So the question becomes: why do they bother having the graph if it's going to read 100% all of the time?

The second question becomes: how do you know how much memory is really being used, and how much is a cache that the OS will throw away if needed?

Linux systems have a similar philosophy - any file read goes into cached memory until it is full (lacks the super-fetch approach, though). But at least you can easily tell what's really used and what's a cache.

Caching.. hm. well..
Maybe Vista is better doing this, but I'm currently using XP with 2Gig, and for me, XP is sucking most of the memory for its System Cache, especially when doing lots of file-activites it's using every bit of the memory, and after a while the computer is just getting sluggish. it looks like it can't handle the size of the system cache, and doesn't throw things out.. so, I reboot the system, and it acts normally again..
I really hope this will work better in Vista..

Oh come on you're clearly covering up the fact that memory dealers are in bed with Microsoft to sell unnecessary RAM to poor old grandma.

But seriously, I've noticed this happening more with OS X with each release as well (though others may call it bloat I swear it's being more aggressive caching things in memory)

That said, I've often wondered; as there is a miss penalty for caches, is preloading the main memory in a cache-like manner only going to increase thrashing for many end users who may still somehow be surviving on less than a gig or two of ram under xp?

e.g. if you have 4gb of ram you can pretty safely start throwing stuff in there and still have room to spare. With a more paltry (normal?) 512 it seems like you'd have to have a pretty smart and judicious algorithm for managing what goes in there. Though I suppose we do have decades of cache population/eviction theories to rely on. It's just the penalty of swapping to disk is so tangible, and even audible.

So it is a service that you can go and shutdown?

Also if you look under processes does it show up how much it is memory it is taking up.

So it is a service that you can go and shutdown?

Also if you look under processes does it show how much memory it is taking up.

did game play speed up after the first few frags? How about trying to window out of the game hitting IE7 and then back to the game, are there bad performance hits for that?

Caches buy you less and less the bigger they are. I just can't imagine what it could even populate 2GB of RAM with. I don't think I even have 2GB of *applications* on my computer. Maybe if it cached data files too, but even then I'd be hard pressed to come up with 2GB of data I use on a regular basis.

This would be a tool I'd definitely want to play around with before enabling. Loss of game performance to keep grandma's cookie recipe in memory at all times doesn't seem like a very good trade-off to me.

Jeff, you need to read "Windows Internals, Fourth Edition". Task Manager in XP is a big fat liar. Windows Vista's Task Manager is not comparable.

The figure quoted as 'available' in XP is the sum of zero, free, standby and modified lists. The 'system cache' figure is the sum of the system cache working set (amount of physical memory used by the file system cache plus the physical memory used by pageable code and data in drivers, plus the kernel's paged pool) and the standby and modified lists. Your screenshot shows the double-counting: Available + System Cache is 1.5 times physical memory!

When a page is taken out of (trimmed from) a working set, it isn't immediately reused. Instead it is put on either the modified (if modified since last written to the page file or memory-mapped file it belongs to) or standby list. Links are kept from the process to the page. If the process then references the page again before it's paged out, it causes a page fault to occur but Windows can satisfy it simply by fixing up the page table entry - this is termed a 'soft fault'.

So how do pages get onto the other lists? Modified pages become standby pages by being written out to disk - a couple of background threads do this, mapped file pages are written after a maximum of five minutes on the list, and all pages start to be written after the modified list reaches 800 pages (about 3MB). Standby pages become free pages as the balance set manager (a thread that wakes up every second) runs, if the free list is too small. Finally, free pages become zero pages as the system zero page thread (runs at priority 0 and therefore only runs when at least one processor is idle) writes zeros to free pages.

When allocating physical memory Windows prefers zero pages for private user-mode page allocations, and free pages for kernel mode or mapped-file page allocations. (The use of zero pages is a security requirement to prevent processes being able to read other processes' data). If the zero page list is exhausted, Windows will use the free list and zero the page on demand; if the free list is exhausted for a free page allocation, it will then use the zero page list. If both lists are exhausted it will then try the standby list - it then needs to unlink the page from its original process at this point - and in the pathological case that that is empty, it has to take a modified page, write it out, unlink it, zero it, and then give it to a process.

This is why these lists exist - Windows has done work when idle to ensure that there is physical memory available on demand.

Speaking of on-demand: when VirtualAlloc is called to allocate memory, no physical memory is actually allocated. The 'commit charge' is simply incremented. It reserves space in the page file to make sure it can't overcommit on memory, but this reservation is a logical one - nothing is written to the page file. Only when a page is touched, and a page fault ensues, does a physical memory page get allocated (and the data loaded from disk if touching a memory-mapped file).

This commit charge is the value actually shown on the 'PF Usage' meter in XP's Task Manager, and in 'Commit Charge' total. 'Limit' is the sum of all page files plus physical memory minus whatever Windows can't page out.

There's no limit to how large the standby list can grow. The file system cache has a limit on its virtual address size of approx 300MB IIRC, but since this is implemented as a working set, pages discarded from the cache go on the standby or modified list! However, if files are opened as sequential scan, they go on the front of those lists, not the end, so are likely to be reused more quickly.

While on the subject of Task Manager, the Process tab's 'Mem Usage' column is actually the process's working set. However, this includes a lot of shared pages from system DLLs, so the sum of 'Mem Usage' normally is significantly larger than physical memory. It's impossible to tell if your program has a memory leak from this column. Switch on the 'VM Size' column (actually process private bytes) to monitor this, although this won't necessarily drop when you free from a heap.

So XP normally has a lot of moderately-recently-referenced data sitting in memory (but not recently enough to keep it in the working set) - well, once the system has been running for a while. The difference is that Vista is actively preloading data that it thinks you might use soon.

It is legitimate to have a blog on Bl*gSp*t, you know! (couldn't post originally due to URL)

I'm skeptical of this feature, personally. It sounds like it will work great for the typical user who runs a lot of small apps - Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, Outlook, even maybe Photoshop. But it looks like it could perform terribly when running high-memory apps, like games as you yourself discovered, or media production software (routinely use 1-2 gigs for me), or even Visual Studio.

I guess it remains to be seen. I just don't trust Microsoft in this area, because they've tried these memory-management features before, like the default system-managed pagefile in XP, which almost every power user changes to manual.

Going to take a lot more than extra-aggressive caching (or SUPER-aggressive FETCHing!) to drag me into the Vista camp...

A few questions.

First, even though it says only have 6MB free in the text of the task manager. The graph shows 905 vs 334 MB being used back in XP. Is the OS truely using that much more memory?

Second, why is your page file 4gb?

I wonder what effect Vista will have on the life expectancy of RAM...

2Gb a mainstream memory configuration? Maybe among us techies but not for 95% of the PC buying population.

I've no evidence to back it up other than what I see non-developer friends buying and they generally get machines with 512Mb in.

I also share some of Aaron G's concerns. Memory intensive applications such as video editing and image editing are optimised around the OS's current memory management strategies. Until they're updated there may well be some performance drops.

Time will tell I guess.

This is very interesting, but can you tell me why my system doesn't FEEL any faster?

>

Just wait for Office 2007, or Visual Studio 2007
:-)

I wonder if this has any effect on power consumption (higher RAM usage), especially on notebooks?

So, what does it save to the HD when it goes into hibernate mode?

RAM _usage_ isn't important, except in certain server chipset (and, apparently, the upcoming DDR3 Sonoma chipset), since all the memory is always on. But if it's reading and writing to it often, that will definitely increase power consumption. Just depends on how stable it is, I guess.

I'd be happy to have XP preload .Net libraries at some point after startup. The only time I ever have a slowdown, even on a cheapo 5400 laptop drive, is loading the .Net runtime up for an app. Once it's up, no slowdowns anywhere.

The two big similarities in XP are the indexing service and the realtime defragmenter. The indexing service was a miserable failure, since it didn't integrate into windows search without bizarre syntax, and caused a significant performance hit at times. Defrag is much better; not amazing but it runs much less and does a reasonable job of keeping performance to certain levels.

It remains to be seen which one the huge vista cache wll take after.

I'm all for more performance. (Who wouldn't be?) But super-aggressive brainiac schemes like this don't appeal to me, at least, not in theory.

Responsiveness is important in a UI, sure. But another thing that's important is *predictability*, which makes a system more learn-able, something a user can become familiar with and adapt to.

If Vista is guessing what apps I'll want to load at a particular time of day or on a particular day of the week, its responsiveness will change when my routine is broken.

I think that's bad. A major app that always takes a few seconds to start is OK. It would be hugely irritating to have major apps *usually* start up almost instantly but *sometimes* take many seconds.

With hybrid flash-cached hard disks and pure-flash hard disks supposedly on the horizon, the benefits of such a complicated scheme may be short-lived anyway.

This performance dip will go away as people programming games learn to deal with Vista. This is only a problem for the first generation of things, it will go away. Probably quickly; if Linux is suddenly the best option for running XP and older games, M$ is going to be in for a big fat surprise.

All it really would take for them to lose their home market dominance in a few years would be WoW / Starcraft / Warcraft III not running as smoothly on Vista as is it did on Linux.

As long as there's some sort of manual control over what to prefetch (similar to how the system tray will guess your commonly used tasks, but still give you manual control over what shows), then it could be kinda neat.

Fast startup times since it asyncronously loads after boot, combined with fast app launching times for mozilla and WOW... that's about all I'd want anyway.

I think any perceived dip in performance per Jeff's anecdotal game performance story is unlikely anything to do with SuperFetch. There is no way to know that SuperFetch itself is causing this difference - it could be any number of complex side effects that cause this to be the observed behavior. After all there are 1000's of difference in Vista any of which could be impacting the behavior directly or indirectly.

The issue SuperFetch looks to address is this:

In a demand paged virtual memory system, things get flushed out to disk automatically based on needing to make more physical memory available. That is, less recently used pages gets pushed to the page file to make more room available. A user is affected by this when they go to lunch and something low priority (or periodic) runs causing all the desktop apps and data to page to disk. However, when the operation finishes, nothing causes anything to get swapped back INTO physical memory proactively. Therefore you have a bunch of free physical memory after returning from lunch because everthing is now idle including the background processes that ran.... It takes the user to return from lunch and try to click on MS-Word window or something to swap stuff back in....again on demand.

SuperFetch looks to address this proactively for the user by attempting to bring things back into physical memory auotmatically via some clever usage statistics of predicting what you are going to try and do when you return to using the computer.

This is stictly on an opportunity basis as a low priority operation itself and should never affect actual normal priority behaviors. Anything proactively restored to physical memory can be easily be discarded since it is already backed by the pagefile....no differently than the case where you were already using MS-Word and simply switched to a new application.

The only case SuperFetch should be able to affect anything negatively is the following pathelogical cases:

-It predicts wrong at the exact instant you were going to do something else and it starts to chew up some physical memory you all of a sudden need for something else. This impact should be trivial as SuperFetch's actions will cease as soon as you do something else more important.

-The added size and complexity of the operating system to implement this feature and to track statistics and such. Again, should also be fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things.

on my RC1 build, it initially appears that you can start/stop superfetch just like any other service.

As far as having manual control over whats cached and whats not, I personally don't care. the L2 and L1 caches have served us pretty well through the years without us nerds micro-managing what is/isn't cached. I'm not approaching Superfetch any differently.

[Jeff observes that SuperFetch hurts realtime game performance badly, then opines that] the question shouldn't be "Why does Vista use all my memory?", but "Why the heck did previous versions of Windows use my memory so ineffectively?"

Maybe because previous versions of Windows understand that realtime games response time is far more important than Word's startup time.

> hurts realtime game performance badly

I wouldn't say "badly". It's just annoying for the first minute or two of gameplay. The game is plenty playable.

I should also note that I'm preternaturally sensitive to hitches in framerate.

No poweruser people only open 1 internet explorer window, and star reading his mail, and infecting his computer with virus. Thats computers have only 256 MB of ram, and you can open more programs, but is not the normal use.

But future users will open more programs, and frezze others. Linux users are a good example of powerusers: some linux users open firefox monday, and close it sunday, 7 days with the application open. As you have more memory you understand that you dont really need to close apps.

With +768MB people will start using more than 5 IE windows, and every windows will have more than 3 tabs. So RAM usage will grow a lot. And more windows users will work like linux power users.

> This performance dip will go away as people
> programming games learn to deal with Vista.

This is the real kicker, and I'm guessing that it's not the kind of thing that can be solved with a "10 Ways to Make Your Game R0XX0R On Vista" article in MSDN.

It's something that happens with each major change in the technology stack, from the CPU on up through drivers, OS, and utilities, and it's only solvable through trial and error.

For example, take MSFT's own MechCommander 2. The disk usage pattern of that game is such that it interoperates horribly with realtime virus scanners. It seems obvious now, but it probably didn't when the game was being developed.

A change to the stack always hurts initially, no matter how good the developers making the stack change or the games might be.

Anyone else here remember when Win95 would not only boot in 4mb of ram but was actually useful?

905mb of ram vs 334?? I think the more realistic question is what is that CD's worth of ram doing?

And why would I want memory allocations and drive access to be constatntly waring with some background thread that thinks it is "helping" by loading something I might, but probably won't actually need?

disks will wear out faster, CMOS DRAM will use more power (proportional to state changes), fans will run more, busses will be busier (sic) ... basically, you're using more of your hardware more of the time. perhaps that's why our brains only use 10% of their capacity -- using more would wear them prematurely and it's difficult to cool a brain as it is now... :)

my mom told me to put stuff back where i found it. displacing a cache line is fine, as long as you put the original contents back when you're done using the cache. but what that original line is no longer available, or needed? then choose something else to put back. that's all that superfetch is doing. microsoft should make "refetch" APIs available so that third-party companies can tune it to prefer real-time app's, drivers that consume lots of RAM, and locking app's into VM... seems that the old unix "sticky" bit is now required again... remember this:
chmod +t vi

Very interesting article. Many people should read it instead of bashing Vista for no reason at all and thinking you will need at least 2Gb to run it find.

The way SuperFetch work it seems like your PC would be faster after a few weeks of use so it knows what you do and when you do it. Quite like some thermal paste takes 200 houres to be at 100% efficiency. The only thing I'm also wondering is if you change your routine, will it gets slower/worse?

On my current computer, WinXP would recommand 2Gb of PageFile to me so I would set min/max to 2048Mb. Now it seems like Vista recommands more "3Gb" even if it doesn't use more.

Something that I'd really like to know is if you plug a USB stick to use "Windows ReadyBoost" feature, will the OS use in first our fast ram or that usb key? Because if it would use the key which is obviously slower than any ram, it would result in slower performance. I'd really like to know more about how it works as it could be really interesting when the "next generation" of usb key will be out. Those new ones will be small like a 25¢ and be ~6Gb! Ah and mostly, would it be much faster than the PageFile?! As I won't keep my usb key plugged if it's the same thing or worse than PF. With the low price of huge HDD, it's no more a problem to raise the value of the swap file.

I'm sure it would need a day or three to relearn your new habits, bt in the meantime things will only be as slow as they'd be without the cache, assuming the memory manager has the power to allocate over the cache at will without overhead.

Readyboost is not a RAM expander, it's a hard drive cache. It wouldn't make any sense whatsoever to use it as main memory when DRAM is orders of magnitude faster.

Disks are the only hardware components that are really going to wear out from overuse, rather than from age or abuse, adn this won't even put extra strain on them. Most compenents die from a bad power supply or improper cooling, and the amount of heat these caching technologies will generate doesn't compare at all to how Aero will keep the cpu and gpu burning.

There had better be a way to tame/turn this off or I'm going to be pissed. Especially since I plan on setting up a fast RAID config sooner or later, in which case app start-up time will drop considerably anyway but I'll still want to be able to use my RAM quickly.

Also, Windows historically sucks at managing memory. It gets very fragmented, which leads to lots of swapping which leads to sluggish performance which eventually leads to crashes. As a matter of fact, the ENIAC (yes, that thing with the vacuum tubes that were constantly burning out and had to be replaced) was actually more stable than my Windows system is now due to the fact that I regularly use many memory-intensive apps whose demands Windows cannot meet for extended periods of time and therefore eventually crashes. Ergo, constantly swapping possible hard disk data to and from the RAM seems like an incredibly bad idea to me, unless MS miraculously managed to write a competent memory manager for Vista.

Okay, I got work to do so I'm done flaming.

Ok, So I upgraded to 2.5GB on my games machine so I wouldn't have to deal with the annoying first 3 minutes of slowdown I got with BF2. And now if I upgrade to Vista and use SuperFetch I'll get that back regardless of the ram I have? No thanks.

Hopefully you can just turn this off. But since I've heard nothing about Vista that makes me want to switch and plenty to get me to stick to XP, I'll think I'll be part of the majority that stays.

I think the real question here is why hasn't Windows ever allowed the user to specify how much memory to dedicate to a process manually? Or assign a priority so that certain processes are never swapped out to disk if at all possible? I'd kill for that...

"...Vista is trying its darndest to pre-emptively populate every byte of system memory with what it thinks I might need next..." microsoft is trying its darndest to pre-emptively populate every byte of system memory with what it thinks I might need next. they are usually wrong.

I wonder if this is worth a push to linux for the gaming industry. I see specialiszed/optimized gaming kernals in the future, where pre-emptive caching is kept to a minimum.

Microsoft's ideal predictive disk caching system:

IE: L2 cache
Word: RAM!
Visual Studio: RAM!
Firefox: disk
Apple web graphics: floppy disk
Linux ISO: they'd never use that, recycle bin

I think that superfetch is getting some undeserved criticism here. In particular, It seems that a lot of poeple believe that superfetch results in long load times in the case where:

1) all your memory is used to cache a specific set of programs, and,
2) you decide to start a program X, which isn't in the cached set.

I have seen nothing that leads me to believe that program X would take a longer time to start (with superfetch) then it would if superfetch wasn't in use.

What happens if the superfetch algorithm guesses your program choice incorrectly? well, program X is swapped into RAM from the hard disk. Guess what? this is exactly what happens if superfetch is turned off. Theres no need to write back a cached program to the hard drive if the program isn't in use. (and if the program is in use, you'd hit the hard drive penalty with or without superfetch).

Of course, not actually knowing the details behind superfetch, I could be wrong here. But it seems that in theory, there's no added penalty for superfetch. I'm not sure why so many poeple are "hoping" that this feature can be turned off. (by the way, as of RC1, it can be turned off).

I hope they have the most advanced theories on fragmentation, scheduling, paging, prediction, and hard drive thrashing. Microsoft has never had a great track record. I will await the final version.

Something to remember is that superfetch runs in background io priority. Because of the way io requests are scheduled, your foreground io request will never wait for superfetch longer than the latency of a single io request (max wait time is bounded).

> Well, SuperFetch saw a ton of memory freed to make
> room for the game, and dutifully went about
> filling the leftover free memory on a low-priority
> background disk thread.
I think that's not what's happening. 'A ton of memory freed for the game' would be 'freed' by the game by commiting or reserving it. So it would not be free but reserved.
I think it's about the 'low-priority background disk thread'. It is likely the problems you notice are due to badly prioritized threads. Wether it's the 'low-priority background thread' of a pre-release windows or wether it's some of Battlefield's necessary thread's running on a too low priority, I dont know.

how u turn off superfetch? its not lettin me use my pc at all with music programs , it lags them

>program X is swapped into RAM from the hard disk. Guess what? this is exactly what happens if superfetch is turned off.

This is correct, as I see it. I can't see any disadvantage to running SuperFetch. You don't have to erase data in RAM before changing it, you just change it. If you're not going to use the superfetched pages then it'd just load the program you chose as usual. Because of SuperFetch's low I/O priority, there's effectively no latency (as already said)

> how u turn off superfetch?

open up a command prompt, type 'net stop superfetch', and press enter. (you'll probably need admin privileges).

> its not lettin me use my pc at all with music programs , it lags them

It's probably not superfetch that's at fault (but disabling it could be a good experiment). I'd make an educated guess that it's a driver issue, but of course I can't be sure. good luck!

i tried but i got the message accesss denied and im the system admin?

>i tried but i got the message accesss denied and im the system admin?

when you open up the command prompt, open it by right clicking on the cmd.exe file, and select 'run as administrator' from the right click menu. You will have to go through the UAC dialog bs.

after doing this, you'll have a cmd window which *actually* has system admin rights. Even though you are already the sys-admin, you still have to do this... Confused? you should be. In my opinion, The UAC dialogs, unlike superfetch, are worthy of some criticism. Even if they do technically make the system more secure. More info here:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000571.html

got it , thanks

everythin runs faster now , only problem i found so far is when i start winwos, takes longer , something makes my computer think a lot after boot

Hi Jeff,
There is a way to disable superfetch in vista by setting the following registry key to a value of "0":

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnableSuperfetch

A value of 1 prefetches boot processes, 2 prefetches applications and 3 is for both.

They should have given the option to turn this setting off in the computer management mmc but that works.

mmm was guessin that it turned on by itself after boot, ill try registry edit

ok still not workin , i did set the value to 0 on registry and superfetch is still active , had to turn off again from cmd,
question my memory is still at 700 mb wheen i dont have anythin running, is vista usin those 700?

The theory on caching algorithms is still incomplete, and the practice very dependant on hardware for efficiency. I don't see where SuperFetch can manage to have predictors fiable enough to offset the (albeight small) additional cost of:
a) Reading data from the disk and filling the RAM
b) Resolve data dependancies when apps reserve some of the RAM that was used for caching.
The difference between this and L1/L2 proc-level caching being that proc cache memory is NEVER needed for anything else. That lets the founders implement caching strategies just tailored to the respective caracteristics of the hardware and cache sizes.
If Vista actually computes a caching policy on the fly, to fit the hw/sf caracteristics, think of the additionnal cost!

Does anyone wonder why they had to create a cache optimizer in the first place for Windows? It's a sad day when an operating system needs a crutch with this abundent amount of system resources!

What they really ought to have done was just design Windows NT/2000/XP to have a more customizable memory manager like Windows 9X did.

Windows 95's overall memory management was pretty bad, but the idea of holding off on using the swapfile until physical memory was almost gone wasn't half bad. At least, it wasn't if you had lots of RAM in your computer, like 64 or 128 megabytes.

Windows 98/Me introduced a supposed "improvement" in memory management by performing swapfile operations when only about a quarter of memory was in use. The main idea with this seemed to be to improve the performance of memory-starved systems. The trouble was that systems obese with memory got the "improved" treatment, too, which often led to unnecessary swapfile operations when nowhere near all physical memory was in use, leading to reduced system performance.

Thanks to the "ConservativeSwapfileUsage" and "vcache" system options, power users with loads of RAM in their systems could customize Windows' behavior when it came to memory allocation for programs and disk-caching and virtually eliminate swapfile access to bring out the best performance their systems could offer.

In Windows 2000/XP, like Win98/Me's stock configuration, the disk cache gets priority in system memory, and little-used loaded program data is shoved out to the swapfile, even when there's plenty of RAM to go around, all leading to increased swapfile activity. There is no customizability for swapfile behavior or disk cache size range. The most customizability there is for memory management is a swapfile size setting and a setting for whether applications or background tasks get more attention. The rest is hard-coded. There's no condoned way to configure the system to potentially eliminate swapfile usage.

The best that I've been able to do to get zero swapfile activity in a WinXP system is to stuff my system full of RAM(at least 512 MB, 1 GB for games) and disable the swapfile completely. This has worked extremely well for me, but many experts warn that doing this does more harm than good, supposedly.

Windows 9X may have been less stable and supposedly had a far less efficient memory manager than Windows NT/2000/XP, but the level of customizability in that memory manager, in my opinion, allowed for the potential to run far more responsively than Windows NT/2000/XP over a longer period of time. I'll admit, I still run Windows 98 SE most of the time, because it stays fully responsive longer, and XP doesn't unless I use that discouraged no-swapfile setting.

ToonPal,

I totally agree with you on disabling the swapfile. Windows XP (on my notebook) seems to like to grind the hdd for no reason, with swapfile disabled. Everything FLYS ... although there's the odd application that demands swapfile to be turned on (eg; Photoshop)

Zhichao,

Yeah, disabling swap file in XP makes the computer a lot more responsive.

Actually, Photoshop is just being stupid. When it complains and asks if you want to continue, clicking either yes/no will continue (wonder why it asks at all). Then you can work normally (never had any problem before).

Be careful disabling the swapfile. The benefits are questionable, and it generally adds more risks than it's worth for the negligible benefit:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000422.html

Some of people are really stupid, doesn't even know what they are talking about.

Superfetch will slow your computer down no matter how scheduler is well coded because it's something like emulating another Machine. Scheduler is a program and a program managed by a program doesn't get much of a cpu's speeding up features unless Superfetch is accelerated by a hardware using parallel technic. It will silently eat your resource because when it calculating threshold that's where is stops frequently, that's where the bottleneck lies. Of course it's so efficient so with a better CPU power you won't notice anything but with let's say like 1G cpu, you WILL suffer.

I suffered. After just disabling superfetch, my lag stopped. I use 1G cpu with 655 ram and I changed everything and it lagged as hell and after I disabling superfetch it stopped.

Of course it helped launching time of a program like a Game and it really works pretty well but a slight bit of a idle, scheduler will take the chance and will launch Superfetch related code and that's where your computer stops slightly and it will happen like 5 time a second and you are facked.

Turn everything on, but turn Superfetch, Prefetch, Intelligent start menu or something feature off if you are using slow machine. DLL force unload helps too.

>Be careful disabling the swapfile. The benefits are questionable, and it generally adds more risks than it's worth for the negligible benefit.

The benefit is exactly the same as SuperFetch — not having my applications become sluggish due to the System Cache stealing all their RAM. Only I don't have to wait for the action which caused the System Cache to balloon to complete.

When I first encountered the bizarro situation where more RAM made my system more sluggish and realized the cause, I tried reducing the size of my swapfile. Guess what happened? Windows XP would complain constantly about not having enough virtual memory even when plenty of physical RAM was being consumed for cache! So I disabled the swapfile and have continued to do so on every desktop system that I've upgraded to 2GB+ RAM.

What's the risk? No crash dumps. Running out of RAM is probably a Very Bad Thing but in my experience the system becomes sluggish as RAM nears exhaustion so I take that as my cue to close something unimportant, like Outlook.

> So I disabled the swapfile and have continued to do so on every desktop system that I've upgraded to 2GB+ RAM

I had some very unusual things happen to me with the swapfile disabled. The last thing I need is more voodoo on my computer at this point.

Can you point to a specific benchmark that demonstrates a concrete, factual, data-backed benefit of disabling the swapfile? If not, then why do it? You're assuming quite a bit of risk for no benefit.

Overall system performance is unlikely to be helped by disabling swap and any benchmark with a significant disk I/O component will probably perform marginally worse since the system will be unable to trade swap for cache.

On a system with excess RAM, disabling swap can solve the problem of "My long-running applications take a great deal of time to respond when they are first accessed following some disk-intensive activity." I don't mind that a new VMware instance may be marginally slower to boot if it means that I won't experience a swap-induced lag when I switch back to Visual Studio. It's a trade-off which works well for my usage patterns. Disabling swap would not be a viable option for someone whose memory needs regularly approach the amount of RAM they have and I would not be surprised by any weird behavior that occurs once RAM becomes exhausted.

PS: Bigger textarea, please.

Does ReadyBoost make hybrid hard disk drives unnecessary? As I understand it, ReadyBoost allows a USB thumb drive to be used as a cache for frequently-used hard drive content. Is that the same thing that the flash memory on a hybrid hard drive does? If one is already using ReadyBoost, how much of a performance improvement will one see from replacing one's hard drive with a hybrid hard drive?

> Does ReadyBoost make hybrid hard disk drives unnecessary?

No, because the Flash RAM on the hybrid hard drive is accessible before the OS has fully booted.. so you can speed up the boot and hibernate/suspend sequences.

For the vast majority of users, disabling the page file is a very bad idea unless you have at least 2-3x perhaps the amount of RAM you normally use. The ill effects are described all over the place. For example, some apps allocate a significant amount of memory without ever using it (or take a very long time to use it). If you have a page file, this memory won't be allocated to RAM until it's used. If you don't have a page file, you have a big chunk of RAM doing nothing. Perhaps about 0.0001% of people out there will actually gain from disabling the page file, the rest will lose out significantly. The trouble is there is a lot of FUD out there about the page file and cache. The vast majority of people are too stupid to bother to read properly to understand what on earth they're talking about. For example, a lot of people call it a swap file. It's not, it's a page file. This isn't just a difference in name, it's an important conceptial difference. I currently have 2gb which is enough for me at the moment. But I would never ever consider disabling the page file. Perhaps if I had 6gb or so I guess, but that's way too expensive.

Forgot to mention. While there are probably some users (very few) who benefit from disabling the page file, as I mentioned, you also need to bear in mind that another reason why disabling the page file is a bad idea is because Windows simply wasn't designed to not have a page file. You may not agree with this design philosophy but it was Microsoft's decision and you choose Windows so you have to live with it. You should at least be aware, if you plan to disable the page file, that MS basically creates the page file in RAM because as I mentioned by design it isn't capable of operating without a page file. While obviously it's all still in RAM, so you've fulfilled your primary purpose of preventing it ever going out to disk, this should at least tell you about the Windows design philsophy and why disabling the page file is nearly always a bad idea.

Unless you've actually seen a properly conducted benchmark you should be skeptical of anyone's claims for improvements. People have a tendency to see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. Double blind tests for example have shown how BS Monster cables are but a lot of people still claim they are super wonderful. Similarly I've seen people make bizzare claims about how much faster their computer is thanks to something when this is obviously not going to provide them a speed improvement or if it did, not to the level they are ascribing.

A lot of people say OMFG why is my page file in use when I have however much RAM. Or why is my disk thrashing every so often? Who gives a fick if it isn't affecting performance (it may cause added wear and tear, but it's unlikely to be that significant unless you need a major RAM upgrade). My point is, don't care if you disk thrases or if your page file has heavy use. Just care about performance (and when I say performance, I mean properly measured not my disk is thrasing so it must be slow). I wonder too how many people are so happy that an unused program can load up a bit faster but ignore the fact that they are degrading overall performance in many other areas. You need to consider overall performance, not single issue performance. Sure disabling the page file may improve the situation when you open up unused background programs, but what about the thousand performance hits you also suffer as a result? Humans aren't goo at measuring overall performance, so again, don't assume it's better, measure it properly. Perhaps it's because I'm a scientist but for me, the most important thing is repeatable, measured performance, not well I think it's faster...

Why would you want Windoze to use ANY memory on a slow, spinning hard drive if you have plenty of way faster RAM memory available?

Suppose you have a PC with 1G of memory and a 1G swap file. Now, suppose you add another 1G of memory so you have a total of 2G of RAM. If everything was running fine before, you won't need ANY swap file because you now have the same amount of total memory as before, except that now it's all in speedy RAM.

What does Windoze do? It now recommends a 2G or so swap file, as if mysteriously now need a total of 4G of memory. Why? Windoze does not do any analysis whatsoever. It just multiplies the amount of installed RAM by a constant and then 'recommends' the result. Stupid!

Here is another thing. Windoze does not make much if any distinction between fast RAM memory and way slow virtual memory on your HD. This is true for Windoze XP Pro, and I would be really surprised if they changed anything in Vista.

You would think that the OS would use up all available RAM and then swap to disk. Not so. The only way to stop swapping is to configure the swap file size to zero. If Windoze really needs some room on the HD, it will just take it, and politely notify you, regardless of your settings.

Case in point. I was running QUAKE 4 some time ago, and did not realize that my system was using the "Let Windoze Manage Virtual Memory" setting.

When I exited the game, I found myself waiting, and waiting, and waiting- for 20 seconds or more. I glanced at the HD light and saw it was on solidly. Aha- Windoze is using the HD for virtual memory.

I have 2G of fast RAM in my system, and no way does Quake 4 need 2G of ram (yet). So, why the h*ll was Windoze using the HD?

I reset the swap file setting to zero, like I have always had it, and tried running Quake 4 again. When I exited the game, it was instantaneous. Your mileage may vary, but if you want way faster response from your apps (especially video editing and such), and absolutely no problems running anything at all, buy more RAM and disable the swap file!

BTW, you regain 2G (or who knows how much) on your HD as a bonus.
If you want to know what's using up the rest of your HD space, I recommend Sequoia View, from the computer science department of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. It uses an amazing visualization technique called cushion treemaps to provide you with a single picture of the entire contents of your hard drive. It can be downloaded for free from
http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/

As NE said, this is Microsoft's "choice" (btw their privilege to choose). Because Quake, and practically any "windows game" let the question of memory management to be solved by the OS. So the creators of the game have to live with the OS. But the Win OS IS a multitasking system, and so it must optimize globally, and not just making favor for a particular program, or a particular class of programs. (that's one of the reasons why the hell was NT born) So why not blame Id Software for letting the OS manage their program's memory??? With all the fact that (I suppose) they knew the consequences. OS offers services. If you use them, you take the risks.
There is no viable multi-purpose solution for caching problems. If you want gaming performance, then go and buy a gaming platform, which was designed for gaming, and which can be blamed if the gaming performance is not enough, but this is another situation.

>> It just multiplies the amount of installed RAM by a constant and then 'recommends' the result. Stupid!
Do you know the underlying algorithm? Do you know the factors which resulted to that "constant" ??

A few answers to a few question a while back. First, yes on a high memory machine (>1gb) Vista uses around 700mb of mem in idle. Second, i currently have 3gigs of RAM so my view may be biased, but my I find that with superfetch turned off my pc performs FAR more sluggishly, (i.e. average app startup time up too 2secs slower). Starting up a more memory intensive application (such as Dark Messijah) seems to take no extra time than if super fetch was enabled, and seems to "free" the needed memory from the superfetch cache with no apparent problem -> I.E. no performance decrease or stutters with it enabled. This might be attributed to my 3GB of Mem, but this still leads me to believe that microsoft might actually have thought about the odd sod gamer who suddenly needs to free up 1.5gb of his "cached" memory for a game. Also as far as i can see the superfetch thread is totaly inactive during some high memory, full screen 3d applications (maybe another indication that microsoft thought about it carefully).

Also slightly more off topic, yes vista does use a larger page file. I'm not sure if it is sized in proportion to avalible disk space or installed memory, but my current (automatically configured) page file is just over 6GB in size.

Hmmmm. Seems to me personal preference also matters. I do NOT want some cache eating all of my free RAM, as I would like to know how much of it I actually have at any one time. Turning off superfetch helps a lot, as it reveals the standard windows memory leak, and allows me to tell when to reboot.

Even with superfetch off, it still shows me it's using several hundred megabytes for caching purposes. I won't mind a bit if an app takes a couple seconds longer to load the first time I use it, if I get a good idea of my actual free RAM in return.

Thanks to all who contributed to this discussion, but my mind's made up. Superfetch is OFF on my vista PC.

Dang! Spoke too soon. Yeah, it helps to turn off superfetch, but all memory still (eventually) winds up in the cache. It just takes longer. If anyone has any idea how to prevent that, please post it! I'll be searching elsewhere on the net, but this is by far the most helpful discussion I've yet found, so I'll be checking back here frequently.

Hello ;-)

Nice Article ;-)

http://www.stone1978.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=9730#9730 => here anotherone Test..........

Greetings Stone

cushion treemaps.. UGG That is such a stupid looking app that it's not useful at all.. what a joke.. I use Drivescan from Stardock and man it rocks.. it shows me how much HD space is used by each folder.. expand that folder and it shows by each subfolder.. sort by size or alphabet. I immediately find out what app is taking up so much HD room.. A true app that saves me tons of time since it's just a few files in a folder I put it on a USB device and working on a clients system to free up room.. it saves me tons of time.

Now on Superfetch I don't know if I like it at all so far. Only time will tell but if I had 2 Gigs of ram I would set my swap file to it's bare mininum 2 megs max.. and not have it using HD at all barely. I like that memory to be used in the app I am using like a game or that.. not some app I am not using at the time.

Vista is waaaaay faster when superfecth is disabled...

I have a new gaming PC and Vista is quite slow with superfetch enabled.

My apolgises I'm no expert on these things, and it nice to have an explaination on why my new laptop is struggling so much. I only have 1gb of RAM and the only thing i was running was chess that comes with windows vista (nothing fancy) and after an hour my system started to struggle and I eventually had to shut it down. It was using 96% of available ram and was continually flaging up that is was low on memory.

As explained here it's running 20+ applications in the background. Now I sorry but I don't need them all to be there to save me 2 seconds when I actually want to use one.

JP, RAM is not the only thing to make your system fast. It's not like you can have a 2.0 GHz celeron processor, 2 gigs of RAM and expect it to be blazing fast just because you have 2 gigs of RAM. There is more to the "speed" of your computer than just RAM. You say you would like an explanation of why your laptop is sluggish? We need more information to help. What kind of laptop? What kind of processor? etc...

ps... this thread is nice :)

Great post, i just built a new system with 2 gigs of ram and vista, let me tell you, best desktop experiance i have ever had.

Checked this out from Digg. I dugg it.. :)

Thanks to EVERYONE for the very constructive and informative comments!

-- Maxximus

Wow things Linux doing for ages. Welcome to the new millenium.

What I found better than SequoiaView and Drivescan is something called SpaceMonger. Think of SequoiaView (Picture Boxes) mixed with Drivescan's flexibility. It lists the folders and subfolders inside the boxes, whichever one is taking up more space.

Check it out, I've been using it for quite a while and it's been saving quite a lot of disk space.

http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/

If you don't want to pay for it download the old 2.1 version, it works just as well.

I'm glad someone is finally explaining people how Windows works. Many of my friends have seen that "Vista eats up all their memory" and switched back to XP because of this false perception. Thank you for the excellent article!

Seems to me like we're missing the point about caching. The trick with a cache is how to remove unwanted pages, not fill them up with gunk that won't be used anytime soon. You buy enough memory for your computer so it can cache your normal working set of programs and data. You don't buy twice the amount of RAM you need on the offchance you're going to open that powerpoint or whatever that you need every couple of weeks.

Agreed re the sticky bit - for those who don't know the history of Unix you could apply a sticky bit to an executable that you expected to use all the time...when it was first executed the binary then "stuck" in memory. I should add that Unix only needed this facillity when RAM was very scarce and caching algorithms primitive. We're talking about the 1970's here.

One of the first comment from new users on linux is: "Hey, Linux is eating all my memory. With Windows, I had much more free memory!".

After explaining that Linux use the memory for caching disk access, they are happy with that.

Very funny to see the same question on windows some years later... :)

The strategy for using memory is different, but the question is the same.

Its optional, all I did is switched off superfetch from the services by using msonfig and under services browse to superfetch and just untick it

I HAVE 2gb of memory and I AM using vista 64bit ultima..... its super fast when I play bf2142 after switching the SF off, I had the same problem before when SF is on and playing the game.

Note: You need at least 4GB of memory in order to play any game smoothly + SF on.

WTF? If you're so concerned about gaming, do yourself a favour. Upgrade your RAM for starters. 4GB if you're dead set serious about gaming (and not the cheap stuff either, I'm running Corsair TwinX C2 Pro Dual 3200. That stuff is synchronised as a pair which is you-beaut for dual-cores).

If you're so concerned about the OS chewing up Page Files while it tries to recover its original status before you played that all-encompassing game for 6 hours straight, just buy yourself another HDD and move the Page Files via a 'Virtual RAID' to the 2nd HDD. Want more Page Files for Vista to play with? No worries, just set values for the 2nd HDD (as well as the original values for the 1st HDD) and you can double your Page File capacity.

If you're so concerned about the life expectancy of your hardware, then don't be. Any sane PC enthusiast will have long since upgraded to superior technology before that old HDD becomes unstable and collapses in on itself causing a black hole which starts growing larger as it twists and absorbs our dimension into the nether-regions of time and space. In other words, don't be a miser - thrash it while you have it. Push it to the extreme and beyond. If you have a decent enough system ie. built it yourself using QUALITY parts, she'll love you for it.

Remember, there is no substitute for quality. You pay for what you get - just make sure you do your homework first.

Get a Mac.

The question should actually be: "Why did previous versions of Windows use the memory so inefficiently, when so many other operating systems (ie Linux) have been doing this for ages?"

Very interesting! Thanks for posting.

The only reason i switched from openSUSE to Windows XP is because some games are made with DirectX, and WINE its not optimized enough to make them playable under Linux-like systems.

I'll stick with my TinyXP Beast Edition that only takes 40 Mb of RAM! Can you believe that!?!

I hope this guy is kidding. For one thing only half of his memory is being used. and secondly has he not read anything about Vista at all? there is a new memory management system that uses much more RAM to keep the speed of the system up. get more RAM if your worried about it

"Why did previous versions of Windows use the memory so inefficiently, when so many other operating systems (ie Linux) have been doing this for ages?"

If you're refering to linux disk cache then I suggest you read up on it a bit more because it's NOT doing the same thing as superfetch. It actually works pretty much just like XP and 2000 did...

4gb of DDR1... Move up to DDR2 and enjoy some real performance. Read up on Corsairs - They only take the same ole RAM anyone else has and puts their name on it with a heat sink. Sometimes overclocking the RAM and then having people wonder why the RAM goes bad and its supposed to be so nice. If your running PC3200 on dual core, you've waisted your money - You will not get the performance out of a 939 socket dual core, that you would get out of a Socket 940 dual core that uses DDR2. So in other words, my 2GB DDR2 800mhz would blow your Corsair 4GB DDR1 (400mhz) out of the water. Vista does run better than XP - Superfetch seems to be a nice answer and the Windows team has a whole new group of people. In due time things will be worked out and I'm all for linux and playing games on Linux - But I feel my 8800 would go to waist playing older DirectX games. I prefer new games, no something thats been out for 3 years. Expect for BF2 :P

hehe quality?! - So if you pay more it must be nicer?? hahahah

No no, if it has LEDs on the RAM, it MUST be nice! hahahahaha

What's so efficient about 92 MB paged kernel memory anyway?

So they finally started doing the sort of memory management that *nix has used for 25 years. YAWN!

Had 1GB on my laptop, with about 600MB being used; added one more GB and now the usage is about 1GB. The goal was to reduce hardrive generated heat(and the fan noise), but the way it turned out, filling up the last available memory slot, (i'm guessing) has filled up an air pocket and my fans are running more often than before :( Can't believe the memory would be generating as much heat as the hardrive spinning...)

Hmm, for those people that are complaining about memory usage in the way this article states, try looking at linux computer memory usage. It is the same and linux has been doing it for a long time. Vista is just catching up on this.

Jeff,

Excellent Article! And Thanks for the Insight! Now I see there are plenty of comment and blog reactions to your article. Is it possible for you to rewrite/add something to your article..which takes some of the important points in the blog/comment reactions and advice us *How exactly Superfetch is good and under what circumstances, or it should be disabled under certain circumstances? And even if it should be disabled, how do you go around doing it ?* I guess lot of people would appreciate the eloquent way you phrase the problem and solutions to it. Thanks!

Interesting. I'll have to start yelling at my local linux guy because he obviously hasnt optimised linux to use up all my memory on duplicate cache requests that fill up my memory and decrease the performance of my computer.

Damn him! How dare he write something that isnt broken and bloated!

I like the days in NT4 where the original writers of the cache algorithms knew how badly designed they were and capped its memory limit at 25% of your system memory. Oh, if only the marketing drones in a technical conference showing off win2k beta1 werent shown that they couldnt increase the cache memory to use up 1/2 the system resources then we'd have computers that would still be kinda fast but wouldnt need 4gb of ram to be running 'efficiently'

I agree with Western Infidels about speed and responsiveness. A program and being sluggish because SuperFetch is caching a whole bunch of stuff into my RAM is more than enough reason for me to put off considering Vista for another year or two until it gets ironed out. Either that or just switching to Ubuntu and 'Wine'-ing all my favorite older programs.

Being in IT and having spent some time talking with a few guys from microsoft at a company showing of vista they recommended that everyone use 2GB really.

1GB is what's recommened as a minimum on the box

If you run 3GB+ vista DOESN'T use all your ram (it seems to stop on my system at just under 3GB used). After evaluating quite a lot of the new technologies I think superfetch is awesome but as I said you need a lot of ram for it really......

As for upgrading to vista I've seem tons and tons of reviews slagging it off with no technical commentary at all, these reviews seem to be written either by mac/linux users or people who just can't be bothered to do any research into what vista can actually do and they hate microsoft just because.

As an OS Vista has got some AWESOME features and superfetch is one of them but you WILL NEED a lot of ram to make the most of it. For those people without lots of ram try adding a 2GB flash drive (which are cheap) and configuring the flash drive using READYBOOST (another new feature) to improve performace..

Out of all the people in this thread I wonder how many have objectively reviewed vista and how many are linux fan boys who have just looked for an excuse not to use it???

At present there are a lot of driver issues around the 64Bit version but for anyone that has used it the performance in processor intensive apps is nothing short of phenominal.

This happens on my mac also. No matter how much ram I have, it uses up all of it within a few hours. Pisses me off, as I like to have at least 25% of my ram unused for opening up new applications. I can hear the disk grind working like hell when the memory usage goes to 95%.

Actually, I dont even know if its caching. I tend to think the mac is just memory leaking like crazy. Hopefully 10.5 will fix it with objective c garbage collection.

I turned SuperFetch off on my vista machine (with 2gigs of ram) and theres a noticable performance improvement. However like some people said, it just delays the fill up. Eventually it uses everything, even when you close all your applications. I wish they would fix this and give power users an option to manage our own F*#$&ing memory.

This seems to be a fundamental shift in computer architecture. It used to be that the hard drive was 'virtual memory'. Now the memory is 'virtual hard drive'...

Times are changing.

FINE. Your hard drive runs like a maniac becuase everything in memory has to be swapped to the page file so there can be enough space in ram to load your new program.

That is why memory is best EMPTY. So we do not have thrashing hard drives. Yes its sometimes less efficent, but I want my hard drive stopped and memory empty when I run my computer.

Is that so bad ? Hell no. Thrashing hard drives is bad not just ebcuase of the noise but it laggs the computer.

You have 1277 cache, with 2045MB total .. so, you're using almost 800MB of RAM doing what? Where is the REST of your RAM?

Microsoft's caching methods are exceptionally piss poor, and always have been.

Patrick: All operating systems have always used spare ram as drive cache, if they were capable of doing so.. Just that Microsoft's form of it sucks. All the way back to "FASTDRIVE" or whatever the hell DOS 5's cache program was called. It's horrible. And, of course, ther'es the fact that until Gigabytes of RAM became common, Windows had a tendency to use nearly all of your ram, using only it's minimum caching.

...
It'd be sweet if someone could write programs to replace Microsoft's piss poor internal parts.

Matt, you don't understand how this works. The cache is not a set size, equal to like 80% of your RAM, or whatever. If the system needs RAM, to run a program, it should immediatly free Cache RAM. Also, if running the hard drive while you're not trying to directly use what the hard drive is caching is lagging your system, then you need to invest in some newer hard drives, or SCSI drives.

So; here is a simple question:

How do you know when you need more memory for a system? Looking for a simple way; instead of having to add up columns.

It's very interesting but it doesn't seem to explain why Vista overall is slower than XP.
If these new methods are clever at prefetching pages and managing cache, why is it slower than XP ?
I would of expected each Windows release to be tuned and faster than the previous version, especially with these new features.

Eric,

I want only the programs I choose to be running to run. I want the computer to have as close to zero CPU cycles and the HD stopped except for when programs I choose to run need either. I want my memory empty.

none2,

Vistas slower becuase of the so called optimizations like prefetch and UAC and especially all the indexing.

Its like build in malware...

Ok first off, this little story is a new spin on a typical corporate myth to explain why their latest program uses more memory than last - 'we reserve memory as a cache' etc. I remember Adobe using it a few times, and even XP used it.

Remember that prefetching DOES NOT MAKE YOUR SYSTEM RUN FASTER! It only loads commonly used junk at startup rather than when you double click the icon! This is logical, think about it. Now, if you boot your computer and decide you don't want to run office first off, or whatever, or you don't just have 5 or 6 apps installed on your computer, it will actually be far, far slower with prefetch.

Lastly, you don't really know how memory works. When 'notepad' in your example is loaded into memory, there is no clearing of memory or anything like that, it simply overwrites an area and assigns it an set of RVA's. The program doesn't know whether it is loaded into swap or phys mem. Windows is so terrible it tends to swap out to disk even when only 10-20% of your memory is used... would you trust prefetch not to swap after this?

Lastly, filling up your disk with possible data is generally a BAD idea since any new data (and there will always be new data loaded, even with commonly used programs, think documents, images, etc) will push itself into memory causing cached stuff to swap. So prefetching will most definitely cause MORE swapping rather than less.

Congrats on listening to the microsoft PR campaign, you absorbed the ambiguous details really well.

I just turned off superprefetching and indexing services and I still managed to type this. Funny how my HD is quite and I have 1.2 gigs of free ram.

My CPU cycles on both my CPU cores are well close to zero.

OMG MY COMPUTER IS NOT OPTIMIZED. good

Woopee!

Finally a way to disable SF. I play company of heroes (COH) on my brand new box, an E6600, 2GB ddr2, 8800GTS, runs in 1280x1024 in max settings in COH in XP with no problems w.r.t. disk activity/lags and I get great performance.

I then tried playing under Vista, and I ran into heavy laggy situations nearly instantly, since COH managed to use 1.3GB RAM. The drive was constantly active during the lags, I'm sure it's SF bogging it down. After a game COH crashes if I tab out to desktop, so maybe I'll get lucky and avoid that too when I disable SF (though I doubt that is related directly to SF).

I'll try disabling SF when I get back home from work today, and find out if that saves me. I'd love to use Vista because of the added security features, but I won't sacrifice my gaming experience like that since I don't have problems with security in XP very often.

You idiots that disable the swap file are complete fools. Of course, this is the internet, full of millions of "self-made experts".....oh pahleze. ;)

The biggest shame is that Windows in the year 2007 is still a "hardcoded" piece of shit. It will be pretty amazing if we could "improve" the system on our own.

is there a way to make vista use less memory for the cache ?

Guys,,this vista caused me many problems,,in many ways,....I'm from Bulgaria and I'm sorry if my english doesn't sound to you good....I don't know the hardware very well but i know one thing,,I have never
seen system like Vista usin' so much memory all the time.That's makes me worried!!!!Why,why,,why.......the pc doesn't do anything,,,,and i'm using 700,...800 MB from 2G,...?????and if I start doing somthing going up to 1300 MB,,,what the .....uck is that????????I'm wondering if i start to do something with 3ds Max ,,how much memory do I have to have???????2,3,4,5 GB??????????????

to "omg"

I suffered. After just disabling superfetch, my lag stopped. I use 1G cpu with 655 ram and I changed everything and it lagged as hell and after I disabling superfetch it stopped. <-- lol

1GB CPU is "weak" at best for Vista, no wonder you seemed to have lag

Hi there, interesting article (and comments).

1. Linux uses that same caching strategy for years, just without superfetch. At college I had my linux machine running constantly for weeks and after a few days it touched the disk only when I saved or loaded a file. All applications were cached in memory.

2. Also the free moemory syndrome you observed in Vista is same in Linux. As explained above, free memory is wasted memory.

3. Superfetch is usefull for people with regular behavior paterns. Start PC, open outlook, word, explorer, winamp and work, close at end of shift. Other than that, it is a hindrance.

4. I'd think it gets worse with more RAM you have. Imagine that after booting superfetch is trying to precache 4GB of ram. That takes several minutes even from a fast hdd. I once saw a linux vs winxp comparison where the guy measured boot up times. he did time the start of the OS until the hdd stopped crunching data. XP was the winner (guess why). I'd like to see that test repeated with vista on a 4GB machine and superfetch on :-))

Linux users have the pre-load that is like the old prefetch used in Windows XP. Windows Vista superfetch is better than linux's pre-load, because the superfetch technology uses artificial intelligence technics.

Hey, whoa, I just read all of the comments here, took me a good 20 minutes.

Thanks to everyone who posted usefull information :P

I work with MS Servers all day. I have a half decent laptop that I generaly only use for work (RDP, Office, Internet etc.), its a 1.6 Duo, 1gig RAM. Worked perfectly for my needs under XP. I recently dual booted my machine with Vista (instantly disabled all the bubbly theme crap and aero bar) and noticed a severe drop in performance just using IE and office. Not to mention the fact that my laptop lags sometimes when just playing an MP3 (becomes jerky).

I have disable SF, Indexing and auto defrag and have seen a massive increase in performance.

Now as I understand it, the whole idea of the above services was to improve the experience of a user just like myself. I don't play games on this laptop, I use it for work, same stuff day in, day out. Why then has my experiance improved from disabling these? Somethings not quite right there...

To help XP to use more of it's RAM constructively, I have been using a progam called Speedbooster by disktrix

I know it's doing something..

I experienced the same thing playing Battlefield 2142 demo with 2 gbs of Ram. Drive would constantly run like it was burning it up. So I just put in 4gbs to test it out. IT STILL DOES IT! GRR. Forever and ever, as you play the game, the disk is working away, getting hotter and hotter. BF2142 does not do this under XP.

I don't know if SUPERFETCH IS THE CULPRIT, but it may also be SEARCH INDEXER... watching under the Resource Meter (reached by pulling up task manager, then clicking Resource Monitor button under Performance Tab, then dropping down Disk drop down menu), I saw it grinding away as well.

SO... IT MAY ALSO BE THAT THE BLASTED SEARCH INDEXER... I swear, if that's anything like that blasted Fast Find under Micrsoft Office, I'm going to shit a brick.

"How do I disable the search indexer?

After you install Windows Vista it will begin looking through your hard disks and building an index of your files. This is done in the background at a very low priority so as not to disturb you too much, so this process can take a long time. Durring this time, you will notice your hard drive light is constantly flashing.

While this process is supposed to be unobtrusive, some people have reported that the indexer slows their computer down so much that it's practically unusable. In this case, it is necessary to disable the indexer by following these steps:

1. Go Start: Control Panels
2. Click on icon Administrative Tools
3. Click on Services
4. Scroll down list to Window Search
5. Stop the process
6. Right click on it, do properties, change from Automatic Start to Manual

Probably windows vista has been tilored on low level users which use a computers for web browsing or listening to music, so the file load is the most expensive thing they may experience. Cachin files to memory then can be a good shortcut to achieve better performance.

The problem is for advanced users that really depend on system performance and free memory, like CAD, 3d animation softwares. Let's plot a simple scenario:
1) my Windows Vista boots and start to fill all my memory of crap I probably don't need.
2) Wow, my usually used software start in 2 seconds instead of 12.. but daily I load it just a couple of times in 10 hours work. I gained 20 seconds of productivity in my whole working day.
3) Then I start using that software. Contente cration softwares, like 3d animation packages, are very resopurce hungry. They must be anle to grow from 200MB to 2GB of needed memory in just few milliseconds. 4) Since the memory is not just free I suppose my application memory allocation will require much more time, because all the windows cachin crap needs to be flushed.
5) Differently from a game than once loaded in memory it can run pretty smooth for all the gaming session (so games could soffer of perfomance degaradation only in the ferts few minutes?). COntent creation software, ans scientific simulation softwares will keep to allocate a free memory as they need it. Maybe the program need 1GB just for a couple of seconds, then it will run with a low memory usega for other seconds and then up again. This is svery tipical. I'm pretty sure Windows will try to fill up the memory again as soon as it's released from my application, resulting a strong performace degradation. Windowns will use lot of processing power just to load data into memory, and just few second after all that cache need to be flushed because I need that memory.

All this will result in a very strong performance degradation.
I completely disagree with people that says unused memory is just wasted memory. Filling memory with any stuff is consuming processin power, and a computer have to execute just the absolute minimum to be as fast as it can when the user is requesting it to compute something.

I think I won't move to windows vista unless I don't have any other choiche.

I've had a vaio laptop running xp since 2004 and i'm probably going to buy a new laptop before the end of the year, but i'm concerned about how well vista will work, as i often use demanding applications. This is mostly because i'm an architecture student so as well as needing to run small programs like a few IE windows, Messenger, media player, at the same time, i have also in the past used Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time as archiCAD, and wonder whether the demanding visuals of Vista couple with the memory management system will be able to efficiently manage switching between these programs.
Something I find with XP is that i will have to restart my laptop to 'refresh' the RAM, as it seems to clog-up, i don't see why after a program has closed the RAM it was using can be cleared, but obviously i am no expert, and i would just like to know if anyone posting on here has any advice?

I HAVE SAME problem with Ram as lot of user are already saying,but mine notebook is having one more problem.
"when i start notebook the free ram shows 700 mb and use memory shows 800.the addition doen not count to 2040 since i have 2 GB RAM.
after runnign any small application it comes down to 140 MB.
Problem Starts now when i start installing any software (i trying Visual Studio 2005 then Free memory Comedown up to 6MB then error message shows that "can not copy delete/setup.exe file to system".
again on rebooting, and without running any application installation starts but slows down drastically.(seems like vista was trying my patience)and i gave up..

can any one comment on this Vista Installation Issue..

How can you really compare memory usage if you have 61 processes running on Vista, while only 44 processes running on Xp?

Well theres one thing for sure.
Vista us a money hungry Operating System.
I mean Bill Gates is Rich enough,why does he make Vista so expensive?
Anyway Vista sucks on average computers.
Well im running windows vista ultimate 64bit version.
and I dont seem to have much problem on my comp.
If it helps in anyway here is my comp specifications.

Intel Dual Core 3.6 Ghz extended 64 technology.
2.5 GB RAM(supports upto 4 GB RAM.
256 Graphics.

My question is "how much is Microsoft paying you?"

So I look at that screen shot and I see 1200 MB in cache, 2045 of system memory, and 6 MB free. And I have to wonder -- what is so hard to understand here?

The problem is NOT the 1200 MB of cache. Agressive use of memory for caching is a very good thing. (In fact, Linux has been doing it for years)

The problem is the 800 MB of memory required to run "a few instances of IE... plus one remote desktop".

Also: "I noticed that the system was a little sluggish, and the drive was running constantly. This was very unusual and totally unlike the behavior under Windows XP."

How about 'unacceptable'? If it were simply releasing cache, it would not need to access the disk drive. It really sounds like it was swapping things out to the hard drive INSTEAD OF releasing cache. That's just ridiculous.

***HERE IS THE BOTTOM LINE***

There is something wrong with this picture. The fact that we are even having this discussion, asking ourselves how well our current generation power-user applications such as 3D, Cad, Audio, Gaming, etc. will work is rediculous. I don't care how you try to slice it, machines with MORE than capable hardware should not see degradation in performance of software because of Vista - that's backwards!

/thread

Definitely feels better with superfetch turned off...

DISABLED in services
firewall
defender
superfetch

and if you have, let say router with firewall, you can disable windows defender and windows firewall and increase HDD access time by considerable amount.. I recommend that you use nod32 and it will give you much better substitute for defender, and all together I am finally happy with my system performance.

**
Core 2 Duo T5500
1GB ram 667
80GB HDD
intel 950

Experience index
cpu 4.7
ram 4.5
gaming 3.2
aero 3.1
hdd 4.8

Hhhm, definitely see an improvement after disabling the search rubbish and auto defrag, they can stay off. Superfetch off left me with more free RAM, but the system seemed a little more sluggish.

I have a Turion 64x2 with 1 Gig RAM and after switching off the search indexer and defrag, aswell as a few other unneeded services, I am left with a system that works much better with superfetch activated.

However, I do really game with this machine much, more general usage, but games seem a little laggy for the first 20 or 30 seconds, but after that they are fine, I simply wait a few seconds before playing.

Overall performance of Vista Home Premium for me is better than XP.

:edit: sorry above should read "However, I do *NOT* really game with this machine much"

Just an idea, maybe microsoft could take into consideration and giving control back to the consumer.

Imagine this:

Maybe a taskbar
1st thing on the taskbar has highest priority, last thing on taskbar has least priority. Like numbered 1 to 5.
And being able to drag and drop applications to different areas on taskbar to adjust priority.
You can keep an eye on your priorities and know at all times what your priorities are just by looking at your taskbar. And the consumer has total control. And user friendly because the taskbar has always been there, therefore they know what it looks like.
Then do something similar for background tasks ie virus scanner etc, like the toolbar.
Just an idear.
Mast

I'm in the same situation as you Gareth. I use my laptop mostly for work, internet, and sometimes some other programs and I've experienced various problems and delays just with playing a playlist in windows media player, having 3 word files open and 5 tabs open in my web browser. This is ridiculous to have in a new computer with just about the fastest processor in laptops available t7200 core 2 duo, 2gb of ram, and 100gb 7200rpm hard drive. My old laptop with pentium M, 1gb of ram could do three times each of those tasks plus run other programs without a hiccup (that laptop got stolen so that's why I had to get a new one). I've always been a Microsoft fan, but my frustrations are with Microsoft for being a billion dollar company but not being able to deliver a functional product. I have no idea why other companies that offer their products for free make products that are twice as good as many of Microsoft products.

you guys are complaining? I have amd 64 X2 4200+ with 2GB of ddr2 RAM, i did a clean install of vista business. once the comp starts up, i have about 45MB, thats right, 45MB of free ram left. msn messenger takes a min to start up, and since i do a lot of programming, visual basic 2005 takes about 2-3 mins to fully start up. i think thats ridiculous. my old intel pentium III with 800MHZ processor and 368MB RAM running XP pro was doing a way better job than vista. and lets not mention that vista IS A rip off of Mac OS X.
check this out and laugh your ass off, cause i sure did.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QdGt3ix2CQ

Vista is all bollox. I use windows 98 with an updated PC, and its fast!. Much better than all this Vista & XP stuff. And you can easily pirate stuff too!.

sure. win98 is a GREAT oS.
LOL.. for morons who believe this.....

Ok i have been reading all posts and my conclusion is this:

First off, alot of linux users here are saying that linux is doing this all the time, i doubt it. It might have better memory usage or whatever, but what vista does doesn't work.

A.I. if that is what superfetch does in the most basic way of AI then it is only usefull for the most basic users, the people that use it for work, start up mail, working program IE. then doing whatever you do with those programs, and at the end of the day you turn it all off and go home.

An advanced user never does the same with the pc so the AI would never know what you will be doing that day. That is if Vista has any form of AI.

Why is Vista slow on older machines? Because graphics and 3d in Vista are used way more then xp ever used and therefor needs a new age pc.
I mean, 1 gig was the minimum allready a couple of years ago. We are getting better processors, better graphics cards and others but why not more memory??

I just tryed to unpack 2 rarfiles both arround 4 gig and then started up IE it took me 2 min to start it up, i mean my pentium 2 was faster than that.

But a problem with all microsoft products is, that they aren't optimised for all the drivers, programs, ways of use,... something that would be impossible since there are millions of ways people use their pc. To be true i always sayed, don't switch os till they are about a year old. With vista i had to since the 8800 GTX uses directx 10 and will need viste to get the most out of my card. I mean we all hate microsoft, but in the end 85% orso of the people use it, including me.

Bottem line is, i and i think many with me don't what everything in my ram, i want to have my programs start up faster not have my file unpacked 1 min faster but meanwhile having to look at the status bar waiting for it to be unpacked because it won't start up any other programs.

For now i am going to see how i can decease the visual and the use of Vista and trying to get it optimized for my way of pc use. I don't care how vista looks since i am looking at the programs i am using, not at my desktop.

I am not saying i am an expert, just pointing out the way i see it.
greets

Just one interesting little comment popped up that was screaming to corrected, namely this:

> 4gb of DDR1... Move up to DDR2 and enjoy some real performance.
> So in other words, my 2GB DDR2 800mhz would blow your Corsair 4GB DDR1 (400mhz) out of the water.

Fact of the matter here is that memory clock speed barely matters any more.. DDR400 vs DDR2/800 has very little difference; even DDR2/533 vs DDR2/1066 has little, if any, difference. Core 2 sees some (SMALL) benefit from running memory synchronously with the FSB, but otherwise there is no "MASSIVE" performance benefit. I challenge any of you to, empirically, prove that memory that runs twice as slow (i.e., DDR2/533 vs DDR2/1066) can make a real (>5%) difference in performance. You'll find that it doesn't, on the same platform (CPU, motherboard, memory) having the memory running at DDR2/1066 will make -VERY- little difference in performance compared to DDR2/533.

PC's have already passed the point where higher memory frequencies translates to very small performance gains. There's no point in purchasing those expensive "fast" and hot running memory kits. They'll perform only marginally better then memory that's significantly cheaper.

"But Vista treats system memory like a cache much more aggressively and effectively than any other version of Windows."

So why is it sooooooo much slower than XPSP2 ? The most basic of tasks such as opening Notepad are dreadfully slow when compared to XP and even Win2K Pro was faster on a 1GHz machine with 256MB of RAM. Today I have an AMD 64x2 4600+ with 2GB of Super Talent RAM, an ATI x600 256MB video card and 1TB of SATA II drives all capable of spewing data at incredible rates and yet Vista is simply dog slow. This whole bit about SuperFetch and other technologies built into Vista would be great if they actually worked however what I'm seeing is a return to bloatware that is mandating unnecessary hardware expense with little if any return on the investment.

Further, the GUI just plain sux. If I wanted a Mac I would have bought one. I am well over the age of 10 and haven't watched Popeye by myself for quite some time. I want a real file manager not some sluggish piece of bloatware that has too many capabilities to do things I could care less about. And all of it is wrapped up in a nice dark Aero theme. YUCK !

And why didn't they include the XP theme rather than the Windows Classic ? I could deal with Classic if it really looked like Win2K but it's some bastardized mix of Vista and win2K that makes me cringe everytime I see it.

Allow me to clarify one thing. I use my computer for work and basic entertainment. I couldn't care less about W.O.W., BF 2142, Halo, or even playing flight sims. I have something called a "life" and most people playing these games will tell you that they don't so they bought one and installed it in a computer. No, I use a computer for building websites. For accessing information from groups of like-minded people. For finding materials and services for purchase. For organizing documents, images, music and videos. I want to do all of the above and more in the most effecient and most enjoyable manner possible. Why do I ride a 1000cc motorcycle ? Because it's fast, it's effecient and it's fun. Vista is none of these.

Silver you know what they say. Don't like it don't use it. When XP first appeared it took a while to wait for the shut down feature... now it's faster. give Vista some time and the hardware will make it faster... it's a lil bit more secure than XP, and it has a nice GUI. I have to say one more thing. if all the big companies like Intel, AMD and other will switch to Vista it means that this version of Windows is better than the old one (that's why its new to be better)

Do you realy have to defrag RAM?

Windows XP/2K/2K3 paid for my house.
And my cars.

Linux pays for my holidays. And my wife's wedding ring.

Vista will finance my kid's education.

I hope you all keep noobing out on this one so that real experts can keep making a fortune.

Having my frequently used programs cached in memory waiting to be activated quickly instead of the slow HDD load is fantastic but I just wish I had control over which programs should be cached or not and then it would be brilliant!

On my Vista PC I have timed starting an application directly after reboot and login. As I am a developer this was done to check performance of the application with an empty filesystem cache because it will access a lot of small files. The result was kind of interesting, at least to me.

The application startup just after login is 2-3 times longer whenever the ReadyBoost service is enabled. This is regardless of whether the USB flash memory is plugged in or not. Using the aforementioned method with the Task Manager and the Resource Monitor it looks to me like readyboot is doing some fancy boot analysis and saving the result to disk. Then if the flash memory is plugged in this process will then continue by writing/reading to the ReadyBoost flash memory which isn't that resource intensive.

I tend to want to start to use applications directly after login so this method of "boot speedup" isn't that useful to me. It is cheating to simply show the desktop before it is usable :)

Anyone with similar experience with readboo(s)t at startup?

I'm kinda with one or two others here on different ways.......:

1) yes XP was terrible when it first came out but now its great (ok maybe slight exageration)

2) I just bought a desktop Intel D915 processor, 512mb ram, 128mb ATI, and its terribly slow. It's like someone is inside winding up a generator (buying a 1gb ram next week)

Point being why do they release things that don't work properly. Ooh buy this Car with no engine, buy this house with no windows, buy this woman with no.......you get the point.

Raaaaa but knows it will get better when they release 'Windows Vista Service Pack 5 (2011)' which incidentally will be just before they release Windows Twix.

okay dumb moment <----- noob whatever....lol

Physical Memory (MB)
Total 446
Cached 178
Free 4

Now i'm doing the math but what is wrong.......... 446-178=4..... Yeah i'd like someone to explain it in a bit more simpleton words.

Hi Adrian, I suspect that you see 446 mb because 64 MB of your 512 MB is shared by on-board graphics as video memory.

I definitely recommend 1 GB minimum for Vista, just as I recommended 512 MB for Windows XP back in 2002/2003..

Hello Mr Atwood,

Yeah, i had 512mb on my old pc back in 2002 (XP). But when i bought new one no-one in store mentions how Vista is RAM hungry.

I was kinda referring to the 'FREE' part being only 4. Sorry. 446mb Total minus the cached amount = free. but the math don't work.

Purchasing 1gb (ordering shall we say) friday cant wait to see if puts a rocket up its arse or merely pushes it a little. Can upgrade to 2gb though if necessary.

1GB ram for Vista. I run it with just 512MB and it works just as well as XP on just about the same load. So I say Vista works fine on 512. After all I get no slowdown in any of my games and some of them need a lot of resources. For a 512MB memory system and I even run aero. I don’t run the sidebar all the time because I don’t see the point.

I run vista on the same laptop i ran XP on earlier. In my experience Vista is a lot slower. So this new way of handling memory doesn't seem all that good. Apps do not start/shut down faster. And the boot process is so slow I have to busy myself with something else during (like rebooting my Linux machine 10 times in the same amount of time, just for fun) or I'll freak out with technostress :) It