Windows 8 and memory consumption

07
2014-05
  • f304347

    My current system should have enough memory (4GB), but it's the lower average right now and if I want to run multiple applications at once - which is needed - memory is getting scarce.

    In addition to make Windows lighter and tablet-friendlier, Microsoft had to reduce the footprint on the HDD of the current iteration, Windows 8. But how does Windows 8 compare to the predecessor in terms of memory consumption? Reviews of Windows 8 often concentrate only on the obvious aspects (look and feel), but not on the improvements from the inside.

    Thanks for any answers.

    • Answers
  • gronostaj

    Windows 8 consumes less resources than previous versions and is faster than XP even with 1 GB of RAM, as proven by Troy Hunt. Vista and Win7 would hardly work with such amount of memory.

    But still, 4 GB should be enough for average user. Maybe we could say something more if we know what apps you're using when you're running short on free memory.

  • Lucas Malor

    Take a look to this article, it explains a possible memory leak: http://lifehacker.com/5993161/check-runtime-broker-if-youre-running-out-of-ram-on-windows-8

    In particular:

    If you find Runtime Broker is using a suspiciously high amount of RAM, try uninstalling any Windows 8 apps you have that utilize live tiles, one at a time.

  • David Schwartz

    Memory isn't getting scarce, free memory is getting scarce. But that's not a problem. Windows will switch memory from one use to another. It does not need to keep memory free in order for it to be available for use.

    Free memory is just wasted memory. If you have 1GB free, you might as well have 1GB less memory installed since free memory doesn't actually do anything.


    • Related Question

    linux - Get process memory consumption
  • Ran

    I need a command that can get the memory consumption of a process called "job_runner_o".

    Running ubuntu 10.10

    Any thoughts?


    • Related Answers
  • Mat

    You could use ps column selection:

    ps -eo vsz,rss,comm|grep job_runner_0

    will list the virtual memory size (vsz) and resident set size (rss). The the ps man page for details about these columns and the other ones available.

    You should also look at the files in /proc/$pid/, especially /proc/$pid/status. They contain a lot of information. For example, try:

    cat /proc/`pgrep job_runner_0`/status

    (This assumes that there is only one process named job_runner_0.)

    Yet another quick option is pmap, which will list detailed process mapping information.

    pmap -x $(pidof job_runner_0)

    for a full detailed listing (this is present in one of the /proc files also).

    If there are several processes with that name, and you just want the total mem used, this can work:

    pmap $(pgrep job_runner_0) | grep "^ total"
  • karlphillip

    Execute the following on a shell:

    grep VmRSS /proc/$(pidof job_runner_o)/status