Windows 7 usage of ram and limiting to programs

[iTree]

my windows 7 has 4GBs of physical memory available tho it seems to often times only use about 3GB the thing is that as i use it, it will go above 3GB and then back down without me closing anything, what i figure its doing is limiting programs sense when this starts to happen programs like chrome will swap tabs to blank white pages and load up them vary slow, i assume this has be a memory restriction and it also makes alot of other programs tend open back up really slow and have random lag hick ups, thing is why won't windows just let them use the ram they need and fill the about 1GB ram i have left available ?
also the resource manager says almost all the unused ram is on stand-by

 

[xtreme5]

which version you have installed 32bit or 64bit?

 

[a little black duck]

Is your version of W7 32bit or 64bit? If 32bit it will not recognise any more than approximately 3.4GB.

 

[iTree]

My Version of windows is Ultimate 64-bit edition

 

[unksol]

Stand by ram(google works you know) is just windows putting things in the cache. Idle programs are being sent too virtual memory, when you load something new it has to make space freeing memory and sending things to the Page file. When you switch back to an idle program same thing.

It's doing exactly what it's supposed to. I hate to know what all you have running to get to 3 gigs+ in windows. Find what's hogging the memory and kill it, or buy another 4 gigs for 20 bucks

 

[mayankleoboy1]

or forget about the memory usage and just keep doing what you are doing.
Win7 is smart enough to allocate memory wherever needed.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Just because your OS is 64 bit doesn't mean your programs are. I beleive chrome is still 32 bit and 32 bit processes only get 2 gig of process space.

 

[gamerk316]

Just because your OS is 64 bit doesn't mean your programs are. I beleive chrome is still 32 bit and 32 bit processes only get 2 gig of process space.

Generally. They can use up to 4GB is compiled as Large Address Aware, but if not, 32-bit applications are limited to 2GB of RAM.

People also need to understand, the amount of data in RAM at any one point typically isn't that large. Data will constantly be loaded/unloaded as needed by the OS, especially in applications that need to use a lot at some points [games in particular].

 

[Hawkeye22]

Generally. They can use up to 4GB is compiled as Large Address Aware, but if not, 32-bit applications are limited to 2GB of RAM.

True, but very few 32 bit programs are compiled with the large address aware flag, especially games. I can recall battlefield 2 hitting it's upper 2 gig limit and crasjing quite often, as well as some other games.

 

[mathew7]

Generally. They can use up to 4GB is compiled as Large Address Aware, but if not, 32-bit applications are limited to 2GB of RAM.

And it's actually 3GB. The rest up to 4GB (2GB without LA and 1GB with LA) are same/shared for all processes and are mappings to kernel functions. Basically unusable by applications. (yes, you can argue that it's not identical due to address randomization....but that is a new workaround to buffer exploits)

But the problem with windows in general is that it allows the cache to grow too much (by swapping background apps). I've had issues with this and actually disabled the paging file ever since I started using 1GB in XP. I've heard W7 is better for this, but never gave it a chance to test it.

 

[gamerk316]

And it's actually 3GB. The rest up to 4GB (2GB without LA and 1GB with LA) are same/shared for all processes and are mappings to kernel functions. Basically unusable by applications. (yes, you can argue that it's not identical due to address randomization....but that is a new workaround to buffer exploits)

Your confusing the LAA and /3GB flags.

But the problem with windows in general is that it allows the cache to grow too much (by swapping background apps). I've had issues with this and actually disabled the paging file ever since I started using 1GB in XP. I've heard W7 is better for this, but never gave it a chance to test it.

XP does have the occasional bug where an app won't start because its busy caching; I've yet to see this on W7. I also note disabling the page file ends up using MORE RAM. The reason this occurs is because every variable at code has to be backed by RAM at creation, not at usage. As a result, if you have an application that creates a large buffer, even if 99% of that buffer goes unused, it MUST be backed by RAM is there is no page file.

 

[iTree]

so there isent a easy way to fix this is what i'm getting ? if i remove the page file then i wouldn't have enough ram for everything and for who was wondering what im using 3gb+ on is windows itself uses about 1gb and then multiple security programs, steam, msn live, firefox, chrome(i use alotta tabs) and usually a video game, so using 3gb isent hard i'm usually always using that much,anyways im guessing the only fix is to buy more ram :x so i guess i'll order some soon , i just hope increasing the amount of memory doesn't increase the amount i cant seem to use
thanks everyone for your replies

 

[gamerk316]

Its not hurting your performance. Because of how paging works, its near impossible to actually use all your RAM at any one point in time, barring a very large [>1GB] dataset.