Vista and caching

Vista and caching

General — Page [1]
Down Rodeo
Cap'n Moth of the Firehouse

Find the Hole II Participation Medal
2007 Oct 19 • 5486
57,583 ₧
So I was looking at task manager today in an effort to find out why my HD was grinding like a horny teen. Turns out this is why:

As you can see there's about 50 MB of RAM currently empty and something of the order 3000 MB used as 'cache'. So there we have it! Vista caches your files transparently; it appears as free memory in task manager, my guess is when you memalloc() or whatever the OS checks that the cached stuff isn't about to be in use then pisses all over it :D

For the record I don't agree with that style of caching, I'd like to know which 3 GB of data it thinks I might use, for the moment all it does for me is slow my current usage down because of the constant i/o. That and shorten the life of the drive :(

EDIT: to the attention of Superererererer and cloudy :)
 
 
 
2010 Apr 7 at 13:52 UTC — Ed. 2010 Apr 7 at 13:53 UTC
sprinkles

Chrome Whore
2009 Sep 6 • 2547
10 ₧
I jus' find it funny that on Windows 7 while idle my pc runs at 34% RAM, but in Ubuntu 9.10 it runs at 5.8%. Suck that Microsoft.
 
 
 
2010 Apr 7 at 14:39 UTC
SuperJer
Websiteman

2005 Mar 21 • 6673
If anything, your 3162 MB of cache should be reducing load on your HDD. Programs trying to read from the HDD will be able to get what they want from the cache, and skip polling the HDD completely.

If I were you I'd look for other reasons that your HDD is grinding away. I'm not sure but there must be some tool for seeing what is using your HDD so much.

EDIT: It could also be that your HDD is dying. So do backup if you haven't.
 
 
 
2010 Apr 7 at 22:29 UTC — Ed. 2010 Apr 7 at 22:30 UTC
the_cloud_system
polly pushy pants

2008 Aug 1 • 3081
-6 ₧
thanks for that just to know that vista sucks, but im glad to have it :P
I drink to forget but I always remember.
 
 
 
2010 Apr 7 at 23:18 UTC
Down Rodeo
Cap'n Moth of the Firehouse

Find the Hole II Participation Medal
2007 Oct 19 • 5486
57,583 ₧
The reason it was grinding is at that stage it was filling my RAM with the cached data, it brought it down to about 50. Yes, I watched it go from ~250. So yes, the harddrive was making noises because Vista was filling it at that stage. I'm not sure that I've noticed a speedup... who knows, maybe I have.
 
 
 
2010 Apr 8 at 01:16 UTC
SuperJer
Websiteman

2005 Mar 21 • 6673
Well if it's not a continuous problem, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Are you powering off/restarting your computer a lot?

Despite the evidence Microsoft isn't totally crazy and they do have pretty good reasons for the core features of Windows.
 
 
 
2010 Apr 8 at 01:45 UTC
sprinkles

Chrome Whore
2009 Sep 6 • 2547
10 ₧
They have good ideas, but the implementation most times is off.
 
 
 
2010 Apr 8 at 02:01 UTC
Down Rodeo
Cap'n Moth of the Firehouse

Find the Hole II Participation Medal
2007 Oct 19 • 5486
57,583 ₧
Yeah I realise why they do it. I'm not complaining too much, it was just that we'd had that discussion in the other truck and I couldn't be bothered finding it. I also can't find the option to turn it off - not that I necessarily would, just that I can't see it!
 
 
 
2010 Apr 8 at 10:11 UTC
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