Memory Cost

Money_Grabber13579

posted wrote: »

Been running XP all day, peak commit charge 541MB, current 315MB

My peak commit charge is 1585MB! What does this mean?

posted_2

It means a ram upgrade might help :rotfl:What is the current value? What are the values after a reboot, and with browser closed?

But I would start by looking at what you have running, what you have running at startup, you are using 3 times as much ram as me for some reason, solve that, and you shouldn't need to spend a penny.

Money_Grabber13579

posted wrote: »

It means a ram upgrade might help :rotfl:What is the current value? What are the values after a reboot?

But I would start by looking at what you have running, what you have running at startup, you are using 3 times as much ram as me for some reason, solve that, and you shouldn't need to spend a penny.

Where do I find the current value? I see in a box in the bottom left and it says Total, Limit and Peak. And then in the status bar, it says commit charge 1288/2441M

And how can I be using over 1500 MB when I only have 1GB of RAM? It is using hard drive space instead as memory?

posted_2

Yes it uses hard disk space instead (page/swap file), which is the main cause of slowness when ram is short.

See the performance tab in task manager.

Money_Grabber13579

So what value is the current value then? And what's the difference between the commit charge and physical memory stats?

posted_2

Physical memory is how much ram you have. 1GB
Virtual memory is physical memory + max size of your pagefile.
Current (commit charge/PF usage in TM) is what you are using now, so the aim is to get that below 1GB

Money_Grabber13579

posted wrote: »

Physical memory is how much ram you have. 1GB
Virtual memory is physical memory + max size of your pagefile.
Current (commit charge/PF usage in TM) is what you are using now, so the aim is to get that below 1GB

But it says available physical memory is 200MB or thereabouts. How can this be when I'm way over 1GB in commit charge?

posted_2

Probably because some of it is swapped out the the pagefile. I suggest you reboot, and start from there, to get clean sheet figures.

If your commit charge is over 1GB before you open a browser after a reboot, you need to look at what you have running at startup.

The other thing you could try is setting the minimum swap file size to 16MB, and set the max size to 3000 (assuming you have 3GB+ disk space free), then you can easily see if the pagefile (c:\pagefile.sys) starts growing over 16MB, you are swapping.

Money_Grabber13579

Ok I'll do a reboot now. And I'm looking for page file stats, in the one beside the graph?

Money_Grabber13579

Ok, rebooted and it stabilised at 513MB, opened Chrome and it's now at 778MB. Would it just be best to get extra memory for all it costs? Would it actually help? And would it stop the freezing of tabs? Everything that starts up, I use mostly.

There's all the Toshiba stuff, Norton, iPlayer, Chrome, iTunes, Adobe Reader, Live Mail etc.