Saturday, March 28, 2015

memory - Windows 8.1 only uses 50% of RAM


Windows 8.1 uses only 50% of my installed 4GB memory which causes games to crash. System information state that 3.71GB are usable). The picture below is from my Task Manager showing the memory (Arbeitsspeicher in German). The graph below shows the memory usage for the last 60 seconds, and to the right you can see that roughly 50% (of 3.71GB) is used. 60 seconds before I took the screenshot, a game crashed due to memory problems.


Only 50% is used


I also noticed that memory composition (the graph below) remains fairly stable when it comes to "Free memory" (far right). Mouseover information says that free memory can be used once necessary, but it doesn't seem to happen. Memtest86+ says all memory is working fine.


System specifications:



  • 64bit architecture

  • dual boot with Ubuntu 14.04

  • pagefile.sys set to 6144MB manually (as an unsuccesful attempt to solve the problem)


This question is not related to two other questions (How to enable 4GB in my Windows 7 64 bit?) and (64-bit Windows 7 can only use 3.25GB of RAM instead of 4GB?).


Answer



By default 32Bit application still only use 2GB of RAM under a 64Bit Windows like they do on a 32Bit Windows. To allow 4GB of memory usage under a 64Bit Windows the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag must be set. If the developers haven't set this flag with the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE linker option during compilation you can use a tool which sets the flag in the executable to allow the 32Bit program to use 4GB of RAM.


No comments:

Post a Comment

linux - How to SSH to ec2 instance in VPC private subnet via NAT server

I have created a VPC in aws with a public subnet and a private subnet. The private subnet does not have direct access to external network. S...