Task Manager Vs Performance Monitor

[Drezha]

Perhaps I’m measuring the wrong thing in Performance Monitor, but what’s the difference between the two?

As per the image, I’m trying to measure the RAM usage on my desktop (debating what the RAM usage is like to decide whether to order a 16GB (from 8GB) upgrade kit for my laptop).

The two images don’t show the same information. Task manager is showing less utilisation than performance monitor. Performance monitor is measuring the % committed bytes in use. Which one is correct?

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Ed P]

I honestly do not know. I would make a guess that Performance Monitor is showing a cached value as well. Windows is a bit of a law unto itself, and will always grabs the maximum ram it can., As an aside ram usage has grown and 16Gb is pretty much the new minimum if you plan on running games.

[Dave Rice]

Ah, ye olde WTF is Windows telling me? I look upon it all as a clue as to what’s happening rather than any cast iron reality.

[Drezha]

I ended up going for the 16GB of RAM anyhow – I’m openign the laptop up to put in a 1TB SSD, so I might as well do the RAM whilst I’m in there!

I wasn’t aware that Windows cached RAM as well – at least macOS makes that clear!

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[JayCeeDee]

Drezha wrote:

I’m openign the laptop up to put in a 1TB SSD, so I might as well do the RAM whilst I’m in there!

I’ve just done similar to an Ideapad 320. It had a 2TB spinner as the main drive which I replaced with a 120GB SSD, when it came to adding the spinner as a second drive, there was a blanking plate for the old dvd rom slot and it was all moulded to just mount the drive straight in. Bonus!! :yahoo: All I had to do was get one of THESE to connect the drive to the DVD rom connectors. A fairly straightforward job made easier by a thoughtful manufacturer. :good: That SSD has made a huge performance increase over the old spinner.
It already has an extra 4GB ram installed, ( which shows for some reason as a total of 7GB ) so that should meet all my { basic } needs ).
Now I’ve got that done it’s time to repeat the process on the wife’s laptop!!

[Ed P]

It does and sometimes bad-actors such as Chrome have been known to  eat it by the Gb. Kludgy ways of autocleaning do however  exist. see link

[Drezha]

JayCeeDee wrote:

That SSD has made a huge performance increase over the old spinner. It already has an extra 4GB ram installed, ( which shows for some reason as a total of 7GB ) so that should meet all my { basic } needs ).

The onboard graphics might be using some of the RAM? It’s the case with the HP Pavilion I bought, even though the discrete graphics card is provided with it’s own RAM.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[JayCeeDee]

Drezha wrote:

The onboard graphics might be using some of the RAM?

True – it could well be that. :good:

I’m playing around with a lot of his old stuff at the moment. He’s had a couple of computers stored here since he moved into a rented flat. He just wants me to nuke the hard drives – he was doing a lot of corporate work and thinks their might be some residual logins, or other work related stuff – that’s no problem, but what to do with the machines is another matter.
The first one I’ve opened up is in a fancy NZXT full tower, with an i7 ( don’t know which yet ) Asus Rampage II Extreme ROG, ( which looks like it was the dog’s proverbials about 8 -10 years ago ) 12GB ( 6 x 2GB ) HP ram, very fancy CPU cooler, Sapphire Vapor-X HD 4890 2GB GDDR5, OCZ 700w Modular plus a few other plug in cards I haven’t worked out yet. I might just leave it running in the garage to keep it warm over winter!!

I’m going to pull out the HDD’s and drop in an SSD, load Windows10 and see if it works and then decide whether or not to keep it as a functional rig for doing things in isolation from my everyday rig. That way, I can keep an image of the SSD and just reload it if anything goes TU!! It’ll be something to play around with in the coming weeks.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

something broken.

if I type to the end of a line

everything jumps left

and the submit button

disappears.

 

[Ed P]

Wheels, until Lee fixes it, other people have found that switching to text mode (button top right) enables you to submit but you lose some options, so start in Visual then switch to text.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Ok,here goes. A retype of the post I lost.

Windows cache’s like crazy 😁

Superfetch logs the files that your applications open and tries to load them into memory in advance. Windows 10 adds Ready Boot ( not ready boost) which monitors the apps you open when you first login and tries to load them into memory before you even launch the app ! In addition, when an app releases memory pages they are placed on a standby list instead of being freed so they are in memory should they be needed again soon. There is seldom much free, unused, memory on a running system.

An explanation of some of the terms in the task managers memory tab is below.

In use (compressed):

Shows the amount of physical memory actually in use, the figure in brackets shows the amount of that that has been compressed (New in W10 or maybe 8)

Committed:

Before a program can use memory it must first commit it but Windows dose not assign any physical memory until the program actually uses it, that is why the commit charge will be higher than the in use figure. The second number is the system commit limit which is the size of the installed ram plus the size of any page files.

The free section of the composition graph is a combination of the free,standby and zeroed page lists and if you hover the mouse pointer over it it will give you a breakdown.

One more thing is that Windows will only assign pages that have been zeroed to a new app to prevent data leakage so it has a background task called the zero page thread that zero’s free pages, you will seldom see much memory on the free list because of this.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

By the way, clearing out the standby list is an excellent way of slowing a system down, much better to let the memory manager handle things 😁

When a process requires physical memory the memory manager will first try to get it from the zeroed page list, if there is not enough there then it will zero pages on free list and use those, if thats still not enough then it will go to the standby list. The standby list is divided into 8 lists with priorities 0-7 and Windows will zero pages on the lowest priority list first.

In the unlikely event that that’s still not enough or if Windows feels that it is low on free/zeroed memory then it will start to trim the working set (in use memory) of running processes, starting with the longest idle/lowest priority first.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I was expecting denials, or at least questions 😁

[Ed P]

Not from me.

The only area that was questionable is a system slowdown from cache clearing, but most experts now say leave cache things to Windows.

You did not mention it, but Windows Runtime Broker used to be the cause of program hangs when it gave unnecessary priority to Windows Experience things. That can now generally be fixed by setting appropriate  program priorities.

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