memory usage of OS options?

[Stuh505]

just by adding up all the memory used by svchost and other known system properties I can see that XP uses a minimum of 110 MB just to be running

For comparison...how much is used at startup by Linux RedHat or OSX?

[jbog91]

You might want to try asking some of the people over in the Linux forum. I am pretty sure it uses less but I don't know. I have never used linux.

[jbog91]

Hey.

I just saw your thread in the linux forum. One way you can get the most out of your system is to use an alternative shell. It's still windows but some alternative shells use less resources as explorer.exe, window's shell.

http://www.astonshell.com

There's one good one. And another advantage is that they look good.

[Stuh505]

I tried out the Astonshell..it's pretty cool, I'm running it on my laptop (512 mb) and it works pretty well, uses the same amount of memory.

I cant run it on my PC (512 mb also) because it is too slow. However, I did discover thaty restarting in Diagnostic mode makes all my problems go away...suddenly I have 400 MB free! I guess I will just be running it in diagnostic mode from now on...

[Stuh505]

well unfortunately I cant really get away with always running in diagnostic mode because it doesn't load certain drivers which I need, like sound...but here's a question--is there a way I coudl set it up to run this way, yet pick specific drivers etc that I want to be loaded as normal?

[Phoenix86]

Also consider total memory usage isn't a good factor for determing effeciency. Most of the unused data (read data that loads but isn't activly being used) will get spun off to the page file, freeing up room for what your activly doing.

As long as you have enough RAM for that tasks at hand, the worse case is you have some increased I/O while the data is going from HDD<-->RAM compared to a "lower overhead setup" (be that a trimmed down windows load or linux) However, once that's done the apps should perform the same. Consequently this is why mucking around with services to save memory isn't that effective unless your really memory bound. Conversly, this is why adding memory to a system that's low on memory helps a shit ton (yes, that's a technical quantification).

Anyways, just something to consider, Linux and Windows will both basically behave the same in this aspect.

http://www.mentallyretired.com/h3/index.cfm/u_45754 (http://www.mentallyretired.com/h3/index.cfm?a=doMyStats&u_id=45754)

[[MS]]

Also consider total memory usage isn't a good factor for determing effeciency. Most of the unused data (read data that loads but isn't activly being used) will get spun off to the page file, freeing up room for what your activly doing.



Ya, the 100-120 memory usage is simply the measure of "things that needed to be loaded in the course of booting the OS". most of those things get pushed into the page file. The actual memory needs of the normal install of Windows XP is 40-50 MB.

How can I say this?

Take a machine with 128MB and start measuring the various page fault counters (this can be done through perfmon.exe or in a custom app), then load an application on the system that slowly begins using more and more memory. Once the memory available to Windows dips below the 50 mb mark, the disk I/O for system processes goes up quite a bit. If you look at the resulting data, you can tell that active code pages are being discarded and that active data pages start getting offloaded to disk. When Window's available memory drops to the 30-40MB range, its very noticable.

The same behavior should be seen in any *nix.

[Phoenix86]

I have been playing around with perform for a couple weeks watching memory counters. You can learn quite a bit from it. :)

One thing I don't understand is why the PF always has small read usage almost consistantly. On the machine I'm testing on I have 1GB RAM and about 600MB Commit Charge, yet the PF loads with 100-150MB worth of data (pretty much at boot and never adds to it), and it reads that data regulary. Is that system cache?

The actual memory needs of the normal install of Windows XP is 40-50 MB....And that's just a hair over what all the uber tweaked loads run, IIRC they are about 60-70MB. Anyways, the more I'm reading about it, the less I think this stuff is worth messing around with (PF, tweaking services, <memory tweak>) on most of the people's systems around here because of higher RAM amts. vs. required memory. There is a point when enough is enough...

http://www.mentallyretired.com/h3/index.cfm/u_45754 (http://www.mentallyretired.com/h3/index.cfm?a=doMyStats&u_id=45754)