would more RAM help or do i need a better CPU?

sadly i'm not experienced enough to know the answer to this... so my lappy has really been struggling just scrolling through tumblr. i mean i have xkit and a ton of tabs open so that complicates things.

task manager shows physical RAM at 85%. tumblr tends so slow down a lot when the cpu usage gets to 70% or so

the CPU is a i7-620m and i have 8gb RAM. any thoughts?

 

85% memory usage surfing the web? Something is wrong, lol. When was the last time you did a clean install?

I think you could use a better CPU, and more RAM never hurts.

 

Something else is going wrong here. Web browsing even with content-intensive sites is no problem on my T500 with a Core 2 Duo and 6GB of RAM, so your laptop shouldn't struggle. Do you shut down your computer, or do you use standby? If it's the latter, do you ever restart your browser? Most browsers have memory leaks that will eventually lead to disproportionate memory usage and slower performance.

Of course, if you also have other malware or other things affecting performance, that could be it too...

 

well i have about 50 tabs open. i closed some stuff and it went down to 59%. its been a while since i did a clean install. maybe ill just switch to linux lol

 

Yeah, forgot about that. Browsers are notorious for memory leaks. Closing tabs and/or deleting all browsing history may help a lot. A quick restart may also be helpful.

I recommend doing that. If it still is high usage, download Malwarebytes and run a full scan. If nothing is found, do a clean install.

 

well i restarted the browser with my internet turned off and it went down to 30%. thats with my internet off so it only loaded stuff from the cache, which seems to be only basic websites like forums and craigslist, everything else didnt load at all.

does 30% seem normal?

 

Yeah, that's not alarming for an older CPU. Still a lot in comparison to newer ones, though.

 

well back to the original question, do you think its the CPU making tumblr run slow then? or would more RAM make a significant difference?

 

also i would like to point out that xkit and the particular plugins i'm using are probably very badly coded.

 

It's most likely the CPU.

 

yeah looks like.............. what i don't understand is why it never hits 100% usage? it always gets to like 75% and then starts to slow up

 

If you mean the CPU, it's probably due to hyperthreading and you hitting limitations as far as the number of threads that whaterver you do can be split in to and CPU performance per thread. 75% CPU usage would mean roughly three threads on two cores. That load could very well bog down a CPU depending on what it is.

A good example of this, although entirely unrelated to your case, is when I am crunching numbers. It's a very sequential type of workload or in other words, the CPU's branch predicition is almost always 100% spot on. That means that running the load on 4 threads or 8 threads will not make a single difference in number crunch time at all. The only difference is that if I load up all threads including the virtual ones, the system slows down to a crawl. You are likely in a similar situation where your two real cores are pushed relatively hard and having another virtual core loaded is enough to cause things to slow down.

 

I've also noticed that chrome will eat CPU cycles until you actually look at each open tab, allowing it to render to the proper screen size.

I was in a meeting on power saver and my fans wouldn't shut up until I shift-tabbed through all twenty or so tabs I had open.

Just a thought.

 

First, clear your cookies, browsing history, etc., etc browser-related. I suggest using CCleaner. Then try completely disabling pagefile. If performs well but warns about running out of memory, then and only then memory upgrade is reasonable.

 

I was under the impression that Arrandale could not work with more than 8GB of total RAM. So even if you wanted you can't upgrade it without getting a new laptop.

~Aeny

 

i7s ending in qm of that gen will work with 16 GB, can't say for i3 or i5.

Also, whomever suggested disabling the page file, why? Niff could just hit his commit limit with that and some program definitely won't like it.

 

8740w is first gen core i and handles 32GB with i7 and I guess 16GB with i5.

On topic - restart your browser frequently, that's all you can do, really. I'd rather restart every second or third day, than browsing without add-ons.

 

have a clean standalone browser for that page (tumblr in your case). Not sure what your browser is, but try clean IE.

 

tijo, disabling pagefile improves performance noticeably and reduces HDD/SSD wear. It's always a good thing to disable it on a stable machine with enough RAM. With the described usage pattern, there is no chance system will be even close to running out of memory, unless it's full of memory-leaking malware.

 

Personally, I haven't really seen any improvements with no page file and I haven't seen anything getting paged that was in use either given enough memory.

As for why I'm not a fan of disabling the page file, this explains it better than I could: The Out-of-Memory Syndrome, or: Why Do I Still Need a Pagefile? | Azius Blog. Well there is that and the fact that I managed to hit the page file a few times even with 32 GB of RAM thanks to some RAM hungry programs. In the end, it's up to the user to decide what to do, you can do it, definitely, but it's not something I'd advocate without a lot of testing before actually leaving the page file off on any given system.

Also, the OP mentioned he was hitting 85% used RAM which in my opinion is a good reason to keep the page file. As for reducing wear on a SSD, that is in my own experience a non-issue. I have been running the same SSDs for the better part of two years now and they still register 100% health with a system managed page file (~5 GB with 43 GB of RAM) on it.

Side note: some programs will freak out and refuse to launch or throw errors if no page file is present regardless of whether it gets used or not.

 

Does you disk usage go up when you slow down, i.e. does the disk light on your computer start blinking really fast? If so that indicates you're bottlenecked by memory. Otherwise, yeah CPU is too slow. That being said, i7-620m is pretty fast even by modern standards.

 

If you are using Chrome, that eats RAM for breakfast. I have 16Gb on my desktop system and I've already used 4 Gb with only 15 tabs open. I don't think an upgrade to a quadcore is warranted as you will replace performance issues with heat issues. I think maybe some tab management and discipline might fix your issues.

 

To be honest, monitoring the HDD light has to be the worse way I can think of to monitor page file usage. Windows access the disk for other tasks after all. I still get HDD activity at idle even without any paging occurring from time to time.

If you want to monitor how much of the page file is actually in use, perfmon.exe (present in every version of Windows that is still relevant today) is your best bet. Load up perfmon, add a counter and in the list that pops up, choose % usage under paging file. The page input counter under memory can also be used to get an idea of how much stuff Windows is paging.