Subj : Learned something new To : Ky Moffet From : Barry Martin Date : Thu Jul 25 2024 10:53:00 -=> KY MOFFET wrote to BARRY MARTIN <=- KM> BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > You replied to my replied to Ed but I think he'll see it. KM> I can't find Ed's again. Why does that remind me of "Where's Waldo"?! > 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 KM> I'd swear they did it on purpose. Someone probably thought it was KM> funny. Never use the April 1st edition of The Onion to fact check! KM> 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. KM> No, this is RAM, nothing to do with however you partition KM> anything. Guess mixing up with the Boot Partition -- I have run out of room in it (years ago). KM> I finally concluded that for some unknown reason, this is KM> buck-naked XP, actually very efficient. When I installed 3rd KM> party drivers on one of these, RAM use ballooned up to the KM> 3-400MB range. Might be the 'why re-invent the wheel': went from 32-bit to 64-bit. Got hat part figured out, so now just tweak those parts for efficiency. > 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!) KM> BOO for swap. Slows things down. In the olden days I always KM> disabled it, or had it at the mnimum (25mb) because Photoshop and KM> Photopaint both look for it and won't run if it's not there. Well yes, Swap is (was) on a hard drive so slower because mnechanical, but I sort of understood it (vaguely!) as a back-yp to RAM. No space available in RAM but everything being used, oldest moved to Swap and can be now found 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 KM> Yeah, and may have taskbar stacking turned off. Actually I've not heard of 'taskbar stacking'. ...I probably automatically used it just for better viewing and organization. > 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. KM> I have RoughDraft (10 editing tabs), LibreOffice (one instance), KM> Supermium (Chrome for XP) with nothing open but the homepage, and KM> SeaMonkey with browser and email panes open. 4.9GB RAM used, most KM> 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! KM> 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! KM> 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. KM> 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! KM> I'm good with that; I can think of several worthy to "encourage KM> the others". ¯ ® ¯ BarryMartin3@MyMetronet.NET ® ¯ ® .... On trucks of plumbing co. "Don't sleep with a drip. Call your plumber." --- MultiMail/Win32 v0.47 þ wcECHO 4.2 ÷ ILink: The Safe BBS þ Bettendorf, IA --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com | 856-933-7096 (454:1/1) .