Available RAM vs. Free RAM?

[GoodEnough]

What's the difference?
Which one tells me how much is left?

 

[pw257008]

Available=Free+Cached.

So my relatively basic understanding of it is that you're actively using about 4GB, then about 1GB of data is cached in your RAM (it's not being used, and if it's kicked out it won't affect any currently running process, but it's there to make something you did before faster, in case you do it again--since it's available, there's little reason not to use it for something). 1 GB isn't being used and has no cached data. So if you need a little under 2GB for a process, you'll be good, but info will be kicked out of your RAM cache.

 

[postmortemIA]

yep, Cached is not included in Free, bit misleading, windows 8+ has it little bit better.

BTW you have way too many running processes (135). My home workstation rarely goes beyond 60, and work beyond 100, and work adds too much IT crap.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

yep, Cached is not included in Free, bit misleading, windows 8+ has it little bit better.

BTW you have way too many running processes (135). My home workstation rarely goes beyond 60, and work beyond 100, and work adds too much IT crap.

In Win7, the best representation of the same numbers is shown in the "Memory" tab of "Resource Monitor," which links from the Performance tab of TM. And basically what the other posters are saying is absolutely correct.

I thought I discovered a memory leak in Media Center that would occur after a DVR capture, but not until after I'd doubled my RAM to 16GB because usage with 8 seemed "high". Don't really regret that, but the best advice these days is that 8GB is plenty for most folks. "MIB" -- More Is Better.

And . . Sheesh!! . . . I've got 132 active processes.

 

[ronitbajaj]

Cached is not included in Free RAM, but Available=Free+Cached.

 

[Dahak]

BTW you have way too many running processes (135). My home workstation rarely goes beyond 60, and work beyond 100, and work adds too much IT crap.

Not to side track this, but that really has little bearing, my work laptop, which I do IT with, fresh boot with outlook,firefox,ie has 123 running

 

[GoodEnough]

Bottom line, when does the PC reach "thrashing" point,
where the performance jams b/c RAM has run out?
When FREE = 0 ? Or when AVAIL = 0 ?

 

[pw257008]

Bottom line, when does the PC reach "thrashing" point,
where the performance jams b/c RAM has run out?
When FREE = 0 ? Or when AVAIL = 0 ?

when available hits zero

 

[imagoon]

Not to side track this, but that really has little bearing, my work laptop, which I do IT with, fresh boot with outlook,firefox,ie has 123 running

Agreed. I am not sure why anyone would care how many processes are running baring system resource issues. I'm over 100 and I just rebooted. Couple of the Citrix desktop servers are 265 -> 1000+

 

[It's Not Lupus]

what about the paging file?

 

[Cerb]

Bottom line, when does the PC reach "thrashing" point,
where the performance jams b/c RAM has run out?
When FREE = 0 ? Or when AVAIL = 0 ?

When it has to use the page file instead of RAM, or has mistakenly put a bunch of data into the page file that would have been better left in RAM. That may occur sometime after available becomes 0, since there may still be pages that can be freed before that becomes a problem. Likewise, it could happen with available at above 0, if the problem is related to mostly reading from the page file, due to pushing data there and then freeing it from RAM at a later point. Available should remain low, however, is that case.

Available is the one you mainly should care about, performance-wise. Free more or less tells you whether or not you have too much RAM .

 

[BrightCandle]

You will see thrashing on the drive before available hits 0. It will becoming an increasing problem below about 10% of RAM available, the machine will be unusable once available actually hits 0 because the page file at that point is probably also nearly full. In a simple scheme it would go to zero before the thrashing starts but windows actually pages out quite a lot of things early that aren't being used much to save performance and get more cache/available RAM for other things.

 

[Cerb]

I think a good short version would be this: on any modern PC, available RAM should always be >1GB. If it's into 3 digits or lower, you're getting close to having issues.

 

[GoodEnough]

Thanks. I will keep an eye on Available.

 

[GoodEnough]

Ok, here is what I did.
I tracked the RAM usage as I opened each additional program.

Does this PC need a RAM upgrade, based on wanting to keep 5-6 programs open at once?

Can anyone explain to me when my 2GB of RAM is getting used up,
and then the PC resorts to the paging file (which should slow down performance)

Why does RAM used never seem to exceed 1.8, even after open a bunch more programs?

I saw that free RAM was already at 0 right after opening Outlook!

The 3 colored numbers need clarification for me.
1) Blue 8. How does free memory go UP when I open yet another program?
2) Red 156. How does Avail memory go UP when I open yet another program?
3) Green 165. Paged went up. Is this when a page file finally kicked in?
4) Last row, RAM used actually went down! Yet, nothing was closed, and more was opened.