TR Forums

Hi all, the last few days I've been having some problems with my machine, and I think its due to high ram usage. After a fresh boot, i sit idle at desktop using 1.8g of ram. I have 8gigs installed. I am running win 7 x64 ultimate. I have a Phenom II x4 955. The problems I've been having recently are slow/sluggish performance, high ping in game (mainly Dota2), and low fps in game (again Dota2). I have a 2gb MSI R9 270. So what I've done to try to rectify this is, ran spybot, MBAM, and cleaned up whatever it found (it was mainly tracking cookies), removed and reinstalled my video drivers (I am using the 14.7 july 9th beta drivers, I was using the 14.4 whql when this issue first started) ran CCleaner to clean up my registry, and uninstalled a bunch of programs that I rarely used.

Please gimme some guidance on figuring this out. I know there used to be a program that would list all your startup programs so you can post it for people to help troubleshoot, but I can't recall the name of it.

Thanks a ton in advance!

Bring up Resource Monitor and look at the Working Set and Private and see which process(s) are holding on to the memory?

https://imgur.com/KKj8egB

that is my current resource monitor listed by private.

Lots of them are chrome.
MediaMall is a program I use to transcode video files to be viewed on my roku.
The biggest offender is svchost

With Chrome and many tabs up, it is not exactly "boot ram usage" anymore. Can you shut down Chrome and see if it is still 1.8gigs used?

https://imgur.com/QBJMAZL

heres an updated 1...im at 1.6 now...i stopped MediaMall from running all the time since I transcode very rarely so that dropped it ~200 megs...i still feel 1.6 is high

Some of it may be used for caching. Click on the Performance tab in Task Manager and see the Cached, Available, and Free numbers? Unused RAM is wasted RAM, unless you are completely out of RAM that the system keeps paging in and out of disk. That is when performance is going to suck. Chrome is a big offender and my 8 gigs is not enough for my laziness to close tabs.

https://imgur.com/8hUCnDe

i only have 486 free, ~6000 is cached....i dunno if that is good or bad

Seems fine. Now load up apps and make sure Free and Available does not go too low. That is when you will be paging. You should probably monitor that while gaming.

I would say a combination of a lot of Chrome tabs, and a game that needs memory may put you over the hump. So watch for that.

cool thanks for the info...ill monitor it over the next couple days and see what kinda numbers I get. thanks again

RAM usage is fine. However:
a) Do you have a paging file defined? Ideally, you should.
b) Is it configured correctly? Ideally, it should be set to 'Automatically manage'.
c) Are you shutting down other apps before starting DOTA? Ideally, you should.

With respect to your symptoms, I don't think its caused by RAM or GPU, as they appear adequate. I'm not familiar with the CPU, but a quick comparison against my CPU shows that its quite powerful, so I won't worry too much there.

That leads me onto your disk subsystem:
a) What hard disk/SSD are you using? If HDD, do you know its rotational speed?
b) In Resource Monitor, under the 'Storage' section, check the disk queue length. Ideally, it should be less than 1 when you're not doing anything. Double digit numbers will usually imply a lot of random access, and can be a cause of slowness/sluggishness.

XorCist wrote:

Hi all, the last few days I've been having some problems with my machine, and I think its due to high ram usage. After a fresh boot, i sit idle at desktop using 1.8g of ram. I have 8gigs installed. I am running win 7 x64 ultimate.

The RAM usage is perfectly fine. Like others have said, look elsewhere for causes - maybe your HDD is too fragmented, or it is dying (OS detected high error rate and dropped the connection mode to slower PIO setting) or the cable's connector became loose (check the cables then run HDD benchmarks to check transfer rate), or your CPU/GPU cooling fan is dying and causing them to overheat and throttle down at certain point, etc. Try out other games to see if same thing affects them too.

XorCist wrote:

I know there used to be a program that would list all your startup programs so you can post it for people to help troubleshoot, but I can't recall the name of it.

Oh, there are a few of them. One of them is FRST, it can list everything you have running, as well as system log errors, permissions, registry settings, etc. You just download it, click on "Scan" button, it generates text files with everything listed. I don't think you need it right now, but it's useful for future references, especially when dealing with viruses/trojans/keyloggers.
http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/topic/33 ... scan-tool/

arunphilip wrote:

RAM usage is fine. However:
a) Do you have a paging file defined? Ideally, you should.
b) Is it configured correctly? Ideally, it should be set to 'Automatically manage'.
c) Are you shutting down other apps before starting DOTA? Ideally, you should.

With respect to your symptoms, I don't think its caused by RAM or GPU, as they appear adequate. I'm not familiar with the CPU, but a quick comparison against my CPU shows that its quite powerful, so I won't worry too much there.

That leads me onto your disk subsystem:
a) What hard disk/SSD are you using? If HDD, do you know its rotational speed?
b) In Resource Monitor, under the 'Storage' section, check the disk queue length. Ideally, it should be less than 1 when you're not doing anything. Double digit numbers will usually imply a lot of random access, and can be a cause of slowness/sluggishness.

Right now pagefile is set for 8189MB, and it is set for automatically manage. I figured 8gb of ram would be enuff to run DOTA, and it has been for the last few months, except the last few days.

Here are my 4 drives in CrystalDiskInfo
https://imgur.com/uUFYLUF
Games are installed on D. For some reason I can't get it to register drive speed on C and D.
Disk Queue length sitting idle is at 0 on all of them.

JohnC wrote:

XorCist wrote:

Hi all, the last few days I've been having some problems with my machine, and I think its due to high ram usage. After a fresh boot, i sit idle at desktop using 1.8g of ram. I have 8gigs installed. I am running win 7 x64 ultimate.

The RAM usage is perfectly fine. Like others have said, look elsewhere for causes - maybe your HDD is too fragmented, or it is dying (OS detected high error rate and dropped the connection mode to slower PIO setting) or the cable's connector became loose (check the cables then run HDD benchmarks to check transfer rate), or your CPU/GPU cooling fan is dying and causing them to overheat and throttle down at certain point, etc. Try out other games to see if same thing affects them too.

XorCist wrote:

I know there used to be a program that would list all your startup programs so you can post it for people to help troubleshoot, but I can't recall the name of it.

Oh, there are a few of them. One of them is FRST, it can list everything you have running, as well as system log errors, permissions, registry settings, etc. You just download it, click on "Scan" button, it generates text files with everything listed. I don't think you need it right now, but it's useful for future references, especially when dealing with viruses/trojans/keyloggers.
http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/topic/33 ... scan-tool/

Yea I thought it was fragged too, so I downloaded UltraDefrag, and ran it, and it said it was 3% fragmented. I did the "optimize" setting it had in it, and last night when I played DOTA, I was back again at 60fps. I can't see how 3% is going to affect performance....but I also noticed my ping was noticably lower on steam last night than it has been since TI4 has started.

I know ping has an affect on fps, but a matter of going from ~140ish ping and 35-40fps, to 70-80ping and a constant 60fps doesnt seem right.

I thought I had enough too until I new'ed up enough Chrome tabs and then my system performance slows to become noticeable. Then I opened up Task Manager and although individually each chrome.exe does not take up too much, once you have 30+ it starts to add up.

Flying Fox wrote:

I thought I had enough too until I new'ed up enough Chrome tabs and then my system performance slows to become noticeable. Then I opened up Task Manager and although individually each chrome.exe does not take up too much, once you have 30+ it starts to add up.

Yea my wife loves to leave open 10+ tabs with facebook and various facebook games. I have noticed tho, since I first posted this thread yesterday, I've kept chrome closed while gaming, and noticeable improvements are seen.

XorCist wrote:

Flying Fox wrote:

I thought I had enough too until I new'ed up enough Chrome tabs and then my system performance slows to become noticeable. Then I opened up Task Manager and although individually each chrome.exe does not take up too much, once you have 30+ it starts to add up.

Yea my wife loves to leave open 10+ tabs with facebook and various facebook games. I have noticed tho, since I first posted this thread yesterday, I've kept chrome closed while gaming, and noticeable improvements are seen.

This may mean a RAM upgrade may be in order for you. The multitude of chrome.exe instances will steal CPU cycles too, especially you have Flash and heavy Javascript stuff going on in those tabs. You should monitor total cpu% that all the chrome.exe instances are taking too.

Flying Fox wrote:

The multitude of chrome.exe instances will steal CPU cycles too, especially you have Flash and heavy Javascript stuff going on in those tabs. You should monitor total cpu% that all the chrome.exe instances are taking too.

Yup, Chrome eats lots of resources. One of my top reasons for sticking with Firefox.

Another thing to check is if background tasks are still enabled for Chrome. Chrome will run apps and things in the background by default.

Flatland_Spider wrote:

Yup, Chrome eats lots of resources. One of my top reasons for sticking with Firefox.

Yes, but...

Most any motherboard made in the past decade or so should be able to handle at least 8GB of RAM, and RAM is pretty cheap. So unless you're stuck on really old hardware or a 32-bit OS, there's really no excuse for having less than 8GB.

just brew it! wrote:

Flatland_Spider wrote:

Yup, Chrome eats lots of resources. One of my top reasons for sticking with Firefox.

Yes, but...

Most any motherboard made in the past decade or so should be able to handle at least 8GB of RAM, and RAM is pretty cheap. So unless you're stuck on really old hardware or a 32-bit OS, there's really no excuse for having less than 8GB.

I don't think he meant that. I was actually saying that even at 8gigs it sometimes was not enough.

On my main rig with 16 gig RAM on a fresh boot of win7 x64 I'm using about 1 gig of ram. With a few tabs of firefox, vlc audio, and a random explorer window or two I'm up to 1.8 gigs reported by win task manager.
Each generation of windows does seem to use more and more memory but the overall performance seems faster and more responsive on modern hardware (haswell 4770, 16 gig RAM, Agility 3 SSD in RAID-0, Z87 chipset)

Flying Fox wrote:

I don't think he meant that. I was actually saying that even at 8gigs it sometimes was not enough.

TBH, yeah I have occasionally noticed that too; KDE + Chrome on Linux can be a bit of a resource pig, and will sometimes start to hit swap with 8GB of RAM when you open a lot of tabs. Both of my primary desktops (home and work) have 16GB these days. But I also tend to have a couple of VMs running, so that chews up a few gigs right off the top.

8GB was a semi-arbitrary cutoff; I picked it because a lot of DDR2 motherboards maxed out at 8GB.

just brew it! wrote:

Flying Fox wrote:

I don't think he meant that. I was actually saying that even at 8gigs it sometimes was not enough.

TBH, yeah I have occasionally noticed that too; KDE + Chrome on Linux can be a bit of a resource pig, and will sometimes start to hit swap with 8GB of RAM when you open a lot of tabs. Both of my primary desktops (home and work) have 16GB these days. But I also tend to have a couple of VMs running, so that chews up a few gigs right off the top.

That's exactly my situation too. I have a VM (or 2) running in the background and a few more open tabs will slow the system to a point that I can notice, even with the pagefile on an SSD. I can understand Chrome/IE's reason for spawning so many processes though: isolation. Too bad RAM prices have crept up over the last year or so.

Heh. You kids and your "RAM is too expensive!"

I remember paying $15 per KILObyte (granted, this was back around 1978).

Now get off my lawn! (You might kill some of the weeds... and we can't have that, can we?)

Well, I'm back again, with issues....I think my drive is dying, but I'm not sure.
I have this drive as my C
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148262
I'm just laggy as hell. I checked everything that is listed in the previous posts, and it doesnt seem to do anything this time.
I ran a program that benchmarks it, and this is my results

Read Speed 84.08 MB/sec
Cache Speed 202.66 MB/sec
Access Time 15.86 ms


Does this seem high?

Also here is my D (which is where all my games are stored.)
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST3250623 ... B000BOF3UW
Read Speed 15.48 MB/sec
Cache Speed 29.19 MB/sec
Access Time 15.27 ms

I think my read speed is garbage on this one. Is that my issue? Which drivers do I need to reinstall to help with performance, or should I migrate everything from that drive to a 500gig SATA drive i have laying around and just eliminate PATA?

Speeds on the C drive don't look particularly out of line for a drive of that vintage.

The D drive looks like the interface has dropped to PIO mode. Check your ATA controller in Device Manager, and make sure the port is configured for DMA. You may also want to try replacing the PATA cable.

*Both* drives are old enough that you're running on borrowed time. I would migrate *everything* to the 500 GB SATA drive, assuming it is newer than the one you've got installed as C currently.

I'm missing where it shows PIO mode. Im in the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. 3 drives are Ultra DMA Mode 6, and the other is Mode 5. I cant figure out which one is what tho.
The one I have just lying around is an old Hitachi Deskstar from Jun of 07. It hasnt been in a machine since 2010. Its been sitting wrapped in the anti static bag and bubble wrap in a box the whole time it hasn't been used. Model is HDS725050KLA360 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822147007

I was also thinking, can I repartition 2 of my larger drives, (each 1.5TB) and move C and D to partitions off that?

So i cloned that old PATA drive to a newer SATA drive (37000 hours+ on PATA, to 7000 hours on SATA) and my system is much more responsive. I'm working on cloning my C to a 200 gig partition on the same SATA drive....stupid me didnt partition it, as the same size and am running into issues trying to clone it since I made it smaller

I'm trying to shrink the existing C partition, but its sat there at querying for over 15 minutes now

apparently shrinking isnt an option....

original C partition size is 233GB, on the new drive I made the partition only 200GB since I only used 105GB of the 233

XorCist wrote:

So i cloned that old PATA drive to a newer SATA drive (37000 hours+ on PATA, to 7000 hours on SATA) and my system is much more responsive. I'm working on cloning my C to a 200 gig partition on the same SATA drive....stupid me didnt partition it, as the same size and am running into issues trying to clone it since I made it smaller

I'm trying to shrink the existing C partition, but its sat there at querying for over 15 minutes now

apparently shrinking isnt an option....

original C partition size is 233GB, on the new drive I made the partition only 200GB since I only used 105GB of the 233

Since it is your boot drive I think you may have trouble cloning it to a drive that already has another partition on it. Should've done C first.

I dont get this machine at all.....

So i cloned D to D worked fine...
cloned C to it...forgot to do the bootmgr section so it didnt work
rebooted back to figure it out, and the 500gb drive just disappeared....
tried multiple times with different sata/power cables......nothing

install old drives back again....

performance is back to normal


LOL