High memory usage?

High memory usage?

My computer has started acting a bit slow today. watching youtube videos as they're continuing to buffer (faster than the rate of play though) causes the audio/video to skip slightly.. that's never happened before. Also, the whole computer almost grinded to a halt earlier when I tried to view a forum thread with a load of pictures in.

Looking at the task manager, I appear to be using a shit load of memory in total.

Is anything weird about this? I have 3gig of ram.. 44% usage when all I have running is utorrent, msn and firefox seems a bit excessive. In this screenshot I also have ad-aware and spybot open but it's barely affected the stats.

depending on how many tabs you have open in firefox, it can get rather ram intensive

im currently at 148 with 7 tabs open, and have seen it around 200 meg regularly

maybe if i shut firefox and winamp (90meg) down, the 600 im using in ableton would be a bit happier - its not like im using them lol

have you recently installed any new plugins / addons to firefox? that might have something to do with it

that memory usage aint too bad its about the same as mine. having more memory in my experience your computer wil use more of it to operate more efficiently... as i remember

Maybe it's the cpu then. When the youtube video in question was fiully loaded, the audio/video still skipped.

When I closed firefox (downloads list was still open) it was using 90mb.. weird.

the cpu usage has been spiking up and down from a constant of around 30, up to 70 and at a few points 100

The only thing i've done today is uninstall two games. No addons to firefox etc.

Could too many files on the hdd have something to do with it? I have over 250gb of them. I can't see it making much difference when i'm just bwosing though. Listening to music in WMP right now is pretty shit.. keeps skipping and warping.

you have to close the download window as well or it will still use the ram

if the hard drive isn't much bigger than what you have in data, you should defrag and consider backing up some - i try and keep my c: drive with at least a 3rd free at all times to allow for windows to piss about with swap files and run fairly optimized

maybe its just your video/sound drivers that need an update?

the cpu spikes could be a wifi/network trying to connect intermittently? is the zero configuration service or similar running for no reason?

The what service?

the problems are defo not video/sound card related. It's that general sluggishness feel within the whole windows environment.. the audio/video is just the most annoying part. I have about 600gb total space.. of which 80 is spare. I'd imagine 80gb is a decent amount of space to have free.

Gonna defrag soon.. I hope it's not hdd related as it's gonna be difficult to diagnose with me using a raid 0 config.

Virtual Memory is a problem these days, doesnt matter how many GB of ram u have, best thing to do especialy to any1 runnin firefox or production software is... if Using Vista/Xp go to Control Panel>System>Advanced System Settings>Performance Settings> Then look for the advanced section at the top, click that & extend ur pageing File (Virtual memory)

3gb of ram is more than enough to deal with basic stuff like Firefox and audio/video. I've had this pc working fine since i got it in March.

*And the paging file size is already set to 3369. I think 6gb+ is enough don't you

3GB is plenty of RAM - increasing the page can cause more problems - it's best left as 'System Managed' and then it can increase it as the OS sees fit

zero configuration is winxp's service that deals with wireless networks - if its enabled it will periodically scan for wireless networks, causing a spike in cpu usage

i typed loads of shit out then realized you're running raid.

im assuming you have 2x300g drives running together as 1? if you have 80g spare between them, you just need to get a new drive and dump some data (or backup to dvd - but its cheaper and faster to just buy a drive now)

running raid 0 is a bit pointless as the minor speed increase is not worth the data loss if one drive dies. plus drives like the wd raptor, or the samsung f1 are high enough performers to not have to worry about running more than one drive just to be able to load in to WoW quicker

defrag and dump some of that data, thats why it feels bloated/running like shit

Pagefile

rory, you might want to read that article before giving out any more 'advice'

The system came pr-configured in raid 0. Two 300's like you say. It seems a bit odd that out of nowhere it starts acting up though. It wasn't a gradual drop in performance, it's gone from running like the wind, converting a 700mb avi to dvd in about 15mins etc, to not even playing audio tracks without skipping. That to me seems a bit more serious than lack of free space. We'll see what happens after the defrag though. I had to leave the hosecall virus scan going overnight cos it said it was taking 5 hours :/

Fair enuf, but a wudnt listen to everythin u read on an instruction booklet with pcs, a build them for a living with Dell, well did, got sick of them. If ur pcs goin slow its either virtual memory, page clogged to fuck, or 2many Processes & there is a C/P u can type into "Run" that will close all the System Processes in task manager that u "dont" need running, which will speed up ur computer to almost factory settings, like when u first bought it. this will only work with vista as its smarter than Xp to find the processes that arent needed, xp can do this but itl oly close processes that aint running.

Sorry but there are way more things that could be responsible for a slow pc than just virtual memory and running processes. My pc is a quad core with 3gb ram.. so I'm guessing that isn't the problem. Defragging now and i'll just have to wait and see what things are like later on.

no offense mate, but that says it all. you just told him where to look. not what to look for, what it should be, how to change it, nothing. there was no actual advice there at all.

and as for doing something for a living - judge jules is a dj for a living and he's, well, crap. :fart:


back to the job at hand;

heat could be the problem - are you getting the problems from a cold boot or is it happening after the system has been running for a while?

have you been converting avi's for the last week non-stop or do you let it breathe every now an then, cap'n?

defrags do fuck all for processing speed.

not installed buggy drivers or owt?

Only significant thing I've done is uninstall Ghost Recon and Stalker. The PC hasn't really been used for much all week.. just downloading a few things here and there. I'm wondering if someone else has been using the pc :s It's OK today so far.. I'll just have to keep a check on it and see if the problem happens again. The fact that it was having trouble playing an mp3 file without the sound warping kinda worried me last night. If I had to guess I'd have said it was something to do with the hdd as my m8's laptop had a similar problem and eventually it turned out to be the hdd.

It's a pre-built machine and the cooling etc is all taken car of courtesy of Dell. Rory u didn't build this one did u

could the the hard disk i suppose - listen for it struggling/making more nosie as usual

fuck that, i would have the side off by now

The hdd's don't appear to be any noisier than usual. The problem is still here. I've attempted to createa rar archive of a few things and it's taking much longer than usual. It feels a bit like my old PC used to. Gonna go through my videos and delete any films that were shite.. see if that helps.

Are there any good programs that I can use to search for problems etc besides:

Tuneup Utilities
Ad-Aware
Spybot
Windows Defender
AVG Free
House Call online scanner