What is eating my memory ?!!

[KilroY]

I have 196 megs of ram in my system. Using the system monitor tool, I've noticed that on a cold boot, I have about 95 Megs of physical memory in use?! The disk cache is at 32, so that leaves 60 megs of memory unnacounted for at startup!

The only background program I have running is a virus checker, and when I quit that I only gain about 1 or 2 megs back. System monitor shows swapfile usage at 0, so this is real, honest to goodness sdram being used up.

Now, you can,t tell me that windows 98 is taking up these 60 megs, how would people run it with 64 (let alone 32) megs? What is going on here?

BTW, this is after I turned off all soundfont memory allocated by my sb-live

SYSTEM:
asus p2b
celeron 400a
196 megs ram
matrox g400
sblive value
d-link ethernet card
maxtor 11 & 4 gig drives
pioneer 6x DVD
hp-8200 cd burner

[Guru]

If you have SiSoft Sandra ( http://fosi.da.ru )installed you can check it by using the processes module! Have you tried cacheman it can save you a lot of memory? You can grab it at http://www.outertech.com

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PIII450@558, ABIT BX6-2, 256RAM, G400MAX, SBLIVE


[This message has been edited by Guru (edited 11 December 1999).]

[Mark F]

Windows 98 (and I beleive Win95 is where it started), dynamicaly alocated memory to your disk cache. The more you have available (total - in use) the greated you disk cache size. So it will show most of your memory in use at any time.
When you open an app that needs more memory than is free at the time, Windows will shrink the cache to provide it.

Mark F.

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OH NO, my retractable cup holder swallowed a CD

[KilroY]

Mark, I have my disk cache fixed at 32 megs by using the min & max vcache setting in the system.ini. I verified this with system monitor, it shows my disk cache memory at 32 megs, and my total memory allocated at 97 megs. So I'm pretty sure that its not the disk cache that is taking that extra 60 megs or so.

Guru, I'm going to try Sandra and see what I can find out.

[KilroY]

Ok, just ran Sandra. I killed as many tasks as I could before I ran it. The program shows:

192 total physical memory
115 free physical memory

so that means 77 megs in use.
77 minus 32 for disk cache = 45 megs.

The strange thing is, the memory taken up by all processes is reported as 26 megs. That means with everything accounted for (Including windows) there is still about 20 phantom megs? Not as bad as I first thought, but if its not being used by any processes, what else could be using it?

[Guru]

Try FreeMem Professional Version 4.2 you can find it at http://www.meikel.com


s/n: 392971868074
(ups how did that get there?)


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PIII450@558, ABIT BX6-2, 256RAM, G400MAX, SBLIVE

[Dyre]

Watch for ICQ!

Its loads all history into memory when you start up! And the history files are very uncommpressed and un-optimized

Just check that, it was killing me!
5 megs free at start up!

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PIII 450 @ 464
generic BX6 motherboard
G400 MAX : )
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 33
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 66
Creative 36x CD-ROM
HP 2x2x6x CD-RW
64 megs PC100 RAM
Intel 10/100
Soundblaster 32 AWE
DiamondMAX 56k
Logitech Wireless Desktop (best $50 ive ever spent)
1 92mm Sunon Fan
4 80mm Sunon Fan's
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