Maxing out Vista

I managed something today which I didn't think was possible. I managed to get my machine to use up nearly all its memory. I was testing a SideShow gadget application which starts running automatically when the SideShow device is connected. But because I haven't completed the code yet, the program didn't finish properly. So Vista started it again. And again. So I ended up with several hundred copies of the program in memory before I realised what was happening.

86% and counting...

By the time I worked out what was happening I had 86% of my memory filled up. The nice thing is that Vista never really slowed down or seemed to suffer. I just saved my files, shut the machine down and rebooted. Which is quite impressive when you think about it.

Comments

[Adam]

Clever bit isn't how stable vista can be with very little RAM left, but what it does with the free RAM it does have. (once you get onto a multi-processor system you have to be doing something damn stupid to make it lock up anyway)

Right now, according to the performance tools, I have 4 megabytes of free RAM out of 2046. 58% of that is currently active (I have a couple of virtual machine sessions open), the remaining 1112MB is being used as cache for the hard disk. Combined with a gigabyte SD card for readyboost, stuff I use commonly, like outlook, loads almost instantly.

[Dwain]

I've just installed Vista and my RAM is constantly around the 77% level, not to mention my CPU gauge keeps spinning everywhere. Though it looks quite scary my good old Toshiba is doing a great job at handling it. My only problem is Live Messenger is no longer connecting.