Hello All;
I spent the extra bucks and upgraded my ram to 24gb with the hope of increasing performance. I followed all of Dell's rules for population of the slots, etc.
Now, when doing some VERY heavy processing, I notice that only a portion of the ram ~30% is being utilized. What is the proper way to get my system to utilize it?
Is some of this application-driven?
Your help is greatly appreciated.
All the best.
Steve
The system will only use what it needs plus some for prefetch. You really can't force it to use more. The performance increase gained by adding RAM, it to have it available when needed rather than using paging which is slow. Most systems will never need 24GB of RAM.
Run a few Virtual machines at the same time(even use one as a server), do some heavy video editing, maybe do some 3D CAD(Computer-aided Design) and 3D printing, or if you area heavy Office user( specially Access & Point). Or play resource heavy games, multi-tasking.
The norm these days, and sweet spot for RAM is 8GB, unless you plan on doing any of the above, all you have is overkill and you're at the point of "diminishing returns".
12-16GB is more than enough for most games, but for the normal every day user, 8GB is enough.
I have 16GB, because I need enough for my VM's and still have some left over for my host).
How is yur 24gb of ram configured i.e ram sizes to make 24gb
I have tried to use all my RAM on Win10, by opening 5 browsers at the same time, with each 20 tabs open, 2 VM's, Skype on, MediaMonkey playing music, and did some graphics in GIMP(did run a bit slower when rendering a globe), but it used only about 8-9GB from 16
The advantage though is you have more memory addresses in more RAM to make it harder for malware to get into the system or running programs, for added security, This is called Memory Protection:
Memory protection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaMethods[edit]
Segmentation[edit]
Segmentation refers to dividing a computer's memory into segments. A reference to a memory location includes a value that identifies a segment and an offset within that segment.
The x86 architecture has multiple segmentation features, which are helpful for using protected memory on this architecture.[1] On the x86 processor architecture, the Global Descriptor Table and Local Descriptor Tables can be used to reference segments in the computer's memory. Pointers to memory segments on x86 processors can also be stored in the processor's segment registers. Initially x86 processors had 4 segment registers, CS (code segment), SS (stack segment), DS (data segment) and ES (extra segment); later another two segment registers were added – FS and GS.[1]
Plus ASLR:
Address space layout randomization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaAddress space layout randomization (ASLR) is a computer security technique involved in protection from buffer overflow attacks. In order to prevent an attacker from reliably jumping to, for example, a particular exploited function in memory, ASLR randomly arranges the address space positions of key data areas of a process, including the base of the executable and the positions of the stack, heap and libraries.
Address space layout randomization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaAddress Space Layout Randomization (ASLR)
ASLR moves executable images into random locations when a system boots, making it harder for exploit code to operate predictably. For a component to support ASLR, all components that it loads must also support ASLR. For example, if A.exe consumes B.dll and C.dll, all three must support ASLR. By default, Windows Vista and later will randomize system DLLs and EXEs, but DLLs and EXEs created by ISVs must opt in to support ASLR using the /DYNAMICBASE linker option.
ASLR also randomizes heap and stack memory:
- When an application creates a heap in Windows Vista and later, the heap manager will create that heap at a random location to help reduce the chance that an attempt to exploit a heap-based buffer overrun succeeds. Heap randomization is enabled by default for all applications running on Windows Vista and later.
- When a thread starts in a process linked with /DYNAMICBASE, Windows Vista and later moves the thread's stack to a random location to help reduce the chance that a stack-based buffer overrun exploit will succeed.
Performance In general, ASLR has no performance impact. In some scenarios, there’s a slight performance improvement on 32-bit systems. However, it is possible that degradation could occur in highly congested systems with many images that are loaded at random locations. The performance impact of ASLR is difficult to quantify because the quantity and size of the images need to be taken into account. The performance impact of heap and stack randomization is negligible.
So basically the extra RAM is not wasted. It's just not needed for the software, but for software(and system) protection.
A screenshot of Task Manager - Performance tab showing memory information would be useful. Memory usage in any modern OS is far too complex to be adequately described with a single number. The number shown in the screenshot in post #1 does not show all memory usage. Most likely the total usage is considerably higher.
Within reasonable limits adding RAM will always improve performance. But there will always be a point of diminishing returns after which there will be little gain. That point is determined primarily by the workload. But understand there are different kinds of workload. A process that is doing "VERY heavy processing" will not necessarily benefit from more memory. There is no meaningful relationship between memory usage and CPU usage. A process may saturate as many CPU cores as you have yet require only limited RAM. Or a process may use large amounts of RAM but have relatively low CPU usage.
When upgrading a computer to improve performance it is important to first determine the bottleneck, the system component that is holding back performance. That might be the CPU, memory, disk subsystem, network, video system, etc. Then upgrade that component. Often the upgrade is to whatever is most convenient or cheapest, and very often that is RAM. But if memory wasn't the problem you have wasted your money.
@Cliff S
Segmentation is not used in 32 or 64 bit Windows. They use pages which are quite different.
The address space used with ASLR is the process private virtual address space which in 64 bit Windows 10 is 128 TB. This is the only address space applications know or care about. This is totally independent of how much RAM you have.
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