See new article here. The Truth About Windows Memory Optimizers Memory boosters, optimizers, and washers --- whatever the name, they all do mostly the same thing, free up physical RAM. They do this by forcing as much allocated physical RAM into the page file as possible. Does this make your computer run faster? The short answer is not as much as you may have been led to believe. Modern operating systems use virtual memory. It is called virtual memory
because it exists in both physical RAM and on disk in the page file. Virtual
memory consists of pages, which are blocks of a few kilobytes of memory.
When a page of virtual memory is accessed it must be loaded into RAM. If no
RAM is available, pages not currently in use are moved to disk into the page
file. Thus, virtual memory is limited only by the size of the page file plus
the size of RAM. In this way, the system can use gigabytes of memory even if
the RAM is only a few hundred megabytes. Windows manages virtual memory so that commonly used pages are attempted to be kept in RAM and less commonly used pages are stored in the page file. In relative terms, the overhead of paging memory in and out is quite high. Therefore, it is important that the management of virtual memory be done in an efficient way. Memory optimizers force all possible pages in RAM to the page file. Thus, the amount of free RAM is increased, but the amount of virtual memory in use is not affected. So there is no true increase in free memory, only free RAM. When the applications whose memory was put into the page file become active again, the pages of memory they use must be loaded back into RAM, incurring substantial overhead. The *only* benefit from these applications is that if you were to load a program immediately after you've paged out all available memory, it *might* load faster in some cases because pages of RAM are already available and don't need to be paged out in order to make room for the program. One way to look at this scenario is that the cost of freeing RAM is done before the program loads instead of as the program loads. However, this benefit is negligible and is more than paid for later when the RAM that was paged out is paged back in. Furthermore, this benefit is only applicable when the program that is loaded after the cleanup requires large amounts of RAM that would not have otherwise been immediately available. This is seldom the case. Later, while running the program the memory that was paged out prior to its loading is often paged in, causing performance to suffer. The memory that is paged out must be paged back in for you to use the other applications running on your computer. Thus, when you click on a minimized application, it takes longer to restore its window because its memory must be paged in. Furthermore, pages that are used by the operating system are often paged back in immediately after the memory 'cleanup'. These memory optimization applications interfere with the ability of Windows to efficiently manage virtual memory. Furthermore, many of them don't even free RAM in a proper way. Often, they do so by simply allocating as much RAM as possible, forcing Windows to page out the memory of all other applications. It is best to leave the management of virtual memory to Windows and not take it into your own hands. Any benefit from these programs is an illusion and temporary. You incur the penalties of paging memory back in sooner or later, even if it appears that the program you run after the cleanup loads faster. If you decide on using one of these programs because your needs do
actually warrant it, at least find one that pages out memory in a proper way
instead of allocating gobs of memory to itself. I do not know which of these
applications do it properly and which don't, but the less gimicky they look,
the better they probably are. An application like this written by a
professional at least stands a better chance of performing its tasks in an
optimal way and causing less performance degradation. |
|||||||||||||||
