Dealing with RAM...
If there's one thing that sometimes grinds my gears, it's memory usage. For some that may know of the laptop that I've been using, now for almost six years, it has 4GB of RAM and now, it seems that the figure is outdated as most computers nowadays have 8GB of it, and that some programs love to consume it. I wonder if there's any way of controlling it if I wanted more RAM on it or, reduce the amount of used RAM out of the many processes on it, as right now there are about 62 of them and while most of them are small (about a few MBs), I feel they're pretty useless to just sit there and not do anything, yet they still take up RAM and that 1.88GB is available for this system. Don't know if there's some sort of utility that can deal with this.
I'm not sure how adding more RAM to this would work when, I don't really want this taken apart just for it to be done and I wonder if there's a removable device to add more in but I don't think something like that exists. However, I am aware of virtual memory where there is 7.6GB of it and of 5.47GB of it available. Not sure if that alone can help of things like Firefox and MBAM using up lots of memory all the time. Don't know if I'm really making a mountain out of a molehill, like I always do but I hope anyone can help out or at least understand where I'm coming from.
I'm not sure how adding more RAM to this would work when, I don't really want this taken apart just for it to be done and I wonder if there's a removable device to add more in but I don't think something like that exists. However, I am aware of virtual memory where there is 7.6GB of it and of 5.47GB of it available. Not sure if that alone can help of things like Firefox and MBAM using up lots of memory all the time. Don't know if I'm really making a mountain out of a molehill, like I always do but I hope anyone can help out or at least understand where I'm coming from.
Comments
Only way I know of to get rid of junk background processes is to backup, reformat and reinstall. Just make sure Windows or one of your important programs don't use any of those processes.
Virtual memory sucks. It uses empty hard disk space as memory, but this process is very slow. You'd be much better served by more RAM.
Web browsers of today are also absurd with the amount of resources they use. Just for comparison, I opened up my website (a pretty basic website) in Firefox, Chrome and Opera 12.18 (when Opera was a good browser). Here's the result:
Why is it that Opera can get away with using so little and be lightning fast, while Chrome and Firefox use at least a couple hundred MB with Chrome spawning 7 instances? Seems like they should be able to trim that down a bit if they really wanted to. My website is basic. It's not that big. Browsers should not use as much as they are.
That makes a difference, especially if you're comparing a modern browser on one based with 6 year old code.
As for chrome, their idea of spawning multiple processes with each performing a different activity...
Although, some web pages that we visit can increase memory usage like, those with that horrid mobile-like web design packed with far too much code and scripts.
Pale moon is essentially a child of firefox, just optimized and mostly stripped down.
As for opera, I do use it as an alternative browser. However, in my opinion it's a bit too childish, script oriented, and falls into the category of yet another webkit-chromium browser.
Overall, it's not bad as a chrome-y browser, but just not very optimized either.
>second sentence
when a webpage is so packed with scripts, a computer is unable to load it.
In this case my d600 has the latest firefox but thanks to the amazing power of scripts, the browser freezes with 100% cpu usage halfway through the page loading as it tries to perform countless useless activities, such as loading flash ads or the javascript cat in the corner.
Although, a quick Google search about its RAM usage tells me of articles that it used much more, but it seemed to be depending on your system. I'm a bit concerned of that actually, and may not want to take the risk
Hint: Modern OSes eat your RAM for good reason - it's cache. Free RAM is wasted RAM, so OSes will cache as much as possible, and that counts as used. My apps, if I total them in processes, use only a fraction of my used RAM, but most of it is tied up in cache, and the other half is completely unused.
Google forked the webkit rendering engine and made their own, Blink, which is what Chrome uses now.
My PC has 16 GB total RAM.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the 64-bit Firefox consumed a lot of memory... good thing I'm using the 32-bit version.
Firefox was version 52.2.1 ESR, and Chrome was whatever the last version for XP was, released sometime last year I think. They're both modern browsers, and the slightly newer versions on my linux machines use a comparable amount of RAM. The only older browser being compared here was Opera 12, which I think they could have improved upon if they really wanted to. Their Opera Mini browser for Android still uses the Presto engine, and it's the best mobile browser I've used. Fast, lightweight and includes an ad blocker.