Does My PC Need More Memory?

[Phete]

Recently I've been working with some cloud-based video animation packages, and I've noticed that they seem to run very slowly on my pc. They aren't particularly graphic intensive - basic 2D cartoon design. I'm wondering if the problem is my broadband connection (basic, not cable), the sites themselves or my PC.

Here's my spec:

CPU Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-4670 (3.4GHz) 6MB Cache
Motherboard ASUS® Z87M-PLUS: m-ATX, USB3.0, SATA 6.0, XFIRE
Memory (RAM) 8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X FURY DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card INTEGRATED GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR (GPU)
2nd Graphics Card NONE
1st Hard Disk 250GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 540MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
Partitions: 100GB, 70GB, 80GB

Any insights would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Rakk]

One easy way to tell if you don't have enough memory is to start up Task Manager (the shortcut key is Ctrl-Shift-Escape) and see what your memory usage is at when you are using your animation packages and when everything seems to run really slow - if it shows you are using 90%+ of your memory then yes you don't have enough memory.

Of course it would also be wise to see if its just the animation packages that are using most of the memory or whether there is some other stuff running in the background that doesn't need to be.
Also I don't know whether this applies to SSD's but if you're running out of space on a normal hard drive it slows things down no end, so that may affect it.

In other words it could be a few different things or a combination of things.

 

[ubuysa]

The key to understanding whether you are short of RAM is to check the hard page fault rate. You can see this if you open up the Windows Resource Monitor, in the graphs on the right is one labelled Memory, the green graph on there is the hard page fault rate. If you see large spikes on there, or even regular smaller spikes then you are short of RAM. The reasoning for this is as follows....

Windows is designed to maximise it's use of RAM, this is because RAM is an expensive resource and programs and data must be in RAM for the CPU to be able to operate on them. Windows preallocates as much memory as it can to the various processes and this shows as used memory even though nothing is actually using it yet (or at all). This is why Task Manager often shows large amounts of used RAM even when you have only a few processes running.

If Windows becomes short of RAM, meaning that the running processes require more RAM than is installed, then Windows does some aggressive memory management. It scans all the RAM looking for pages that the owning process has not referenced (used) in a long time, and those pages are stolen. In a page steal Windows writes a copy of the page to the pagefile and then marks it as free, the owning process doesn't know this has happened of course because it's not been referencing that page for some time. Windows will steal many pages from many processes during this operation, writing each one to the pagefile and freeing up the RAM page until it has recovered enough free RAM.

Often these stolen pages are never referenced, those pages containing initialisation code for the process are only referenced once for example, but many stolen pages will later be referenced by the owning process. When this happens a hard page fault occurs. When a page fault occurs Windows has to locate a free page in RAM and read in the copy of that page from the pagefile, the process is of course suspended during the page in and since the page in involves a disk operation it will be suspended for a long time and that impacts performance. This can be made worse if the process had many pages stolen, each one will be paged in one at a time and the process will be suspended for each one. Thus, if you are seriously short of RAM and Windows is doing a lot of paging the performance of your applications will be very poor.

The hard page fault rate that you see in the Windows Resource Monitor is the rate (in pages per second) at which Windows is doing these page in operations, they are happening because those pages were earlier stolen and those page steals were done because you were short of RAM. Thus the hard page fault rate is the only genuine indicator that you don't have enough installed RAM.

Ideally the hard page fault rate should be zero, or very close to it, meaning that you have enough RAM installed for the processes you are running and installing more RAM will make no difference. (There will always be some page steals even when you have tons of RAM, so don't worry if you see an occasional and low hard page fault rate).

If you see a consistent and regular hard page fault rate as spikes on that graph, and especially if they get anywhere near the 100 page faults/sec max of that graph then you are short of RAM for the workload mix you are running and installing more RAM will make a big difference.

 

[Phete]

Thank you for the suggestions. I shall investigate further.