Subj : Re: Learned something new To : Barry Martin From : Ky Moffet Date : Wed Jul 24 2024 09:08:00 BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > > You replied to my replied to Ed but I think he'll see it. I can't find Ed's again. > KM> Lost track of the message, but anyway.... by itself, 32bit XP > KM> with default drivers uses 386mb RAM (I've seen this number over > KM> and over) or if it's dual-booted with ReactOS, for some reason > KM> only uses 80mb RAM. Either way, it's not the major problem. > > Yes, I've seen that 386 MB usage figure numerous times; don't know if > someone measured once and everyone reused that data or what but seems to > make sense: the work data is stored someplace and takes up space. Odd I'd swear they did it on purpose. Someone probably thought it was funny. Naked XP64 uses... are you ready for this? 486 MB RAM. > how the number is slashed with ReactOS -- I'd guess the 'missing' memory > could be found in the dual-boot partition. No, this is RAM, nothing to do with however you partition anything. I finally concluded that for some unknown reason, this is buck-naked XP, actually very efficient. When I installed 3rd party drivers on one of these, RAM use ballooned up to the 3-400MB range. > KM> Browsers are the biggest hogs, I've seen Chrome suck up 40GB > KM> (yes, gigabytes) of RAM! Supermium, despite being based on the > KM> same code, is not as greedy, but still uses about 700mb when it's > KM> just admiring its navel, plus about 2GB per page open. > > 40 GB!! And for a while we were installing 8 or 16 GB of RAM and thought > sufficient! (Horray for Swap!) BOO for swap. Slows things down. In the olden days I always disabled it, or had it at the mnimum (25mb) because Photoshop and Photopaint both look for it and won't run if it's not there. > KM> How on earth did you have 28 to 32 programs running -- doing > KM> what? I have 4 or 5 apps that are open all the time, but > KM> otherwise... are you sure you're not counting multiple windows > KM> for a single program? You might want to set them to "group when > KM> taskbar is full". > > I was thinking Ed was counting all the open windows and some windows > were multiple of the same utility. Right now I have 8 windows open for Yeah, and may have taskbar stacking turned off. > Otherwise here I can have concurrently open utilities for e-mail, > temperature monitoring, viewing remote desktops, and the scripts > 'snooping' on the other computers to make sure they're operating > correctly. All those little functions make the count go up quickly, so > I could see Ed's getting to two and three dozen. I have RoughDraft (10 editing tabs), LibreOffice (one instance), Supermium (Chrome for XP) with nothing open but the homepage, and SeaMonkey with browser and email panes open. 4.9GB RAM used, most of which is browsers. > > KM> Best thing to check is Task Manager, it'll give you a lot of > KM> information. I leave it running in the system tray all the time, > KM> cuz it doesn't eat much (at least on older Windows; on 10/11 it > KM> uses way too much RAM). > > Agree on using Task Manager -- and a reminder to open all the view > options: with System Monitor on Linux there are options to view User, > Active, All and Dependencies so assume something similar for Windows XP. > ..Click for sorting so don't have to scroll though the list! Yeah, that sort of thing is really useful on any OS. > > Mine comes out really strangely: > > > > 655360 bytes total conventional memory > > 655360 bytes available to MS-DOS > > 634048 largest executable program size > > > > 1048576 bytes total contiguous extended memory > > 0 bytes available contiguous extended memory > > 941056 bytes available XMS memory > > MS-DOS resident in High Memory Area > > KM> I think it's seeing only the mini-VM (I forget what it's called) > KM> 32-bit XP uses to run DOS programs. It's certainly not seeing > KM> system RAM. > > Probably so, else it's the computer version of the elusive perpetual > motion machine! LOL. If you run MEM on a DOS system you'll get the above. > > > I'm thinking maybe the reason you can't open your 40th window is there > > is not you're out of system memory but rather you're out of memory for > > whatever application governs the files. > KM> Might have run the heaps dry. However, then you normally get a > KM> wonky screen where if you drag a window around it looks like > KM> this: > KM> http://doomgold.com/images/linux/snapshot5-smplayer.png > KM> Incidentally that screenshot was from linux, not immune to this > KM> issue. > > Yup: I've seen it on my system which isn't in the whimpy department. > Extremely rarely seen, but as I recall when there's some heavy system > loading going on. Some programs are ill-behaved varmints and prone to do this. > > > .. If mediums can communicate with dead imagine what large can do! > KM> Bring back the mammoths, and smallpox, and dinosaurs.... > > And burning at the stake! I'm good with that; I can think of several worthy to "encourage the others". þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com | 856-933-7096 (454:1/1) .