered that myself, actually (if chrome would just free up more ram as it was needed), but it "feels" like the system lags a lot more when I'm running at max load. I'll check it out.

This is a 24/7 uptime machine? do you close applications or are they just left running?

Granted you are a power user if you have as setup like that.

 

[FalseChristian]

I have 8GB of RAM and the longer I leave the computer on the less RAM is available. Right now there's only 2GB available. Should I upgrade to 16GB as Windows 7 Home Premium only supports up to 16GB?

 

[BFG10K]

I have 8GB of RAM and the longer I leave the computer on the less RAM is available. Right now there's only 2GB available. Should I upgrade to 16GB as Windows 7 Home Premium only supports up to 16GB?

It's probably being used as a disk cache, which is normal. The RAM is still available if something needs it.

You can check the "standby" value in resource monitor to see the current size of the disk cache.

 

[Ben90]

Not really sure why this thread got sidetracked so much. Just get 6x4GB and be done with it. The RAM isn't going to run any slower with all the channels populated.

It is true that the memory controller does get stressed slightly harder, but that only matters for extreme overclocks. My memory craps out well before my uncore does with all 6 slots populated.