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Last post Author Topic: Rambooster. Junk?  (Read 42537 times)

Steven Avery

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #50 on: March 28, 2009, 05:09 AM »
Hi Folks,

I don't believe it would be fair to call it a ram booster, cause it's not. More like a little extra management.
-cmpm

Agreed.  Management doing preemptively, casually in the background, a helpful function that XP does very late in the day of crises, after slowdowns, while you are waiting, and not fully.

How to avoid slowdowns, and slowdowns unto lockups.

1) Maximize the memory (my plan tomorrow)
2) Close and reopen the worst recidivist offenders. (Firefox, Eudora, others)
3) Reboot when you are taking a break.  (Walk away from puter, do not touch the keyboard).
   Start re-browsing with new tabs.
4) Run CleanMem to complement #2 and #3 if memory is not totally sufficient and you experience any pagefile-style slowdowns.  CleanMem will make closing some programs (e.g. Eudora) unnecessary, while others, like Firefox, still cry for attention.

And upgrade to a hotter system and use the less-memory, slower one as a dedicated Linux box for a light XP usage (e.g. voice and telephone chat) on your home network.

In the old days I only really did #3.  And not often enough.  With Firefox Session Manager being very strong now, that takes care of a lot of force-reboot concerns.  I would like to add a method of making sure my email is not downloading when I force a reboot, possibly through requesting first an orderly close of Eudora.  That I have to try out.  I have it set to automatic download every two hours but I can miss the fact that it is downloading when I call for a reboot.  (This is one thing to note .. folks have lots of reasons why they would prefer not to reboot, they may consider a force reboot dangerous and a hand-close-reboot slow and annoying.)

It's the only memory program I would recommend at this time, if asked. And I've tried a few.
-cmpm

I am curious if you ran MiniMem.  It may be redundant at this point but if  you did a comparison share away. It was the one other one I found of some additional interest when reading.  I actually did not intend to use anything, being a bit intimidated by the nattering nabobs of memory negativity :) .  I started this discussion with memory tools being in my mind only a step above registry cleaning as a nothing sideshow, potentially dangerous.

Shalom,
Steven
« Last Edit: March 28, 2009, 05:47 AM by Steven Avery »

f0dder

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #51 on: March 30, 2009, 09:07 AM »
Why don't you take a single processor CPU with 1 Gigabyte and download a few thousand emails from Eudora (which works its mail through an Inbox that is in memory) and open a few dozen Firefox tabs and a few other browsers and have a couple of dozen programs open and then report back.   If on your system you have a well-behaved game or graphics or web-dev program .. what difference does it make ?
-Steven Avery
I used to run with and AMD64-3500+ (2.2GHz) and 1gig of ram - before that, I had a P4 2.53GHz w/512meg ram (later upgraded to 1gig, iirc). I've put those systems under a lot of stress, lots of uptime, and never ever would a program like cleanmem have helped anything. A thing that did matter for the 512meg system was specifying sane pagefile sizes, so the system didn't have to expand the pagefile... that was a very costly operation. I don't think I've ran XP with less than 512meg ram, but I used Win2000 comfortable with 256meg - and still no "memory optimizers".

What surprises me in your approach is how you don't even address the timing issue.  That for Windows XP to do "stuff" (and likely the wrong stuff) late .. after your keystroke creates a crises .. is doofus memory management.  XP should be prepared for the next need with CPU and memory attuned and ready to go.  This idea that you wait a long time while XP tries to clear out space is simply an operating system weakness. And one that CleanMem helps address.
-Steven Avery
Why should process working sets be trimmed before it's necessary? I'd be frustrated from the possibly unnecessary disk I/O this would cause.

There is an irony that you mention Visual Studio as the major memory-CPU part of your earlier system. I would assume that VS uses the .Net function that encouraged CleanMem that is largely ignored elsewhere.  Thus keeping a light footprint.
-Steven Avery
What is the ".Net function that encouraged CleanMem"? If you mean garbage collection, then that isn't anything at all like process working set trimming. I mention VS since it's a relatively resource-heavy program (sitting at 112MB private bytes with a relatively small solution open). Eclipse (java) sits at 130MB with my schoolstuff workspace open. Those are two of the heavier often-in-use applications I keep running... firefox is, by far, the biggest sinner - it's no unusual for it to sit at 5-800 megabytes private bytes if I haven't restarted the browser all day.

And you say you disabled the Pagefile and ran with 1 Gigabyte.  I am not sure how that works, I read a bit about that way of running and decided against it, I think I remember warnings that it would not work well if at all, perhaps you have different ideas to share.  Clearly the moment you disable the pagefile you have a radically different system, making any comparison one of apples and kumquats.
-Steven Avery
Back when I had 1GB in my system, there'd be an occasional hiccup (read: application crash) if I tried to run recent games without PF enabled, but as a whole things worked well (this was before FF :)). With 2GB I never ran into problems, and in my current system I have 8GB - no pagefile, permanent ramdisk running, and everything flies.

Yes, disabled pagefile does make a difference, namely that I won't suffer disk-write I/O. My laptop has 2GB and a pagefile though - haven't bothered profiling memory usage to see whether it's safe to disable or not.

Note specifically the point about a lot of memory released that does not go to the pagefile.  From Ian Griffith beginning "I'm unconvinced by the points regarding the way Windows pages out applications that are idle.".  It seems that this bears directly on the issues involved with CleanMem as well.
-Steven Avery
What he's referring to is page discard, and that (as he says) only happens with pages that aren't dirty (ie, haven't been written to). This is a relatively tiny amount of memory for most programs, compared to the writable data allocated. Discarding does mean that you don't need to write pages to the pagefile, but it isn't free - once the code/data is needed again, it will be re-read from disk. And disk is slow compared to memory.

Keep in mind that read-only pages are sharable across processes. If you launch two instances of firefox, physical memory will only be allocated for one set of the read-only pages. Same things happen with shared DLL files (as long as they can be mapped to the preferred base address and don't need relocating).

I'd like to run programs/apps without having to restart them for any reason. I shouldn't have to. XP's management does not work for every situation or computer.
-cmpm
Complain to the programmers who write buggy, memory-leaking software :)

But you have to restart firefox sometimes, with or without cleanmem or any other help.
-cmpm
Yes, obviously cleanmem (or anything else) won't help about programs that have memory leaks - the only thing that works is restarting the program.

Cleaning temp files periodically as well as clearing the cache helps with mem and cpu.
-cmpm
How does cleaning temp files help wrt. cpu/memory?

Agreed.  Management doing preemptively, casually in the background, a helpful function that XP does very late in the day of crises, after slowdowns, while you are waiting, and not fully.
-Steven Avery
It trims the working set when minimizing windows, if the application hasn't overridden the default behavior.

I'm not a fan of trimming workingset before it's necessary, since it's a pessimization for the trimmed process(es). An exception would be a program or service that's going to sit idle for long period of time, it can make sense for it to trim it's working set after initial startup is finished... but the largest effect is pleasing people obsessing over task manager memory stats.
- carpe noctem

cmpm

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #52 on: March 30, 2009, 10:39 AM »
Overall the the system runs better after cleaning all temp files, which includes prefetch and java cache.

I have no idea how it helps cpu and memory, but that is what powers the thing, is it not?

Honestly fodder, I don't think I can converse with you on these things I don't know much about. Not that that is something wrong, but you just know more and can't grasp what you are saying half or more of the time.

I've found somethings that improve the comp, and some that don't that others say does. Basically I see what the result is and don't see what actually transpires in the inner workings of the comp.

I could study up on those two sites from ms in CleanMem's explanation, posted somewhere here in this thread, or the link, and try to do what you laid out with the -1 deal. But that would be dangerous in my opinion, cause I don't know what I'm doing getting into the inner workings of XP. Which after doing what I don't know what I did and it faults somehow, I doubt if I could undo it.

Not afraid to do it, if I knew what I was doing. I can run programs and that's about it, or edit the registry as needed, with instruction. Programs that are recommended or high rated, I'm willing to try at the risk of a reformat. Cause I at least know how to backup stuff I want to keep.

One case in my computer life is Advanced System Care, which is rated high, recommended, and was fine till they upgraded to a newer version. It took out some things it should not have. But was restored because it backed up it's changes. So now I don't use it.

What I do use helps at this time.
With stability and performance.

f0dder

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #53 on: March 30, 2009, 11:03 AM »
Cleaning prefetch files really shouldn't make your computer faster - au contraire. It's a persistent myth that cleaning out the *.pf files is an optimization, though. They're used for telling Windows' application loader that "when loading this application, it's usually going to need these pages right away", instead of demand-loading the pages as they're needed... this is smart because a few larger I/O requests are (a lot!) faster than a lot of small scattered requests. It's not like the .pf files take up a lot of disk space, either - and usually they won't be fragmented.

I honestly can't see how cleaning out %temp% would make things faster, either. Well, OK, if you have several thousand files there and spend time browsing that directory for fun, I guess there could be some slowdown. Stuff can accumulate there, though, so you can save a bit of disk space by cleaning it - which can reduce the time necessary to defragment the partition with the temp files.

Which leads to... do keep your drives defragmented, that does mean a lot for performance... and do use a proper defrag application, the one that comes with windows (including vista) sucks bigtime.
- carpe noctem

cmpm

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #54 on: March 30, 2009, 11:30 AM »
Yeah that's part of my routine when I do clean the computer.
Defrag. Once a month or so I will run my programs.
No I don't browse the temp files.

Just surfing the net isn't so bad, till you watch some videos or tv or download a lot of things and uninstall things.

Yeah I use it a lot for fun mainly.
Try different programs for whatever.
Not just computer performance.

If I blow it up, I figure out how to fix it.
learning is fun ....sometimes.
Not so much when I can't figure it out.

If this was a work related computer.
I may do things different, I don't know.
The ones at work are pretty much locked for playing around too much. I don't have time to surf much at work anyway.
They just now let Firefox in, mainly because the new pc/mac's come with it I believe.

And my wife's computer is a different story too...lol.

My sister-in-law bought a new computer and ran it for over a year without any maintaining at all. And wondered why it didn't work right and was very slow.
Just running Ccleaner perked it up. Then after I ran my routine on her comp, she was back up to speed.

mrainey

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #55 on: March 30, 2009, 12:35 PM »
learning is fun ....sometimes.


I can appreciate that line!
Software For Metalworking
http://closetolerancesoftware.com

bit

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #56 on: February 05, 2014, 04:43 AM »
So.......is RamBooster junk, or what's a good RAM manager?

justice

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #57 on: February 05, 2014, 05:31 AM »
So.......is RamBooster junk, or what's a good RAM manager?
Yes; recent version of Windows.

bit

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #58 on: February 05, 2014, 05:04 PM »
So.......is RamBooster junk, or what's a good RAM manager?
Yes; recent version of Windows.
IOW, Windows 7 does a perfectly good job automatically?

mwb1100

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #59 on: February 05, 2014, 05:33 PM »
Any discussion of "RAM management" software for Windows reminds me of the marketing success of  Syncronys Software's SoftRAM followed by devastating findings of outright fraud:

In December 1995, the German computing journal c't disassembled the program and determined that it did not even attempt to do what it was meant to do.[4] In fact, the data passed through the VxD completely unaltered so that no compression whatsoever could have taken place. The actual drivers were in fact slightly modified versions of code examples taken from Microsoft's "Windows Development Kit". Still, the program would try to pretend that it increased system resources, by silently increasing the size of the swap file on Windows 3.1 and by giving false information on the current state of the system.

I think that most RAM management software probably has little real effect on most systems. I'd suggest steering clear unless you're certain that you'll benefit (and prove that out with testing).

Shades

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #60 on: February 05, 2014, 07:04 PM »
There are some use cases that could benefit from the use of a RAM disk. But those hardly apply to the most common uses of computers. As mwb1100 already stated: practically all software applications with RAM in their name should be avoided. The moment you really do have a need for software applications regarding RAM, that will feel almost like a moment of clarity. Until then, just don't. 

justice

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #61 on: February 06, 2014, 03:24 AM »
Yes if it's more RAM you need you best just go and buy extra. Windows 7 and higher are built to manage your memory, swap out things and cache where appropriate. What you do by using a ram booster or any program that tries to manage memory is to compete with Windows built in systems which results in degraded perfomance such as extra swapping and suboptimal caches.

The reasons for a typical user to look into something like RAM booster (slow machine, stuttering, slow loading of programs or whatever) will almost always have other causes such as viruses / spyware, multiple anti virus scanners competing for resources, hardware problems, overheating etc.

bit

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Re: Rambooster. Junk?
« Reply #62 on: February 20, 2014, 11:12 PM »
I uninstalled Advance System Optimizer 3 from my old Win XP alternate OS that I keep on an old HD for older apps, and which the ASO3 was managing the ram. The OS got sluggish and crashy after I uninstalled ASO3 for some reason, so I dragged out an ancient copy of RamBooster from an old A: drive disk and installed it and Win XP seems quite a bit happier now.