How to determine memory usage?

[Guest]

Another long day of working on this, but I have made a lot of progress. I
followed the suggestions in the Pacman's Portal link regarding the order of
using the different methods of disabling programs from running at startup.
Between the information here and in www.answersthatwork.com, I was able to
reduce the number of selected startup items from 30 to 13. I didn't get to
remove NIS yet, but the speed of the PC has increased tremendously, and seems
acceptable. Looking closer at the NIS-related processes in Task Manager and
their Mem Usage/VM, I see ccApp.exe 1.2M/5.7M, and ccSvcHst.exe 3.9M/2.4M.
Now with similar applications running, I see CPU Usage average ~1%; Physical
Memory:458M Total, 149M Available, 222M System Cache; Commit Charge: 420M
Total, 1081M Limit, 515M Peak. Looking at Processes (Mem Usage/VM):
iexplore.exe:31M/76M, svchost.exe:15M/13M, hpqste08.exe:11M/8M,
explorer.exe:11M/26M, and the rest use 3M memory or less. I downloaded
AutoRuns, but haven't had a chance to go through it yet. By the way, after I
gave you the Performance readings from Task Manager, you wrote "your Commit
Charge and Peak values reveal you're relying on your pagefile", and I'm
curious how you determined that. Is there a good way to look at these
readings, to determine that there may be a problem? Thanks again.

 

[Daave]

I have a feeling you don't need hpqste08.exe.

The goal is to hardly ever use your pagefile. If the amount of RAM you
have installed is sufficient for your tasks, then you're good to go.
It's good that your Commit Charge (amount of memory you are currently
using) is now less than your Physical Memory (RAM). If you can somehow
get your Peak (highest value since your most recent reboot) also under
458 MB, that would be even better. Once those figures exceed 458 MB,
your pagefile is used (and this will cause a noticeable decline in
performance).

See:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_fix_too_little_virtual_memory_in_windows.html

Keep up the good work.

 

[Guest]

Thanks again for all the good information. The performance improvement on my
PC is incredible. By the way, the coding I do in my work is mostly in ANSI C
and assembler for real-time embedded control systems, but I have Visual
Studio 2005 and have been trying to pick up C++ and C#. If you are
experienced in those languages, do you have any texts that you would
recommend? Regards.

 

[Daave]

You're welcome. I'm happy to hear that your PC is working to your
satisfaction.

Unfortunately, I know very little of programming. The last time I
dabbled in it was about 25 years ago (BASIC)!

 

[Ed]

500MB is just really on the cusp if you are running any applications. I have
never considered using less than 1GB for XP and apps. I bet your system runs
faster with more memory. However you may want to check and make sure any
applications you have shutdown are actually out of memory. I have a problem
with that very issue right now. Many applications will retain memory even
after being shut down for hours or even days.

 

[Gerry]

Ed

Are you leaving your computer on 24/7?

If you have a memory leak restarting the computer releases the memory.


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Hope this helps.

Gerry
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FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
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