memory mapped files

I'm just looking at memory usage and processor usage here on my machine.
(win7 ultimate 64bit)
What set me off is that Acronis has some invisible console program that
betimes loads and then tends to sit in memory, do nothing and use 25% of
processor capacity. Ok, I can fix that with sysconfig, by stopping all
Acronis stuff from auto-loading but that really should not happen. Waste
of 'lectricity I reckon.

Subsequently I looked at memory status using sysinternals'rammap
utility. I'm down to 4Gb of physical RAM currently, and I find that
1,500,000 of that memory is taken up by mapped files, after the machine
has been up for a couple of days. That is also kind of ridiculous to my
mind.

(Hope I get my pair of replacement ram sticks some time soon... Corsair
just isn't the quality it used to be).

Any idea how to clear out all that junk without a reboot? Free up Mem?
Basically I find that I have to restart the machine to be able to do any
complicated stuff with photoshop for instance or I get 'out of memory'
problems.
Not to mention a couple of 'delicate' games tend to crash out as well
should I try to run them at this point.



-P.

 

Sounds strange to me - memory in use is, surely, a good thing -
otherwise... well, it's not being used! OS memory, I'd have thought,
should be paged in and out as required, to allow the system to manage
memory for apps as required.

I guess my wee 8Gb notebook machine looks quite different to yours? -
you'll note an uptime of about 10 days - be interesting to compare with
a similar pic of yours?...

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/duncanm4/Clipboard01.jpg

What Acronis program are you using? Trueimage? I just use the built in
Windows Backup program and it's scheduled to run once a week, data and
system image to a backup drive hanging off another 'puter. It takes
ages via the aging 100Mbit network switch, about 10 hours, but it
doesn't bother me at all. And it doesn't hog memory or CPU.

 

Hi Dave.

Can you restore your boot partition completely from that 'system image' if
it gets corrupted? If yes have you tried it? (I always do that - usually
swap in a spare HDD to restore to as I've found some folks using programmes
and thinking they're covered but, when push comes to shove their 'backups'
aren't worth the space they're using.) I too use Acronis TI and it does that
very well.

Is that a quad-core CPU that's using that 'hyperthreading' thing that (to my
mind) only made sense on single-core CPUs?

Cheers,
--
/Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)

 

It does, but I prefer Paragon Drive Backup myself. Just a personal
preference thing It was last tested about a year ago I also
tested it not long after I got the notebook - and stripped all the
manuafacturer crap from loading, I made an image using Drive Backup and
setup the Windows Backup. Both were tested. So I have an early image
that I could go back to if I needed to go back to "the day I got it -
but with the HP crap stripped" sort of thing. And I have the Windows
Backup that I could use to subsequently get either data or a system
image from. It's not an important machine really, hence the backup has
not been put to test for about a year now

Don't know sorry It's only got one physical CPU I believe.

 

It will be interesting to see how you machine is with the new RAM.
Perhaps it's problem over - but it does sound pretty strange and um...
OS related really.

Today was Windows Update day, and after 12 or was it 16 updates where
applied, it was typically reboot time (Linux would be a shell reload I
bet, unless grub was updated).

Anyway I took a new screenshot - and it's not too different from the
original really...

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/duncanm4/Clipboard02.jpg
(not a lot loaded, VS, Outlook, Word, Excel, IE w' 8 pages and Skype)
vs the original...
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/duncanm4/Clipboard01.jpg

Perhaps the problem could also be a rogue app that's allocating memory
poorly, but surely that would be easy to spot by way of killing
suspected apps and processes. It would be worth trying that sort of
thing?

What happens if you say load XP Mode which goobles a significant amount
of RAM, or other VM's? Does any mapped memory get dumped?

 

I can't follow it up since I'll be in Oz for the next three weeks.
Hopefully the replacement ram will be waiting when I get home. Then we
can see.
And yes, I had a suspicion that a rogue application was not de-
allocating ram on exit until I ran the sysinternals utility. That
changed my perception to "memory mapped files that are no longer in use
stay in RAM".
It merits further investigation.

cheers, -P.