RAM usage spike

So, I woke up from my nap (I had early classes this morning) and I came down to my Sager 2090 and found two wonderful things. A), when it went into sleep mode it flip-flopped the location of the monitors (I run dual monitors), so all the stuff that was on my second monitor, was invisible. That was just kinda annoying, but I also noticed that on my handy windows gadget, RAM usage was up to 77%... I have FOUR Gigs of RAM, and all I was running was word, bit torrent, AIM and thunderbird. I just closed word and bit torrent, and it went down from 77% to 74%. I thought that the gadget was probably just a little screwed, so I checked w/ the nvidia monitor and alas, it was the same. I killed all my processes so I'm down to about 50 . I'm gonna give it a good old fashioned restart, but I was kinda curious as to why windows was like "I NEED THREE GIGABYES OF RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMM." CPU usage is idling between 4 and 10% depending on what I do.

 

Sounds like a memory leak somewhere.

 

All four of the applications you mentioned (Word, Bit Torrent, AIM, and Thunderbird) are all known to leak memory over time. Word was probably leaking the least with Thunderbird and Bit Torrent leaking the most memory. If you browse the Internet for you may be able to find a patch/tweak that will cut the leaking down on Thunderbird, but so far there is no permanent solution available. (All web browsers and their related applications currently leak memory, so you wouldn't do much better by switching away from those programs). Next time it happens try closing all of them starting with Thunderbird and Aim and and you should see more than 3% free up.

 

wow, I've been running for a while, was getting up to 50, came out of lock, and now I'm up to 73... which is.. wrong. The only thing I can think of, is that I just used disk cleanup and killed some big "unnecessary files" Windows deemed them unnecessary, so they must be useless... The latest software I put on was quicktime, but it's not running. Nothing's really happening slower, but it's certainly incorrect that I should be using GB's of RAM. Any solutions?

 

- disable System Restore
- disable Drive Indexing

- MS programs are not the best for memory optimizations... especially if they build up temp files during use.... like Word would make backups as you are working on it.

- use well-coded programs
... I usually do not do torrents (too slow for my taste), but know that the ones thats well coded are:
-- BitLord/BitComet, uTorrent, or Azureus

 

Where can I find drive indexing? (to disable it) - and what does it do? and I'm fairly naive about torrents, I just use bitTorrent (vanilla). Anyway I can get this RAM back.. I mean.. what's it doing right now? just running in circles?

 

hm, I just used some webcam software (still have AIM thunderbird firefox and bittorrent open) and RAM consumption dropped to 33%.... Computers are weird, weird things.

 

you right click on the Hard Drive in the My Computer, and uncheck Drive Indexing (for all files and folders)

do not use the spyware based bittorrent client.... use one of the others that I recommended.

 

spyware based?! I had no idea, wow; thank you.

 

its borderline spyware usually.... so I would avoid any program that sends out info without your knowledge.

use uTorrent or Azureus for best results.