Paul: Win10 Laptop Using Hard Disk As Memory!

[Chris K-Man]

Hi Paul, Hope you are safe during the pandemic.

As stated above, My 2015 HP laptop, Windows 10 Home Edition,
originally with 4GB RAM and doubled by me, is still paging to the
hard drive, and using onlyup to 3.5 GB of the 7.4 now visible and
available.

I reduced the Page File in settings to only 100mB or some such,
but this behavior is continuing.

What else can I check?

[Paul]

Well, the machines are full of fun behaviors.

I'm on Win7 right now (since my Typing Machine died
about a month ago), and I see a weird behavior. And I
don't know what I've added to do it.

Steps for mine:

1) Boot machine.
2) Machine uses too much RAM for an idle computer.
3) Command Prompt (you don't have to be administrator)

testlimit64.exe -d 1 -c 8500 # The number on the end, is slightly more
# than the "real" amount of available RAM.

Doing that, "squeezes" the machine. You press control-C
to stop that program, and it releases the RAM. But the
machine does not "soak up" the released RAM. There is a
"permanent change" to behavior.

Now, if I don't do step 3, it might take 20 seconds for
Firefox to start, 10 seconds for Thunderbird to start.

If I apply the memory squeezing line, the machine launches
programs "almost as fast as a real computer". It's sad really.

*******

I used to think this might be some kind of SuperFetch behavior,
but I can't be sure. And the behavior was not there, when I
first started using this particular Windows 7 C: again.

In your case, I would start by checking whether the memory
is registering or not. Programs like CPUZ, all they can do, is
report which DIMMs are readable on the SPD bus. If the CPU socket
was making bad contact, the BIOS testing procedure for RAM,
may have automatically disqualified a stick or stick(s) of RAM.

If I try Start : Run : msinfo32.exe, I see:

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 64.0 GB
Available Physical Memory 7.73 GB

and that's because my RAMDisk is running. If I switch off the RAMdisk

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 64.0 GB
Available Physical Memory 61.3 GB

which means 2.7GB is being used, partly for the USENET client.
If I apply memory pressure, I get it to

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 64.0 GB
Available Physical Memory 61.5 GB

and I find that SVCHOST 672 (housing SysMain) is using
750MB of RAM. And SysMain happens to be SuperFetch. SuperFetch
is known for both memory gluttony, as well as occasionally
railing a CPU core. A moment ago, SuperFetch was up to 1GB.
Perhaps part of the reason, is a disk drive with 15 partitions
or so is connected. But SuperFetch should mostly be worried about
C: and not other partitions.

Summary: Start : Run : msinfo32.exe
and look for clues. Is the 8GB of
RAM really registered ??? Sometimes, there
is a reason for this.

And even though msinfo32 has info, when it comes
to mobo and chipset detail, you still need CPUZ

https://www.cpuid.com/downloads/cpu-z/cpu-z_1.98-en.zip

Paul

[Chris K-Man]

_________________________

Hello, and thanks for the information.

Here is what's listed, RE: RAM, verbatim:

"Installed Physical Memory(RAM) 8.0
Total Physical Memory 7.89GB
Available Physical Memory 5.31GB
Total Virtual Memory 5.24GB
Page File Space 100MB*"

*The latter reflects what I've set the initial Page File space down to. Maximum
is 600MB.

So the machine is seeing all the RAM, and accounting for what is being used right now.

It is running much better today since today I remembered to restart the machine after
adjusting Page parameters. Paging only a little, just after arrival at my desktop, compared
to what it was doing before: Pegging my HDD to 100%!

[JJ]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2021 13:34:09 -0500, Paul wrote:
>
> If I apply the memory squeezing line, the machine launches
> programs "almost as fast as a real computer". It's sad really.

That's due to memory block fragmentation. That tool allocates multiple
non-swappable continous memory block as many and as large as possible. It
forces all swappable memory blocks in RAM of other applications to be moved
into paging file.

When the memory is released, it leaves large continuous free memory spaces.
i.e. it preallocates continuous free memory space. So the system doesn't
need to move swappable memory blocks in RAM when loading big a application,
because there's enough continuous free memory space already.

So, even if there's enough free memory space, it doesn't mean that it has
enough continuous free memory space for an application if it needs one. If a
continous memory space is required and there is not free continuous memory
large enough for it, memory swapping will occur to make the needed
continuous memory space - and that will add more time.

When free continuous free space can not be achieved, the continuous memory
allocation will fail. However, the system will report a generic "not enough
memory" error message, which is too ambiguous. It is why sometimes big
applications - usually games, complain that there isn't enough memory even
though the user see that there's enough free memory.

[Paul]

Yeah, this is immediately after a reboot :-/

It's not an uptime-related issue.

Maybe I should be doing a boot trace with ProcMon
and see if I can spot something new going on.

Paul