Dealing with RAM...

edited August 2017 in Hardware
If there's one thing that sometimes grinds my gears, it's memory usage. For some that may know of the laptop that I've been using, now for almost six years, it has 4GB of RAM and now, it seems that the figure is outdated as most computers nowadays have 8GB of it, and that some programs love to consume it. I wonder if there's any way of controlling it if I wanted more RAM on it or, reduce the amount of used RAM out of the many processes on it, as right now there are about 62 of them and while most of them are small (about a few MBs), I feel they're pretty useless to just sit there and not do anything, yet they still take up RAM and that 1.88GB is available for this system. Don't know if there's some sort of utility that can deal with this.

I'm not sure how adding more RAM to this would work when, I don't really want this taken apart just for it to be done and I wonder if there's a removable device to add more in but I don't think something like that exists. However, I am aware of virtual memory where there is 7.6GB of it and of 5.47GB of it available. Not sure if that alone can help of things like Firefox and MBAM using up lots of memory all the time. Don't know if I'm really making a mountain out of a molehill, like I always do but I hope anyone can help out or at least understand where I'm coming from.

Comments

  • Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
  • If it's a laptop that's about 6 years old or so, it's more than likely DDR3. I have found tons of DDR3 SO-DIMMs around. I have gotten enough of it that one of my broken laptops has 8GB of RAM and can't even be used. People just give that stuff to me. I would just look around and see what you can get for free or very cheap and then put 8GB or so in it. It's not very expensive to do, and I'd say it's worth it.
  • I have 6Gb of RAM in my own laptop, and have never used more than 4Gb (which was stock). My web browser spams my processor pretty good, but memory usage isn't terrible.

    Only way I know of to get rid of junk background processes is to backup, reformat and reinstall. Just make sure Windows or one of your important programs don't use any of those processes.

    Virtual memory sucks. It uses empty hard disk space as memory, but this process is very slow. You'd be much better served by more RAM.
  • I too am annoyed at how much RAM some software eats up. Seems like with Windows 7 and up, 4GB is usable but not quite enough.

    Web browsers of today are also absurd with the amount of resources they use. Just for comparison, I opened up my website (a pretty basic website) in Firefox, Chrome and Opera 12.18 (when Opera was a good browser). Here's the result:

    WebBrowserRAM.png

    Why is it that Opera can get away with using so little and be lightning fast, while Chrome and Firefox use at least a couple hundred MB with Chrome spawning 7 instances? Seems like they should be able to trim that down a bit if they really wanted to. My website is basic. It's not that big. Browsers should not use as much as they are.
  • In comparison to Chrome though, there's only three instances of Firefox seen in Task Manager, with the main one being well over 200MB. Firefox itself has always had a problem with memory usage and I'm surprised it's still not been addressed.
  • nick99nack wrote:
    I too am annoyed at how much RAM some software eats up. Seems like with Windows 7 and up, 4GB is usable but not quite enough.

    Web browsers of today are also absurd with the amount of resources they use. Just for comparison, I opened up my website (a pretty basic website) in Firefox, Chrome and Opera 12.18 (when Opera was a good browser). Here's the result:

    WebBrowserRAM.png

    Why is it that Opera can get away with using so little and be lightning fast, while Chrome and Firefox use at least a couple hundred MB with Chrome spawning 7 instances? Seems like they should be able to trim that down a bit if they really wanted to. My website is basic. It's not that big. Browsers should not use as much as they are.
    I just upgraed my laptop to win7, it can do 2 gigs max, but it works fine. What ARE you doing to your computer(s)?!?
  • And yet you performed this test without stating the versions of firefox and chrome used?
    That makes a difference, especially if you're comparing a modern browser on one based with 6 year old code.

    As for chrome, their idea of spawning multiple processes with each performing a different activity...
  • When knowing that Firefox does consume memory a lot, I would like to see if there's another browser that's very light on resources though PaleMoon is one of them that I know of, and the same for the old version of Opera mentioned here (though I'm curious of why people don't like Opera now).

    Although, some web pages that we visit can increase memory usage like, those with that horrid mobile-like web design packed with far too much code and scripts.
  • >first sentence
    Pale moon is essentially a child of firefox, just optimized and mostly stripped down.
    As for opera, I do use it as an alternative browser. However, in my opinion it's a bit too childish, script oriented, and falls into the category of yet another webkit-chromium browser.
    Overall, it's not bad as a chrome-y browser, but just not very optimized either.

    >second sentence
    when a webpage is so packed with scripts, a computer is unable to load it.
    In this case my d600 has the latest firefox but thanks to the amazing power of scripts, the browser freezes with 100% cpu usage halfway through the page loading as it tries to perform countless useless activities, such as loading flash ads or the javascript cat in the corner.
  • I did know that Opera now uses the same engine as Chrome does... I even noticed that when I tried to switch to it myself. And if Pale Moon is a very stripped-down version of Firefox, I wonder how much RAM it uses, compared to its big daddy's ~300MB?

    Although, a quick Google search about its RAM usage tells me of articles that it used much more, but it seemed to be depending on your system. I'm a bit concerned of that actually, and may not want to take the risk :\
  • I'm using a laptop with 8GB RAM right now and all of the processes (Mostly firefox) are using 57% of that RAM. When did it become acceptable for browsers to use this much RAM?

    OmGm2PR.png
  • Because people wanted them to do more.

    Hint: Modern OSes eat your RAM for good reason - it's cache. Free RAM is wasted RAM, so OSes will cache as much as possible, and that counts as used. My apps, if I total them in processes, use only a fraction of my used RAM, but most of it is tied up in cache, and the other half is completely unused.

    OunhzE7.png
  • Bry89 wrote:
    I did know that Opera now uses the same engine as Chrome does...

    Google forked the webkit rendering engine and made their own, Blink, which is what Chrome uses now.
  • Shouldn't this be in Software BTW? This discussion really isn't about physical RAM sticks
  • 66659hi wrote:
    I'm using a laptop with 8GB RAM right now and all of the processes (Mostly firefox) are using 57% of that RAM. When did it become acceptable for browsers to use this much RAM?

    http://i.imgur.com/OmGm2PR.png
    Wow I don't know what the deal is with your Firefox, but i'm using 52.2.1 ESR (x64) and its ressource usage is quite different : about 330 MB of RAM at the moment, and task manager says the maximum memory it used in this session was about 640 MB.
    My PC has 16 GB total RAM.
  • 66659hi wrote:
    Shouldn't this be in Software BTW? This discussion really isn't about physical RAM sticks
    Actually, I did think about putting it there but, guess I made the wrong choice :lol:

    And I wouldn't be surprised if the 64-bit Firefox consumed a lot of memory... good thing I'm using the 32-bit version.
  • It'll mean that it's capped to 4 GB per process (less fatal with e10s) and it can't take advantage of any JIT improvements in the 64-bit version.
  • And yet you performed this test without stating the versions of firefox and chrome used?
    That makes a difference, especially if you're comparing a modern browser on one based with 6 year old code.

    As for chrome, their idea of spawning multiple processes with each performing a different activity...


    Firefox was version 52.2.1 ESR, and Chrome was whatever the last version for XP was, released sometime last year I think. They're both modern browsers, and the slightly newer versions on my linux machines use a comparable amount of RAM. The only older browser being compared here was Opera 12, which I think they could have improved upon if they really wanted to. Their Opera Mini browser for Android still uses the Presto engine, and it's the best mobile browser I've used. Fast, lightweight and includes an ad blocker.
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