PDA

View Full Version : can this be bad for your memory?

Krome
10-12-01, 05:20 PM
I installed "MaxMem" on my system, and IMO I think it's way better than "Cacheman". The real question is, can anything (hddrive/memory modules) break from using "aggresive cleanup" to often, I like to keep at least 45% free memory for some reason. I just cleaned up, and have 207MB/81% free right now. :D
Christoph
10-13-01, 12:59 AM
Link (http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/maxmem.htm)
I'd be real surprised if it were possible to kill anything by freeing your RAM exessively.
Krome
10-13-01, 08:44 AM
MaxMem is just nice, I am able to run all sorts of applications at once, and still have a bunch of memory to spare. I had tried Cacheman 5, and it would just start eating it up @ idle, am I the only one that experienced that?
proze
10-13-01, 12:58 PM
umm, imho free memory is just wasted memory. it's not doing anything if it's free. it may as well be caching something, rather than sitting idle.
Krome
10-13-01, 01:25 PM
Proze - are you saying that I should let the memory run its course, without trying to free it at all? What exactly is "cache"?
proze
10-13-01, 02:50 PM
just hypothesizing really... i've seen all these programs that free physical memory, etc, etc, and if i think about it, i don't see the point of running one all the time. sure, if you have a badly written program that doesn't release memory properly when it's finished, then a memory free-er could be useful. but to have memory free when other programs could be using it seems kinda silly. programs keep data they use often in memory while they're executing, so that it doesn't need to be loaded from the hdd. freeing the memory all the time would inhibit this, if you think about it.

"cache" is typically used to describe the onchip memory that store data that is frequently used by the program currently executing within the processor. cache->processor register data transfers are much faster than memory->cache->register transfers, obviously, and those in turn are much faster than getting data from virtual memory. but that's a different story altogether.

shed any light for ya?
Lancelot
10-14-01, 02:48 PM
Standard SDRAM needs to be refreshed about 16 times per second to keep data integrety. So if you have 512Megs like me, there's 16x512MB=8.2Gigs of data moved per SECOND. Don't worry, your ram can handle any extra management. However I second Proze's opinion, and the more RAM you got the less extra management you will need anyway. Right now I have Folding running, outlook and this browser window, and I've got 351Megs of physical memory free. But you can NEVER have enough ram!