Reducing Runtime Memory in Windows 8

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The Windows 8 development team updated its blog today to explain how the company has optimized the way Windows 8 uses memory.

As Windows executes applications and performs its own system housekeeping, program files and data are loaded off the disk into main memory. During Windows 7 and Windows 8 development to date, we’ve analyzed the pieces (pages) of memory during normal execution and how often they were referenced. The idea here is that if you’re going to pay the price for allocating a piece of memory, you’d better be using it (referencing it) often. If you’re not referencing that memory often but need it, consolidate it with something else.
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The Windows 8 development team updated its blog today
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Today?? TODAY?? Today is Oct 10th.. the blog post was written on the 7th!! Steve is either living in the past or is 3 days ahead of all of us.. can't tell which :D.. but Steve, if you are 3 days ahead of the rest of us, please clue us in on Kyle's Bulldozer's benchmarks!! :p
 
Fuck reducing runtime memory. Get rid of the god damn winsxs directory. It's still a fucking hard drive hog.
 
toy4x4 said:
Fuck reducing runtime memory. Get rid of the god damn winsxs directory. It's still a fucking hard drive hog.
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First of all, the directory is made of hard drive links and thus doesn't take up nearly as much space as you think it does. Second, would you rather go back to DLL Hell?
 
IMO, they shouldn't be using "less". They should be using as much as needed based on how much system RAM you have. With the memory amounts going up and prices goes down, why have a bunch of useless ram sitting in there if it's not going to be used. That is the point, isn't it?
 
Term-X said:
IMO, they shouldn't be using "less". They should be using as much as needed based on how much system RAM you have. With the memory amounts going up and prices goes down, why have a bunch of useless ram sitting in there if it's not going to be used. That is the point, isn't it?
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Because most users are smart enough to CTRL-ALT-DEL see all the memory windows is using but not smart enough to understand what the numbers actually mean.
 
Term-X said:
IMO, they shouldn't be using "less". They should be using as much as needed based on how much system RAM you have. With the memory amounts going up and prices goes down, why have a bunch of useless ram sitting in there if it's not going to be used. That is the point, isn't it?
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Windows 8 has to fit on smaller, cheaper devices so there can no longer be the assumption that there's tons of RAM on a device. The key is scaling, as long as the OS runs optimally with the resources available to it then this is a great thing.
 
Don't they make this claim every release? Reduced memory footprint, tighter instruction set, less overhead blah blah blah... When they have an OS that can run quickly and efficiently off a 1gb flash drive then I'll be happy.

Hell, I'd be happy if they just stopped competing with Linux and joined forces LOL
 
DoggyDaddi said:
Don't they make this claim every release? Reduced memory footprint, tighter instruction set, less overhead blah blah blah... When they have an OS that can run quickly and efficiently off a 1gb flash drive then I'll be happy.
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Actually Microsoft doesn't make this claim with every OS release, typically the system requirements go up but a probably understated. Windows 7 actually held the line on hardware requirements compared to Vista and that is an honest statement most seem to say. Looking at the Developer Preview thus far this isn't just blah, blah, blah, Windows 8 looks like it does indeed have a smaller memory footprint in my observations.

DoggyDaddi said:
Hell, I'd be happy if they just stopped competing with Linux and joined forces LOL
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As far as the desktop OS world is concerned, Linux isn't even in the game.
 
heatlesssun said:
Actually Microsoft doesn't make this claim with every OS release, typically the system requirements go up but a probably understated. Windows 7 actually held the line on hardware requirements compared to Vista and that is an honest statement most seem to say. Looking at the Developer Preview thus far this isn't just blah, blah, blah, Windows 8 looks like it does indeed have a smaller memory footprint in my observations.



As far as the desktop OS world is concerned, Linux isn't even in the game.
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Could have sworn Microsoft made a big deal about abandoning the old Kernel for something smaller, more efficient, and more secure.. in any case, why the point by point denouncement? I never considered Linux (or all the other permutations) to be ACTUAL competition for Windows.. my point was Linux has aspects that Windows could benefit from. It's not like they DIDN'T spend the 1st 2 decades of their existence acquiring every good idea they could find, or destroying anything that wasn't for sale.
 
Linux these days is maybe as bloated as windows anyway. Just keep adding on to that ol kernel there...
 
DoggyDaddi said:
Could have sworn Microsoft made a big deal about abandoning the old Kernel for something smaller, more efficient, and more secure.. in any case, why the point by point denouncement? I never considered Linux (or all the other permutations) to be ACTUAL competition for Windows.. my point was Linux has aspects that Windows could benefit from. It's not like they DIDN'T spend the 1st 2 decades of their existence acquiring every good idea they could find, or destroying anything that wasn't for sale.
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I was just saying that I've never recalled Microsoft making the specific claim of it's newest OS taking less memory than the previous on. Sure they make a lot of claims that are overstated, it's not like Linux distros haven't either. But sure, Windows could benefit from some aspects of Linux, for instance Microsoft has done a lot of decoupling and modularization in Windows which has helped to contribute to the lower memory footprint
 
heatlesssun said:
Windows 8 has to fit on smaller, cheaper devices so there can no longer be the assumption that there's tons of RAM on a device. The key is scaling, as long as the OS runs optimally with the resources available to it then this is a great thing.
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If only they made two OS versions. One for mobile and one for desktop solutions.... or a Windows 8 Lite // Windows 8 Full-Featured versions. I find it a scary prospect that the capabilities of my PC's OS might be limited by what your cellphone's ARM processor and 256MB of memory can do. At that point, it's almost like PC gaming behind held back by consoles, except PC OS's being held back by cellphones/portable devices like tablets.

It's a bleak future if you think of it that way. Frankly, I was fine with even Windows Vista's memory footprint. Stuff loaded fast so who cares if it used up 2GB of my '12' GB. 10GB is more than enough for me to video edit/watch a hd movie, have skype/msn open and a mmorpg idling on a third screen.
 
WBurchnall said:
If only they made two OS versions. One for mobile and one for desktop solutions.... or a Windows 8 Lite // Windows 8 Full-Featured versions. I find it a scary prospect that the capabilities of my PC's OS might be limited by what your cellphone's ARM processor and 256MB of memory can do. At that point, it's almost like PC gaming behind held back by consoles, except PC OS's being held back by cellphones/portable devices like tablets.
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Isn't great software supposed to scale? From a purely technical standpoint I don't see why reducing the memory footprint of Windows holds back anything on the PC, people have been complaining about the "bloat" of Windows for years now.
 
The irony here is that MS is actually attempting to lower system requirements from their previous OS. Their stick in the mud attitude has always been pile on more features into windows and a hardware will get faster to keep up. This hardware principle doesn't quite work in mobile market, at least not yet, so linux is (via Android) pretty much is eating MS lunch.

If they can get stripped down windows running reasonably on a $200-300 tablet device then I'd say they have a chance at taking a bite of the market. Just matching iPad at $500 bracket just ain't gonna buy them market share as reflected by all the slash in tablet prices lately.
 
Tweak42 said:
The irony here is that MS is actually attempting to lower system requirements from their previous OS. Their stick in the mud attitude has always been pile on more features into windows and a hardware will get faster to keep up. This hardware principle doesn't quite work in mobile market, at least not yet, so linux is (via Android) pretty much is eating MS lunch.

If they can get stripped down windows running reasonably on a $200-300 tablet device then I'd say they have a chance at taking a bite of the market. Just matching iPad at $500 bracket just ain't gonna buy them market share as reflected by all the slash in tablet prices lately.
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That first paragraph describes the modern Linux kernel pretty well too.
 
WBurchnall said:
If only they made two OS versions. One for mobile and one for desktop solutions.... or a Windows 8 Lite // Windows 8 Full-Featured versions. I find it a scary prospect that the capabilities of my PC's OS might be limited by what your cellphone's ARM processor and 256MB of memory can do. At that point, it's almost like PC gaming behind held back by consoles, except PC OS's being held back by cellphones/portable devices like tablets.

It's a bleak future if you think of it that way. Frankly, I was fine with even Windows Vista's memory footprint. Stuff loaded fast so who cares if it used up 2GB of my '12' GB. 10GB is more than enough for me to video edit/watch a hd movie, have skype/msn open and a mmorpg idling on a third screen.
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They DO make a Windows Mobile OS.. I heard it's not a happy experience though :(
 
Term-X said:
IMO, they shouldn't be using "less". They should be using as much as needed based on how much system RAM you have. With the memory amounts going up and prices goes down, why have a bunch of useless ram sitting in there if it's not going to be used. That is the point, isn't it?
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They should be using less.

In POSIX systems you've had for a very long time a virtual memory facility that only loaded pages that are actually being accessed.
This way if you loaded up a 2000KB library and only 200KB of it was actually used, it would only load the 200KB. If you need some of the remaining 1800KB then you hit the disk for it.

This is basic virtual memory management.
I'm surprised to hear that Windows didn't use this feature. The concept is almost 50 years old at this point.
 
LightningCrash said:
They should be using less.

In POSIX systems you've had for a very long time a virtual memory facility that only loaded pages that are actually being accessed.
This way if you loaded up a 2000KB library and only 200KB of it was actually used, it would only load the 200KB. If you need some of the remaining 1800KB then you hit the disk for it.

This is basic virtual memory management.
I'm surprised to hear that Windows didn't use this feature. The concept is almost 50 years old at this point.
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You're not following the conversation. This isn't about virtual memory management.
 
Monkey God said:
You're not following the conversation. This isn't about virtual memory management.
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You express no understanding of the topic. This is all about virtual memory management.

From the article:
When assessing the contents of RAM in a typical running PC, many parts of memory have the same content. The redundant copies of data across system RAM present an opportunity to reduce the memory footprint even for services and OS components.

How can this happen? Applications will sometimes allocate memory for future use and will initialize it all to the same value. The application may never actually use the memory as it may be there in anticipation of functionality that is the user never invokes. If multiple running applications are doing this at the same time, redundant copies of memory are in the system.

Memory combining is a technique in which Windows efficiently assesses the content of system RAM during normal activity and locates duplicate content across all system memory. Windows will then free up duplicates and keep a single copy. If the application tries to write to the memory in future, Windows will give it a private copy. All of this happens under the covers in the memory manager, with no impact on applications. This approach can liberate 10s to 100s of MBs of memory (depending on how many applications are running concurrently).
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I don't read it as it's saying that the whole process is new, it's just trying to explain the all of it. The part that is new, memory deduplication (as in RAM not VM) is new because mostly is most useful on systems running virtual machines which most people don't run currently.
 
Ryokurin said:
I don't read it as it's saying that the whole process is new, it's just trying to explain the all of it. The part that is new, memory deduplication (as in RAM not VM) is new because mostly is most useful on systems running virtual machines which most people don't run currently.
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and I think the memory deduplication is a good thing. It's not just the virtual memory system using less memory, it's using it more efficiently.

Linux has a similar effort called kernel samepage merging. It was initially targeted for KVM but you can flag any region in virtual memory for samepage merging.
 
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