Any ways to make vista use less memory?

Matt-Page · 15 Feb 2007 at 13:57

Anyone got an indepth article about how vista utilises RAM? Sounds very interesting and a what would seem, logical step for future O/S's. Do any of the Apple/Linux OS's do this?

Waste not want not!

bledd · 15 Feb 2007 at 14:04

you could remove some vista components with vlite, that'll make it a 'lighter' os

http://vlite.net/

therubble · 15 Feb 2007 at 14:05

Vista Loves RAM, I got 3 GIG Plus 2 Gig on a ready boost pen, it swallows all the ram up, but my god is it quick, it's very cool you can watch it releasing memory back to the system.

tomanders91 · 15 Feb 2007 at 14:06

does readyboost help a lot with gaming?

On gamespot, on the vista gaming tests, without it (and a GTX) company of heroes got 106fps, with it, it got 116fps.

Might be worth a buy.

Minstadave · 15 Feb 2007 at 14:24

tomanders91 said:
does readyboost help a lot with gaming?

Not really, it only gives a small performance boost, and you have 2GBs of RAM anyway.

I'm surprised at the gamespot results, will check them out

Matteysan · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:10

Teletraan-82 said:
But its only appearing to use so much RAM because of superfetch, not because of a 'high impact problem'

I have 1GB and my usage is constantly 60-70%, yet its quicker than XP.

I wish i could believe that, i had Ultimate 64 installed for 4 days on e6300, 1gb pc4000 ram, 6800GT & it was a hell of a lot slower than XP doing anything at all. Even browsing in IE7 was a lot slower than using it in XP Pro.

Sorry for the bashing but i do love vista, but at the moment it is no where near as quick as XP at anything! Well maybe the search function which is hopeless anyways if you keep ya comp tidy.

therubble · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:14

If u have a nvidia card, go into the driver control panel and turn off the automatic upscaling, caused me no end of issues, once I did that my machine was as quick as, or quicker than XP in games, I mostly play HL2DM, CSS and WOW.

I have a 6800GS and all my issues just went away.

Rebelius · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:25

Matt-Page said:
Anyone got an indepth article about how vista utilises RAM? Sounds very interesting and a what would seem, logical step for future O/S's. Do any of the Apple/Linux OS's do this?

Waste not want not!

Linux has done it for years - i've never used a mac

squiffy · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:32

Vista email no longer supports HTTP, pretty stupid as I have several hotmail accounts, and being that hotmail is MS :rolleyes:

anyway to get Vista mail to support hotmail email accounts? :confused:

Rebelius · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:39

I don't use vista mail for one reason alone: it won't minimize to system tray. I don't understand why not, it can't be hard to implement - Outlook does it.

So I use Thunderbird. And that can do hotmail.

don't know about getting hotmail in windows mail though

TrUz · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:40

Programs that need the RAM will get RAM, it will just clear cached items out of RAM. Vista's RAM usage is disigned this way and it is better.

TrUz

Hxc · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:42

squiffy said:
Vista email no longer supports HTTP, pretty stupid as I have several hotmail accounts, and being that hotmail is MS anyway to get Vista mail to support hotmail email accounts?

Isn't that Office 2007, and not vista? Or Outlook express, but why on earth you would ever be using that to manage mail is anyones guess.

dirtydog · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:44

NathanE said:
No it isn't. It's complete and utter BS and you are fool to even believe it.

Vista uses a lot of memory because otherwise the memory would be sitting there not doing or helping anything. It's called Superfetch. The idea is to keep RAM usage as high as possible so that almost everything you do on your computer is pre-cached. Memory in use by the Superfetch component of the kernel can be reclaimed instantly so it doesn't affect performance when you load a game or whatever up. The overall result is higher performance.

Would you accept that Superfetch is flawed in some ways though?

For example, which I read on another forum recently:-

SuperFetch has plenty of problems though, real ones that I've identified by monitoring tools. (this is on RTM, of course)

For me SuperFetch (yes, it was that one; I checked the SvcHost's service list and disabled one by one) totally ruined my performance as I used eMule, and I can imagine other apps being affected too. Vista simply thought "OK, so it's evening and he probably wish to run eMule" and started prefetching -- get this -- an unfinished download of several hundred MB's. It just kept reading, reading, making the drive go wild, so I checked what was going on in the Sysinternals File Monitor and I had a lot of read for one and the same file over and over. As soon as I stoppsed the SuperFetch service, my hard drive went completely silent and my computer became far more responsive as it tried to load applications I started and ran.

I wish SuperFetch would be much more configurable and not a black box sitting doing "something it feels would be right" to improve performance. I don't really want to generalize, but it's such typical Microsoft behavior to hide important customization like this from the user in order to dumb it down enough for the masses. File and directory exclusion filters would work wonders with it. Or at least only prefetch executables and DLL's! There's absolutely no reason I'd like to prefetch an unfinished download for faster access because I'm of course not going to run it.

Keep in mind that SuperFetch is based a whole lot on guesswork and statistics.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=519457

Rebelius · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:45

Hxc said:
Isn't that Office 2007, and not vista? Or Outlook express, but why on earth you would ever be using that to manage mail is anyones guess.

In vista Outlook Express has been scrapped and replaced by "Windows Mail" which is actually pretty good.

dirtydog · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:45

Rebelius said:
I don't use vista mail for one reason alone: it won't minimize to system tray. I don't understand why not, it can't be hard to implement - Outlook does it.

Outlook Express doesn't though? Which is what Windows Mail basically is.

Rebelius · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:47

dirtydog said:
Outlook Express doesn't though? Which is what Windows Mail basically is.

it's the reason I didn't use outlook express as well.

NathanE · 15 Feb 2007 at 15:58

dirtydog said:
Would you accept that Superfetch is flawed in some ways though?

For example, which I read on another forum recently:-

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=519457

Yes Superfetch will make mistakes. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of Registry keys to tweak its behaviour though. Exclusion zones are trivial and I'm almost certain Microsoft would have implemented them.

Superfetch can't reduce performance though. It can only ever make things better. So what if this guys hard drive was busy for few minutes reading some large files? It doesn't matter on Vista because all I/O is prioritised and Superfetch uses a super-low I/O priority. So if he started doing some other I/O task (whether extracting a bunch of ZIP files or just loading a .txt file) that would have got priority.

neowin poster said:
"Or at least only prefetch executables and DLL's!"

This makes me think he doesn't quite understand the purpose of Superfetch. It's not just about pre-caching executable code. It's about pre-caching anything and everything... from Word documents, to media files, even your porn. Everything.

dirtydog · 15 Feb 2007 at 16:01

NathanE said:
Yes Superfetch will make mistakes. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of Registry keys to tweak its behaviour though. Exclusion zones are trivial and I'm almost certain Microsoft would have implemented them.

Superfetch can't reduce performance though. It can only ever make things better. So what if this guys hard drive was busy for few minutes reading some large files? It doesn't matter on Vista because all I/O is prioritised and Superfetch uses a super-low I/O priority. So basically, if he started doing some other I/O intensive task that would have got priority

It can't reduce performance? It did for him, until he turned it off.

This makes me think he doesn't quite understand the purpose of Superfetch. It's not just about pre-caching executable code. It's about pre-caching anything and everything... from Word documents, to media files, even your porn. Everything.

He understands it very well. That's his point; he thinks it would work better if it did only include executables and DLLs.

What performance gain is there from pre-fetching a large several hundred MB unfinished download file, which made his computer unresponsive while it was happening and put his HDD under unnecessary strain? I'm failing to see the benefit and obviously so did he.

NathanE · 15 Feb 2007 at 16:06

dirtydog said:
It can't reduce performance? It did for him, until he turned it off.

He understands it very well. That's his point; he thinks it would work better if it did only include executables and DLLs.

What performance gain is there from pre-fetching a large several hundred MB unfinished download file, which made his computer unresponsive while it was happening and put his HDD under unnecessary strain? I'm failing to see the benefit and obviously so did he.

No he didn't like the sound of his hard drive chugging away and incorrectly believed that the old rule of "hmm my hard drive is very busy so it must be slowing everything else down" still applied with Vista. As explained that is no longer the case. It is going to take a while until people even start letting go of that rule.

I agree in this case Superfetch was dumb as a rock in prefetching an unfinished download. There are API's available that allow software to exclude certain files from Superfetch (and from being indexed by Windows Search). So a BitTorrent client for example can exclude all the files it is downloading. Once they are done it can remove the block and allow them to be interrogated by the OS. BitTorrent is an interesting example because the files will be read and written to very frequently which in Superfetch's eyes makes them a prime candidate to be added to the system cache. As opposed to a regular HTTP download which doesn't involve any read operations at all, so it probably wouldn't get onto Superfetch's list. So again, this issue could be categorised as boiling down to software not fully supporting Vista yet.

If his PC was unresponsive then maybe he should enable DMA (i.e. get some decent chipset drivers) so that the CPU is not involved in each and every I/O request.

HDD strain shouldn't be an issue on modern PC's. SATA's NCQ smooths out the head movements.

dirtydog · 15 Feb 2007 at 16:19

It still might have been an idea to include the option for power users to configure Superfetch to only include certain types of files, or to exclude certain apps or filetypes.