XP Runners - whats your experience with memory management?

[LvR]

Running this XP machine (fresh install) in the office 24/7 - Starting machine and opening taskmanager/performance shows about 150M of 1G memory gets gobbled up once all apps/tasks are running - including ADSL, NIS2003, ECDC5, UPS monitor, Adwatch6 and Outlook Express6 and IE6.

Now for about a day, I find I can use the machine normally and memory allocation goes up and down as applications (MSP6.5, PHP7, Off XP etc etc) are opened/closed and never vary much from that figure.

After about 2 days though, I find the amount of physically assigned memory ("total commit charge") slowly creeping up-wards - and after about 2 weeks I am sitting with a machine running on about 450M when idle (as in identical to just after having started the machine).

I cannot see any slowdown in the response of the machine as time goes by, and cannot attribute the amount of memory in use to any particular app running - it looks like between 2 and about 25M gets grabbed extra by just about all the processes running (36 currently) over the period of 2 weeks.

Are any of you guys seeing the same sort of trend, and should it simply be considered to be normal - ie - possibly XP keeping a fast little cache going based on the user's environment and habits? - I dont remember seeing the same with W2K running on the same hardware.

[Gurm]

Well there IS an adaptive application startup cache, but you shouldn't have THAT kind of memory creep. Over the course of a couple weeks I see a BIT more memory in use - probably up to 250MB total instead of my initial 175... but on the other hand I do have a tendency to leave really sloppy applications open all the time, and I haven't tested strictly to see if XP's occasional memory-reclamation will clear that up or not.

You could try running TweakNow's RAM booster or whatever it is that frees up unused RAM to see if it's a leak or actual creep.

Gpar_

[LvR]

I have tried using tools like that (Taskinfo) to free up memory (and normally end up with a figure very close to what was initially in use just after the machine was first started) - but always end up with a bad taste in my mouth immediately after having just run it - sure they do clear an outhouse full of memory (according to their own reports anyway) but I somehow have a feeling that the machine is extremely sluggish immediately following such an operation. I suspect these tools are not always freeing up the right bits - given a short period of normal use, the machine is once again responding as "normal" with not much more memory (15M?) having been gobbled up after having just completed the "optimization"

[Nowhere]

Memory management? Oh yeah, that must be that thing keeping me alive
On 128 mb sdr...(but I think I'll have more soon, not Soon™)
Anyway I prefer this over win9x.

LvR, don't expect those applications that free memory to do much - basically they just allocate large amounts of physical memory (causing system to throw other things to swap) and then they release it. So theroetically you have large amounts of free ram afterwards, but you're more than lucky if after doing this some data or program you're working with didn't end up in swap, guess what that will do to performance

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Nowhere

LvR, don't expect those applications that free memory to do much - basically they just allocate large amounts of physical memory (causing system to throw other things to swap) and then they release it. So theroetically you have large amounts of free ram afterwards, but you're more than lucky if after doing this some data or program you're working with didn't end up in swap, guess what that will do to performance

I used to use them on 98SE. If I ran these programs right before starting a round of CounterStrike or something, it really helped. These games would soak up memory, and if they made other programs flush their cache to the HD <I>during</I> the game, it was very laggy for me. These memory managers are good because they get all that swapping done before the game.

[Nowhere]

Agreed, but on XP it's not such a problem anymore...(after all this is about XP)
And you don't have any guarantee that this won't throw to swap something that will for sure be needed in just a moment.