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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
news.zdnet.com
February 18, 2010
I’ve had so many emails hit my inbox overnight about a story over on
ComputerWorld citing data collected by Devil Mountain Software’s
community-based XPnet claiming that some 86% of Windows 7 machines being
monitored are regularly consuming 90-95% of the system RAM that I’m
forced from silence to comment.
OK, let me begin by telling you why I wasn’t going to cover this story.
Well, I’ll be honest with you, it’s because XPnet’s data isn’t a data
source that’s on my trusted list. Collecting and correlating data is a
tricky business, and there are too many mysteries surrounding how XPnet
data is collected and what data is collected for me to get a clear
picture of what’s going on. Those are my thoughts and feelings on the
issue, but I encourage you to come to your own conclusions.
OK, but with that out of the way, let’s take a look at the claim.
86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming
90%-95% of their available RAM
OK, first off, these figures seem way off to me. A quick look at the
Windows 7 systems I’ve running here (which range in RAM from 1GB to
24GB) now shows the highest consumption to be in the region of 42%, and
that system has two browser running, a remote desktop session active and
a word processor running. This system is a notebook and has 2GB of RAM.
I’ve asked around a few other folks who are running multiple Windows 7
systems to see if they are seeing anything like what’s being reported.
So far, no one I’ve talked to has seen this happen outside of when
really pushing the system gaming or other demanding activity, such as
running virtual machines or encoding multimedia.
OK, but let’s assume that there are systems out there that are consuming
+90% RAM. So what? The only time you waste RAM is when you don’t use it.
If you have 2GB or 4GB or whatever in your system, you want your system
to make use of that RAM. Operating systems such as Windows 7 make
intelligent use of memory, using it to speed up the OS when no other
demands are being placed on it.
High RAM usage only becomes a problem when there’s no more RAM to work
with because something is hogging the RAM and the system has to resort
to disk paging. Problem is, there no data provided about disk paging or
page faults, so we can’t make any sensible conclusions as to the impact
that the memory usage is having on the systems.
So, once again, assuming that there are a lot of systems out there
consuming +90% of system RAM regularly, is it the OS doing this or other
applications? The data sheds no light on this:
So there you have it, another blind spot.
Another concern is the use of the word “regularly.” A vague word at
best, and one that unfortunately gives us no insight into how often
memory is above 90% capacity. Spikes in memory usage are common (boot
up, firing up an application, or when the system is opening large
files), but it’s the long-term trends that matter.
Final thought … if “86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are
regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM” then a commonality
amongst those systems is that they are all running XPnet’s data
collection utility …
I’ve approached Microsoft for comment on this issue, given that the
company collects an incredible amount of telemetry on system
performance. I’ll update this post when I hear something.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=7389&tag=content;col1
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