RAM usage

[dreamliner77]

How can I figure out what is eating up so much ram on my system? Usually at start up, I use between 110 and 130 mb. Now all of a sudden at start up I'm using 239 mb. I've checked the processes and msconfig and I don't see anything unusual. All I've done since I've noticed this is change a bunch of icons. Could this be the cause?

 

[dreamliner77]

nada


I can clear it down to ~80 mb by running clearmem. Other than that, I can't find any mem leak or anything.

 

[Perris Calderon]

If you are uncertain about the memory requirements of a process that you are running, you can note its working set in System Monitor, shut it down, and observe the corresponding effect on paging activity on your computer. The amount of memory freed by terminating programs is the amount of additional physical RAM needed on the system.

this is from the microsoft knowledge base...use this method one by one to see what's eating your ram.

I prefer coolmon to monitor the affect of the pf

 

[dreamliner77]

I've tried everything to find what is eating my ram. It was fine until yesterday. Nothing that I could shut down had any affect. I've run virus scan, trojan scan, ad-aware, nothing shows up. I have msconfig set to the min. The only thing I've found so far is that for mem, explorer is eating 79,228k. I know it usually eats alot, but I don't remember it being this much, but I could be wrong. I mean, I have 384 megs of ram, but I don't think I should be using 220 meg at startup. It really slows down some of my audio programs. Dammit, looks like it might be time to reinstall. Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[dreamliner77]

btw, I'm still wondering if it has any thing to do with changing about 30 icons. I don't think it should, but the time corealation is interesting.

 

[dreamliner77]

bump

 

[Perris Calderon]

go back, young man...go back

 

[dreamliner77]

Go back as in reinstall??? I did what you suggested before, nothing used nearly the 100meg or so jump I'm seeing. Think my RAM could be going bad?

btw, I'm not that young, nor that old

 

[Perris Calderon]

try a system restore...go back...

hold...my batteries dead, but I want to work on something for ya...I'll try to be right back...hang

 

[Perris Calderon]

ok...I found this in the knowledge base;

If you suspect a memory leak, monitor Memory\Available Bytes and Memory\Committed Bytes to observe memory behavior and monitor Process\Private Bytes, Process\Working Set, and Process\Handle Count for processes you think might be leaking memory. Also monitor Memory\Pool Nonpaged Bytes, Memory\Pool Nonpaged Allocs, and Process(process_name)\Pool Nonpaged Bytes if you suspect that a kernel-mode process is causing the leak...



also, there's a way to get the taskmanager to list the processes in decending order for amount of memory used, But I forgot how to use it...anyway, you can see the memory usage just by hitting the processes tab.

Personally, try the sustem restore first, maybe that'll save alot of effort...unless of course, you're curious about this issue...if so, try to solve the problem

 

[dreamliner77]

damn batteries

Just wanted to thank you in advance for taking the time to help me out with this.

I'm still curious as to if the icon theory holds any water. IE, does windows have to load the icons into mem on startup?

 

[Friend of Bill]

Quote: explorer is eating 79,228k


Explorer should use between 17000k - 21000k

 

[dreamliner77]

hmm, mine is at the 79k at start up
drops if I run clear mem
what's up with that?