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del_diablo
Legendary Hero
Manifest
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posted January 02, 2010 11:15 PM |
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Quote:
Caching SHOULD NOT be USED MEMORY. XP has disk caches too but they aren't displayed as "used" memory because that memory is not USED, it's free to use by other apps -- of course if that memory is still 'free' then Windows XP uses it to cache disk access, but at any time any app can use that page block (memory is divided into 'pages').
So what's the deal with Vista/7's cache being USED memory (i.e memory that is not 'free' for apps to use), it's totally backwards.
My Windows XP uses 150MB after bootup, with all drivers and everything. 
You forget something: RAM is roughly 1000-2000 times faster on read and "write", which means it takes 1 second to load something instead of a few minutes. The bloody point of RAM is to be used.
The problem is of course big, since you can only use what you got once before purging it and writing on something else.
The problem with Vista is how the ram cache works, it gets a backup on the disk which it loads on bootup(the stored is ridicules huge btw). About 1-2 gigs of data, which it uses to fill up the memory.
A good RAM cache is when you set a cap based on amount, got no backup for loading unless its spesifically specified(ex: what you load all the time).
RAM loads and unloads at about the same speed, well its so fast that nobody cares.
The entire reason SSD is good is because its faster to load up your application, and load files into RAM.
Now, on a sytem with 200MB of RAM caching is useless. If you go 2 gigs or more, its usefull.
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TheDeath
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
with serious business
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posted January 03, 2010 01:07 AM |
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Because you obviously totally missed my whole point.
Are you aware that Windows XP caches up in your RAM without displaying it as "used memory"? Because in truth it is NOT used memory, it is ALWAYS available IMMEDIATELY an application requests it.
So why should it be "used" memory, or in other words, memory that cannot be allocated?
Because caching must NEVER interfere with an application's request for more memory should it need it. For example, suppose you have 4GB of RAM, your OS uses 120MB, and let's say you can access all 4GB hypothetically. Then you go browse through your harddrive, let's say listen to some music, and since it calls ReadFile, Windows XP internally caches this.
You can prove this by then listening a track you previously listened and as long as it's still in cache the HD LED will not light anymore -- or more accurately, use HD-Tune's HD activity to see that 0 Read is performed, because it reads it from cache.
All in all, let's assume there's 2GB in cache.
Now, of course, the "available memory" the OS should display should be 3.8GB. After all, caching is not unavailable memory. If you run an app that needs 3GB, the oldest cache entries get discarded.
If the OS displayed it as unavailable memory, and it actually was unavailable memory, then this app would bloody output "Out of Memory" when you used it -- is this smart caching for you? I call it ANNOYING CACHING.
Cache must never ever interfere with an app's request for more memory, it should be completely transparent to the user.
Which is what XP handles well. And if really the 800MB usage of Vista or 7 is because of caching, then oh boy, I'd say they have a very very backwards design...
Just as a side note, you seriously have no idea how much the OS uses your RAM "behind the scenes" without you knowing -- of course, such memory is not flagged as unavailable, so it's transparent to you, you won't run out of memory because of caching for instance.
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phoenixreborn
Promising
Legendary Hero
Unicorn
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posted January 04, 2010 12:26 AM |
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Death you could probably try a demo of windows 7 to see exactly what it is doing because I'm seeing a lot of if statements.
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TheDeath
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
with serious business
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posted January 04, 2010 02:37 AM |
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Simple question really. How much memory does it use as unavailable memory (i.e what displayed in task manager)?
The caching excuse doesn't work -- actually, if that memory is unallocated when a program needs more memory than available, then the task manager is absolute crap in Vista or 7, displays it wrong. However I don't suspect that is the case.
And I can't really download a demo of Win7 and test it -- I can, but I don't really have time to fiddle around with installing a new OS, even on a virtual machine. Sorry
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del_diablo
Legendary Hero
Manifest
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posted January 04, 2010 04:06 PM |
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Well, in Linux cached us showed as "used" because it is. But maybe Vista got the worldst worst caching, and does not unallocated properly? I got no clue. But superfetch is a big failure regardless, since it had ridiculessy bad settings.
I know you can change the display of what is to appear used in Linux, in Windows there might be hidden something in hex somewhere in the deep corners of the register
PS:
Disk cache != Ram cache
Those 2 should NEVER be mixed, EVER. RAM is several thousand times faster than the bottleneck we call HD. Yes it can to be used, but meh.... Maybe a change of terminology? Allocated instead of used?
Anyhow, your point is not good anyhow.
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radar
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Castle/Haven player
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posted January 04, 2010 05:40 PM |
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Win 7 is fast like hell on my laptop and I don't really care how much RAM is actually being used as long as I don't feel any slowdowns.
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TheDeath
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
with serious business
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posted January 05, 2010 02:24 AM |
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Edited by TheDeath at 02:26, 05 Jan 2010.
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Quote:
Well, in Linux cached us showed as "used" because it is.
No it's not. That makes the task manager memory info utterly worthless.
Imagine you want to know how much free memory you've got, to know if you can run an app properly or not (without swapping pages to disk... which I disabled anyway). So if you have 3GB left free, you know you're in good shape. However, if it says "100MB free" what are you going to think?
"Better start close some apps I don't need!"
Right?
Well in Linux this would be worthless since cache is included. It's a very backwards and bad design.
It's called FREE memory -- free memory that can be allocated. Cache must NOT be included into "non-free" memory, because it's FREE memory... it gets unallocated when needed.
Quote:
PS:
Disk cache != Ram cache
Those 2 should NEVER be mixed, EVER. RAM is several thousand times faster than the bottleneck we call HD. Yes it can to be used, but meh.... Maybe a change of terminology? Allocated instead of used?
Anyhow, your point is not good anyhow.
What do you mean?
Disk caching is what the OS does when it reads something from any disk, harddrive included. So if it will read it later and it's still in the cache (RAM), it will read it from there.
I disabled paging btw (I've got enough RAM to even make a 1GB RAM disk on B:\), if that's what you mean by "disk caching".
Quote:
Win 7 is fast like hell on my laptop
but still slower than XP and still uses more RAM than XP. MUCH more. These are facts discussed.
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phoenixreborn
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Unicorn
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posted January 05, 2010 04:19 AM |
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Quote:
Win 7 is fast like hell on my laptop
but still slower than XP and still uses more RAM than XP. MUCH more. These are facts discussed.
And XP is supporting 12 gb of ram for graphics designers? Your point may be true in the very specific technical sense but maybe you have lost sight of the larger picture.
Diablo why is superfetching bad?
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TheDeath
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
with serious business
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posted January 05, 2010 05:10 AM |
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Edited by TheDeath at 05:13, 05 Jan 2010.
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Quote:
And XP is supporting 12 gb of ram for graphics designers?
AFAIK WinXP 64-bit can address up to 8 terabytes per process.
EDIT: apparently though, current operating systems are limited at 128GB for some obscure reason (hardware?)
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radar
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Castle/Haven player
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posted January 05, 2010 02:30 PM |
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Quote:
Win 7 is fast like hell on my laptop
but still slower than XP and still uses more RAM than XP. MUCH more. These are facts discussed.
That supa awesome XP won't even install on my comp, the setup crashes.
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted January 05, 2010 02:45 PM |
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Quote:
That supa awesome XP won't even install on my comp, the setup crashes.
I actually encountered this before.
I don't know why but the installer simply REFUSED to continue after a certain point, resulting in a hang-up every time. had to use win 2000 floppy disc install, then upgrade. every time I wanted to reinstall the system.
And lack of support for RAID disks was just a joke.
About win7: the more I use it, the more I like it. Seems the most stable system I've ever seen (regarding windows family, that is).
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nikita
Famous Hero
Meepo is underrated
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posted January 05, 2010 03:34 PM |
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Quote:
Win 7 is fast like hell on my laptop
but still slower than XP and still uses more RAM than XP. MUCH more. These are facts discussed.
unless you disable every process that you would on xp... there are programs like vista inspirant for xp that would make it look better but uses up more resources.
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del_diablo
Legendary Hero
Manifest
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posted January 05, 2010 06:06 PM |
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Quote:
Diablo why is superfetching bad?
Superfetch is another "cache", BUT the setup is totally idiotic and backwards.
Lets see:
*Loads on bootup
*Caches randomly binary files
*The place the binaries are stored is not in the swap
*Did I forget to say that its both cached to disk AND RAM at the same time?
Quote:
No it's not. That makes the task manager memory info utterly worthless.
Taskmanager? You mean that utterly useless crap which shows incorrect information? On unix we use top and htop(frontend to top and phid and kill).
Quote:
Imagine you want to know how much free memory you've got, to know if you can run an app properly or not (without swapping pages to disk... which I disabled anyway). So if you have 3GB left free, you know you're in good shape. However, if it says "100MB free" what are you going to think?
"Better start close some apps I don't need!"
Right?
Start up htop. and see if soemthing uses my RAM(read: flash memory leak). If there is 100MB left, that is. If there is no flash memory leak I got something stored.
Lets see if I remember this one: sudo freemem -purge
Quote:
It's called FREE memory -- free memory that can be allocated. Cache must NOT be included into "non-free" memory, because it's FREE memory... it gets unallocated when needed.
Please use a modern system when talking, and you will realize what a bizzaro dated backwards land Windows is.
Quote:
What do you mean?
Disk caching is what the OS does when it reads something from any disk, harddrive included. So if it will read it later and it's still in the cache (RAM), it will read it from there.
Quote:
I disabled paging btw (I've got enough RAM to even make a 1GB RAM disk on B:\), if that's what you mean by "disk caching".
*shudders* Your ignorance scares me.
Termology:
Cache = RAM cache
Disk cache = cache on disk
Disk cache is the disk being used for R/W of cache, which results in a gigantic bottleneck and massive fragmentation. Check the term, its that easy.
Windows is the only system now a days where the dish cache is set to attempt to fragment the partition, on any other modern system the swap is either non-existing or written on separate partition to avoid fragmentation of the actual system.
Another point about disk cache for it to be used on something useful like where you are in danger of actually used something, like using it for an location table of your tmpfs(mounts stuff in RAM).
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baklava
Honorable
Legendary Hero
Mostly harmless
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posted January 05, 2010 06:21 PM |
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Edited by baklava at 18:22, 05 Jan 2010.
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Quote:
*shudders* Your ignorance scares me.
Termology
Rejoice, for you have been embraced by the immortal spirits of irony
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is. When you ain't got no
money,
you got the blues."
Howlin Wolf
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TheDeath
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
with serious business
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posted January 05, 2010 07:07 PM |
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Edited by TheDeath at 19:09, 05 Jan 2010.
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del_diablo I have no intention of arguing with you because you obviously don't know what you're talking about.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/D/disk_cache.html
Read on "soft disk cache" since obviously we're talking about software (operating system) not hardware (the HDD buffer).
As for Linux being "modern", I see the opposite in your argument. The Task Manager in Windows XP needs to be launched once (it's only 1 window/app), shows perfectly how much memory you have free to use, shows CPU usage... in short, the basic and most frequently needed information is there.
Linux obviously has to have multiple tools and be more complicated -- that's not modern to me.
Quote:
That supa awesome XP won't even install on my comp, the setup crashes.
I bet you don't have all the updates and drivers up to 2009 integrated/slipstreamed.
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del_diablo
Legendary Hero
Manifest
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posted January 05, 2010 10:50 PM |
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Quote:
thedeath: Then what is modern to you? Several bad coded outdated tools? Lack of innovation? Lack of proper tools? Lack of a good underlying system?
What about Windows in general software wise? Several badly coded GUI applications along with several hundred of them again which does the exact same thing, but they use different icon themes?
And who care in the end? In the end I do not think you question your moral over your OS enough.
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TheDeath
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
with serious business
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posted January 06, 2010 12:18 AM |
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Don't get me wrong, XP and MS software have many faults, but the caching definitely is not. What I hate about both, for instance, is the dependency on so many libraries. This is worse in Linux because there are multiple GUIs and I think some apps run only with some frameworks etc... I never said the Windows GUI is perfect, in fact, the way Vista goes, it's downhill for me.
Yes I think Windows XP has many nice features over Linux and would say it's even better, but the current MS trend makes the newer versions far below Linux.
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mvassilev
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posted January 06, 2010 12:56 AM |
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As long as you can make the GUI look like classic Windows, then it's fine.
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Eccentric Opinion
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Corribus
Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted January 07, 2010 03:27 AM |
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Questions:
I'm preparing to install W7 on my laptop. I currently have Vista Business 32 bit.
However, I'm also going to swap my old, tiny 80 GB hard drive for a much larger 250 GB HD. Thus I don't really need to format my old HD - I just need to swap in my new one and do a fresh install of Windows, right?
Complication: as I understand it, the W7 upgrade disc I purchased requires Windows Vista to be installed on my hard drive. Thus, after I swap in my new HD, do I need to install vista first and then upgrade to W7? That seems like a pain in the butt.
Other question: just out of curiosity, since I won't be formatting my old hard drive, am I able to just put the old hard drive back in and run basically my old system any time I want?
Final question: Any idea what I can do with a very old desktop PC (about 9 years old, running XP)? Like, anyone I can donate it to or anything? Or should i just pitch it into the trash.
Thx.
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phoenixreborn
Promising
Legendary Hero
Unicorn
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posted January 07, 2010 03:51 AM |
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This thread is pages long: 
