Maxing Out Physical Memory Usage

Hello MajorGeeks,

I recently bought a new laptop, a Lenovo T430 with Windows 8 and 8 GB of RAM and, for some reason, the memory all gets used up astonishingly quickly.

Just after starting up and running a few minor background services and such, my computer often sits at 40% used physical memory. The screenshot attached shows the Resource Monitor with few programs open, and it is mostly Chrome that uses a good chunk of the memory. But even when adding up all the processes, the total is far less than 2GB which would be 25% of my total physical memory.

I wouldn't be complaining about this, since I am aware that it isn't necessarily a good thing to be not utilizing memory.. but often with 8-15 tabs open in Chrome, and running Youtube and downloading files, the memory usage jumps up to 97%. It makes everything run super slow and it doesn't add up at all to anything close to 8GB.

Any ideas? Do I have a memory leak? In searching through random links to forums on Google, one person talked about disk caching being a potential culprit. This is my first system with a SATA drive so maybe that could be the issue... ?

Any help is incredibly appreciated

 

Hey emidac, welcome to MajorGeeks, try running this to clean your computer,
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/ccleaner_slim.html
Then give this little memory cleaning tool a run, be sure to click on the mini monitor so you can watch how much is being used, and right clicking on the taskbar icon will give you the option to Clean Now.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/cleanmem.html

 

I already use CCleaner so I just went ahead and ran it. Then I downloaded the MemClean software as per your suggestion and ran that. Attached is a screenshot showing the 'Memory Stats & Info' from CleanMem.

It still claims to be using almost 3GB of RAM when the only significant programs I have running are Chrome with 4 tabs open, iTunes, and uTorrent.

 

emidac...

CleanMem took my RAM usage at idle from 35% to 25%. This was with me including like 20 processes in the "Ignore List".

If CleanMem helps you, I recommend using the option from the Mini Monitor right click dialog to run the "CleanMem Settings Wizard". I leave them all default but then select the "Ignore List" option. Then I just include processes that CleanMem exempts from its cleanings. Again, I still got a 10% decrease in RAM usage at idle. Doesn't lower the amount used by the browser, but it makes things open snappier and drag better and so on...

 

I would recommned not using memory cleaning programs.They can be a bad thing alot of times.

The reason i see is that chrom is using a lot of ram per page.

I would recommend using firefox.Firefox only uses one Processes.

And Firefoxs memory can be adjusted in about:config

 

Goldenskull...

Good point on Firefox. I use Opera...same thing. Only one process no matter how many tabs.

With CleanMem, I have "Ignored" Firefox from memory trims, because I use it for online games, but I haven't "Ignored" Opera, so CleanMem does trim it some. I use Opera for general net searches and roaming. Allowing CleanMem to trim is a good arrangement for a browsing browser...

CleanMem trims most of a process' ties to virtual memory. Doesn't necessarily work very well on some processes (programs), even though RAM memory is much faster than virtual. The approach for me is to "Ignore" processes that are high activity for extended periods or are critical such as backup. Also want games "ignored", so they will have all their RAM, and I add Office software, media players, and media converters. Also good to "ignore" Explorer.exe, optimizer programs, and docks...

As mentioned...still getting a 10% memory trim at idle...very nice...

 

Starting with Windows 7, so I suspect 8 is the same, Microsoft's thinking is "idle RAM is wasted memory".

Don't waste your time staring at RAM usage unless you are having computer freezeups and/or programs failing to launch.
You have to think differently about RAM in 7. DO NOT revert to XP RAM-type thinking.

 

Chrome is a monstrous memory hog.

 

The reason I started the thread was precisely this.. I was having 97% usage and freezeups with 8-15 tabs open, iTunes, and little else. With my system (2.6ghz i5-3320, 8gb ram, secondary SATA drive, alternating intel hd 4000 and nvidia 5400M) .. do you believe this is normal and not something that merits checking RAM usage issues?

BTW, for people in the firefox chrome opera discussion. Firefox or Waterfox (which I was using since this is a 64-bit system) actually take up more memory than Chrome, as does Opera.. even though it is only in a single process.. I've seen benchmarks on sites like Tom's Hardware and AnandTech that show this. The only reason I downloaded Chrome (I'm new to it for the past week) is that I was having so many memory issues with Waterfox.


In general, thanks for all the responses and people trying to help!

 

Well one thing i look for in a web browser is speed and security.

And i got both with firefox,waterfox ant too bad it is good for windows 7.

Like i said in my previous post in firefox you can adjust the amount of ram it uses in the about:config.In Chrome you can not that is way it eats so much ram chrome has a memory leak i do be leave.It seems there was a report about it around Mar 14, 2013.I guess they still might or have not found it yet.

The max amount so far i have seen firefox use in memory usage is about 300,000 maybe a little bit more if your using multiple tabs and downloading a bunch of stuff.The highest i have seen it go is about 450,000kb which is small if you as me 450k is about 50meg.

 

My experience is that in terms of memory consumption, Firefox and Pale Moon can handle several hundred tabs as well as Chrome can handle twenty tabs. Chrome is fine if you only have 2 or 3 tabs. The constant plug-in crashes in Chrome are quite wearisome too.

 

Care to post information to back your statement up? IE & Firefox are actually more of a hog than Chrome. Chrome actually uses memory smart in how it uses for processes, compared to the other two.

 

Speaking of references.... this is the benchmarks review that led me to try out Chrome in the first place after I had tons of issues with Waterfix

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-15-safari-6-web-browser,3287-12.html

 

Firefox won a speed competition last year at http://lifehacker.com/5917714/brows...firefox-13-internet-explorer-9-and-opera-1164.

I saw another speed comparison on a prestigious computer site of about a dozen browsers. Pale Moon finished on top, and Firefox finished ahead of Chrome. I don't remember which site that was; it might have been Raymond CC.

Let's not get hot under the collar, folks. It's only browsers in view.

 

They are comparing how the browser renders sites and graphics, not the actual under the hood. Yes Pale moon is lighter, but I have found that Firefox has become too bloated once they started to hit the 2x.x series of releases.

Also looking at the Toms hardware link, appears that Chrome is the best for memory efficiency. but then IE, which they did use only IE9 on Win7, which shows this is a dated test. Until you start getting into the link for 40 tabs, which no one that I know is ever going to open that many tabs, or have a need to do so.

Also the lifehacker link is dated from over a year ago, so it disapproves anything about stating that FF is better than other browsers. Might want to dig out more recent test results, than something that is ten years old in computer time.

 

Out of curiosity, I just downloaded Chrome to checkout the current memory usage on a group of pseudo-random sites. Obviously, these results are only representative of my PC, yours may vary somewhat.

Chrome
1x tab: 3x processes = 109,500K
2x tabs: 4x processes = 140,000K
5x tabs: 8x processes = 297,000K
29x tabs: 32 processes = 537,000K

Firefox
1x tab: 1x process = 85K
2x tabs: 1x process = 100K
5x tabs: 2x process = 250,5000K
29x tabs: 2x processes = 503,000K

My default browser is Pale Moon x64, currently on 3h16 m CPU time (it's been open for several days) and 103 tabs using ~1.4G

 

Enjoy your Mozilla or Chromium or IE family browser each and all. Let's just hope no browser ever corners the market so we can all be happy with our own respective choices.

 

Microsoft keeps trying to corner the market. This is their latest marketing sham. http://www.yourprivacytype.com/

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Microsoft’s new consumer privacy campaign and a quiz we developed – Your Privacy Type (YPT) – for consumers to gauge where they fall on the privacy continuum.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2013/05/13/minding-the-privacy-gap.aspx

 

The test won by Pale Moon was indeed at Raymond CC, and it was not too many months ago.

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/battle-of-the-browsers-in-cpu-and-memory-usage/

There are options for Mozilla and Chromium family users both to get relief.

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/easily-o...bases-with-speedyfox-portable/#comment-568760

 

You do also realize that the Chromium project is based on the Mozilla engine, which its predecessor was the Netscape browser, which was only about 19 years ago.

"Shortly before its acquisition by AOL, Netscape released the source code for its browser and created the Mozilla Organization to coordinate future development of its product.[6] The Mozilla Organization rewrote the entire browser's source code based on the Gecko rendering engine;[7] all future Netscape releases were based on this rewritten code. The Gecko engine would later be used to power the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape

If you actually tore apart the IE code, you would find Gecko code in it, which is the standard now days to rendering, and browsing for web browsers, which they started as of IE8.

IE11 will contain even more of the Gecko layout engine in it, when it is released, and will behave as if it is FF, due to MS is losing ground to other Operating systems and browsers of late.

http://www.geek.com/microsoft/internet-explorer-11-will-pretend-its-firefox-1543903/