Heya,

If you look at the attached screenshot, you see that the processes use about 300 megabytes of ram, yet more close to 1000 is in use if you look at the bottom status bar!

How can this be? What is using my ram?

(actually this is at work, and got me wondering why a pc could be so slow when you'd expect it to just about keep going with 512mb ram..)

I"m puzzled!

I'd say the problem is down to porn

Yet more proof that IE is the f*cking devil.

Seriously, get Firefox or Opera.

Memory usage like that suggests massive content. So like the biggest Flash animation ever, some serious movie streaming or that you've installed a billion pieces of crap like the Yahoo/Google/smiley/random porn toolbar.

Quote from Niels Heusinkveld :

I"m puzzled!

Go to View > Select Columns and turn on Virtual Memory Size, all will become clear

Try to optimize your OS . This is my XP in one of my computers. Be sure it´s 100% functional. And of course, use another browser.

Actually firefox is even worse for memory leak... it's a well know bug in FF2. But, even still it's better than IE
Go with Opera!

Quote from NitroNitrous :

Try to optimize your OS . This is my XP in one of my computers. Be sure it´s 100% functional. And of course, use another browser.

Bah, that's using at least 20Mb too much

Quote from nikimere :

Actually firefox is even worse for memory leak... it's a well know bug in FF2. But, even still it's better than IE
Go with Opera!

Yeah - if I leave Firefox open overnight, I find 1 Gb of memory gone in the morning... a bit aggravating.

Get Firefox is about the most clueless advice you can give someone with RAM problems.

I recently had the same problem where RAM was full but Taskmanager processes didn't add up. In my case MS Virtual PC was the culprit. I guess you just need to close the programs one by one to see which one is using all the RAM.

Quote from J.B. :

I recently had the same problem where RAM was full but Taskmanager processes didn't add up. In my case MS Virtual PC was the culprit. I guess you just need to close the programs one by one to see which one is using all the RAM.

Check post #4 above... the total shows virtual memory i.e. pagefile use, you can turn on that column in the process list

Quote from TechAde :

Check post #4 above... the total shows virtual memory i.e. pagefile use, you can turn on that column in the process list

What does it mean? I thought Virtual memory was pagefile.sys not real RAM?

Quote from J.B. :

What does it mean? I thought Virtual memory was pagefile.sys not real RAM?

It's rather complicated and a little beyond my capabilities to explain before at least my 3rd coffee of the morning!

http://shsc.info/WindowsMemoryManagement

That's about the best description of windows memory management I could find with a quick google, hope it helps.

Horribly inefficient oracle / java type custom software is probably the reason here.. Thanks for that info Ade, didn't know that.. Its eating ram like crazy

XP using only 43MB of RAM? I assuming that must be running no drivers? Just installing the ATI driver bloatware bumps my memory usage by 60MB or so (that's a guess from memory so don't shoot me if I'm wrong). Then throw on firewall and av and I'm happy if I'm at 250MB used by boot.

Quote from Bob Smith :

XP using only 43MB of RAM? I assuming that must be running no drivers? Just installing the ATI driver bloatware bumps my memory usage by 60MB or so (that's a guess from memory so don't shoot me if I'm wrong). Then throw on firewall and av and I'm happy if I'm at 250MB used by boot.

Yeah, that's the XP SP2 + IE6 vhd image from microsoft running with only required services

Quote from TechAde :

It's rather complicated and a little beyond my capabilities to explain before at least my 3rd coffee of the morning!

http://shsc.info/WindowsMemoryManagement

That's about the best description of windows memory management I could find with a quick google, hope it helps.

Thx, that kind of helped.

What I basically got out of the article is that both "VM Size" and "Mem Usage" are pretty inaccurate ways to tell you if you're running out of RAM. But if you are running out of RAM, which you can notice by harddisk thrashing and the "available physical memory" value, then "VM Size" is (sometimes? always?) the better indicator of who the culprit is.

Right?

Quote from nikimere :

Actually firefox is even worse for memory leak... it's a well know bug in FF2. But, even still it's better than IE
Go with Opera!

It isn't a memory leak or a bug.

The way they made Firefox is that every site you visit is kept in your RAM so it loads quickly when you use back buttons. But it doesn't dump the ram when you close tabs, only when you close all instances of Firefox. It would be nice if you could turn off the cache in RAM so it caches on your HDD.

OT:
I don't use back buttons, only new tabs. I've still seen FF use 700 MB. I like FF and use it almost exclusively. It has a great list of features (although only you if go hunting for add-ons yourself, vanilla FF is meh) but speed, responsiveness and hardware efficiency certainly aren't on that list.

For example one thing FF really needs is dual core support. It's so annoying that using the tab I'm on always gets slow and laggy whenever FF is loading other tabs in the background. But somewhere I read an article by a FF dev who thinks that multi-threading sucks and we won't see it in FF any time soon...

With many FF fanboys I get the impression that they don't really care about the software itself, they just think "hey, it must be great and fast stable and all that because open source is so great and Microsoft is so evil".

seems IE using 200+ MB, might just be the website you were on at the time. i know one site i looked at took up 450mb of ram just for one page no wonder it used to make my pc almost crash when i had 512mb of ram!

the caziest thing ive seen lately is explorer (the windows window manager one not ie) using 500mb
caused by some horribly ineffective (although extremely well thought out and highly useable) field simulation cad environment

Quote from Shotglass :

field simulation cad environment

Simulating cows is always the bitch

only until youve figured out that a cow can be easily and accurately approximated by a ruminating sphere

You have to much prosses opened , the normal is 24 -30 prosses , but you have more that 40 , look mi Task manager, chek if are running prograns has useful for you or check for malwares or blasters

I just had a situation where utorrent was using 400 MB of physical RAM but only showing as 40 MB in both "VM Size" and "Mem Usage". So it looks like checking VM Size isn't a solution for detecting all forms of buggy crapware either.