RAM questions

manecante · Unread post by **manecante** » 22 Dec 2009, 17:01

When i open Usine with an empty project it already uses 50 % of my RAM, is it normal considering that i have "only" 1Giga Ram?

That means that when i open my live project, it is at 98%. And i don't have so many patchs in it and less than 10 waves (indeed, three of them are quiet long, maybe up to 5 mn). And the very weird thing is that the more time elapsed with my project opened I wait, the more the Ram used decreases, going down even sometimes to 32%(after one or two hours), less than with an empty project!

And it is apparently in contradiction with what Gurologic told me in another post, no? :

"Sometimes if your workspace uses a lot of memory to start, you may need to occasionaly save and exit Usine to refresh the temporary memory used as running out of memory can cause a crash. Also the same for disk space. If Usine is on a disk that is full,and you are building patches for a long time, the disk can overfill and the temp files can fail to write to disk which I have seen cause loss of data."

Apart from that my Cpu is totally fine, between 40 and 50 % with this project. But for live situtation i have to open my patch a long time before playing, and pray for no problem otherwise i have to wait again to play in good conditions!

So the question is, should i buy more RAM, or the problem is somewhere else?

Thank's for your advices

Asus A6000G Series Notebook, Windows XP3
Intel(R) Pentium(R) M 1,6 GH
RAM :1024 MB (PC2700 DDR SDRAM)
Chipset Motherboard : Intel Montara-GM+ i855GME
Grafik card : ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9700 (64 MB)
Sound card : M-Audio A410

gurulogic · Unread post by **gurulogic** » 22 Dec 2009, 23:43

I have no idea what would cause memory usage to "decrease" over time but in general it seems like it would be a good idea to add more memory to your system, another 1 GB would make sense but just 500Mb may also do the job just fine . You could also try a cleanup of startup programs to prevent unnecessary programs from starting with the OS and hogging memory...

gurulogic · Unread post by **gurulogic** » 23 Dec 2009, 00:13

You may find Process Explorer usefull for getting a better idea how Usine is actually using memory on your system. Memory usage as reported in the task manager does not actually mean much, IMO.

Here's the link, no software install needed:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96653.aspx

YouTube · Unread post by **senso** » 23 Dec 2009, 10:45

At the startup usine 4.22 take 60MB of RAM with an empty workspace. And generally Windows around 500MB...

manecante · Unread post by **manecante** » 23 Dec 2009, 16:54

Thank's for your answers.

I can gain a bit of RAM when wireless is disable in the Device Manager but not really enough.
The bad news for me is that i just realized my computer does not support more than 1 GB Ram..

And of course I always exit Antivirus, antispyware, and the windows search option by default activated in SP3 ( little lup icon), that eat a lot of RAM.

gurulogic · Unread post by **gurulogic** » 23 Dec 2009, 22:54

manecante,
I don't necessarily recommend you try without a bit more more research, but often computers will allow for more RAM than is specified which I assume is because at the time the computer was manufactured, the specified amount would be the most RAM someone would be likely to use. I know this was true for my Asus A8JS. Perhaps you can contact Asus support about this?

As far as freeing up more memory, you could try running msconfig.exe (Start>Run "msconfig") and navigating to the startup tab and unchecking things you think you can temporarily live without. If you are really ambitious, there are a lot of tweaks that can be done to optimize Windows exclusivly for audio use, for example: http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm
Good luck!

manecante · Unread post by **manecante** » 27 Dec 2009, 17:06

Thank's for taking care of my technical problems gurologic!
I contacted Asus support and indeed i can have up to 2* 1Go RAM if the frequency is 333 Mhz, cool

Didn't try yet your "msconfig" optimization but i will.
merry christmas to everybody!

héliouk 6 · Unread post by **héliouk 6** » 05 Jan 2010, 11:40

hi manecante

i had a problem looks similar,the ram decrease with time,and a big workspace ...that eat a lot
i have no solution especially for the relation between the time spent on a project and the ram ,but i optimized my workspace(subpatches better than rack,mono grain sampler much better than stereo,in my case) and the ram decrease a lot...

maybe can help...

woodslanding · Unread post by **woodslanding** » 06 Jan 2010, 10:05

does this mean it is best to put everything in one patch, rather than using up many slots in the grid??

I would do that if it would decrease my memory footprint. I am always at 87%+ and pushing my luck.

YouTube · Unread post by **senso** » 06 Jan 2010, 10:56

For info the V5 is 2x lighter in memory than the v4.

woodslanding · Unread post by **woodslanding** » 08 Jan 2010, 11:53

wow, some serious optimisations then!

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