RPGDX > Forums > Off Topic > Windows memory problems... anyone ever have this?

XMark

This has started to happen recently on my comp (Windows 2000 Professional). For some reason, a bunch of programs in memory all of a sudden decide to use 10-100 times as much memory as they're supposed to. Anyone know what might be causing this?

I've found if I run one of the more technologically demanding games on my system like Half-life 2 sometimes when I exit the problem has magically fixed itself. Weird.
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Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

PhyrFox · Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 7:36 am Post subject: Memory issues?

As far as I know, Windows seems to not always know what's going on with itself internally. My best guess would be that the VMM subsystem went into some rampage, allocating extra memory for the programs for no reason in particular (could be a program requesting memory at a certain time, confusing the VMM subsystem?). Fortunately, memory that's allocated, but not committed, uses no extra physical (or virtual) memory, so it shouldn't cause any signifigant slowdown. I'd ponder running an updated virus scanner, to be on the safe side, though.

~= PhyrFox =~

EDIT: As a side note, not that it matters, but you might find ALT+PRNTSCRN instead of the usual PRNTSCRN will capture an active window, rather than the whole screen. Easier than having to crop an image, imho.

Bjorn · Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 8:41 am Post subject:

I don't see anything weird about those numbers...

BadMrBox · Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 3:20 pm Post subject:

On my computer, I can only see the bottom text on my task manager. That is weird, annoying and I'm gonna delete XP.
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XMark · Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 8:49 pm Post subject:

As it turns out, most of the problems were due to the educational copy of Oracle 9i that I had installed for my database course. Now that I'm done the course I was able to take that 2 Gigabyte brick out of my computer and all the memory-hogging programs that come with it :)
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Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

janus · Mage Joined: 29 Jun 2002 Posts: 464 Location: Issaquah, WA

Windows memory usage is split into two values - VM usage and RAM usage. By default, the task manager only shows RAM usage. Often if a game like HL2 sucks up RAM, other apps get their data moved into VM. If you enable the VM column you'll be able to see the actual memory usage.