You know what would be REALLY cool Some type of tool that would show me where my RAM was REALLY being used up.
Task Manager is kind enough to show me that I'm currently using 1.79 GB of RAM, but if I do a quick sum of the memory/virtual memory being used by listing the processes, I'd be lucky to come up with 500MB of RAM.
No.. I don't have spyware, a rootkit, malware, etc. I'm running Virtual PC - and that's a beast (and appears to lie to the kernel about where memory is)... but still.
I'm open to suggestions..
Adam, I think I'm just grumpy because out of the blue I blew my system up this morning trying to launch a 3rd VPC. I run 3 every so often, but this morning Windows scolded me about virtual memory. Grumpy, I shut down my other two VPCs, then set about trying to find what was still taking up .7GB of RAM. Outlook was running, and we all know that's a pig - but not that much of a pig. A quick glance at the processes tab (for all of the 12.2 millionn processes running) just gave me a gut-check analysis that something goofy was up - and somewhere, something wasn't accurately reporting RAM usage. (And an anti-spyware scan last night (I do them for good measure - but I practice 'safe computing') showed that nothing was found. Anyhow... hence my gripe. (And maybe the disconnect here is that I like to keep an eye on the graphing part of Task Manager - that shows CPU and RAM usage. THAT is what is showing the huge amounts of RAM being used - but when I switch over to the processes tab, there just isn't enough there to justify all the RAM in use...) I probably sound like a nutter, but I think some things in windows LIE.... that's the gist of my rant. (Now I just need to find some proof, other than VPC which obviously 'lies'.)
Posted by: Michael K. Campbell | September 29, 2005 at 12:05 AM
I don't think that you /can/ lie to the kernel about the memory you're using. Somethings that may cause this disconnect: * System Cache * Processes/services running as other users (by default it won't show them.) Try Process Explorer from sysinternals, it's very good.
Posted by: Ayende Rahien | September 29, 2005 at 11:43 AM
My Processes tab is accurate and reports exactly the amount of RAM in use. I've got a billion proceses running, most of which taking up between 20 and 5MB of RAM. Aside from VPC, I bet if you actually used your calculator and added them all up (all those little 5s and 10s add up quickly) you'd see what is being reported is accurate). And why would you even be taking virtual memory into account? That's not RAM and thus isn't what's reported by Physical Memory(K) in task manager.
Posted by: Adam | September 29, 2005 at 11:54 AM
Thanks for the info Ayende. I've got processes for all users displayed (I'm a control freak, it's one of the first things I do). I should haven't have shot my mouth of about the whole 'lying' to the Kernal thing. 1) You can lie to the kernel - (that's the whole point of root kits), 2) i doubt that windows task manager = kernel. I guess what I mean is that I've got 2 VPCs running now, one that gobbbles up 768MB of ram, and another that does 256MB, yet virtual pc only shows up as using 20MB (including Virtual mem). That's what I'm grumping about. I'm also convinced that other apps lie as well (SQL Server used to 'lie' for the longest time, and appears to have been fixored with SP3 in terms of correctly reporting memory usage.) Thanks for the hint about Process Explorer... that is a good tool.
Posted by: Michael K. Campbell | September 29, 2005 at 11:56 AM