Memory Resource Monitoring solves Windows7 performance bottleneck

The system is dragged down due to performance bottleneck, which is undoubtedly not expected by administrators. Since Windows Vista, Microsoft has strengthened its monitoring of the performance of various system resources. Its main technical means are so-called performance counters. Using these counters, we can effectively monitor the system, and then discover and solve system performance bottlenecks. This article will talk about how to monitor memory resources in Windows 7 to discover and solve technical details related to performance bottlenecks.

Windows 7 is a memory-consuming system. Microsoft recommends a minimum of 1 GB of memory. Although Windows 7 can be installed with MB of memory, such a system is not practical at all. In addition, a program running in Windows 7 will also use a large amount of memory, which makes it worse for many old users with small memory. If Windows 7 is installed with the minimum required memory, the system will undoubtedly fail to reach the optimal running status. However, even if the recommended amount of memory is used for installation, the system performance may not be optimal. This is because the memory requirements of the system depend on many factors, including selecting and installing Windows 7 components, enabling special effects, and configuring applications and computers.

Performance Monitor

For Windows systems, we know that the system needs both physical memory and virtual memory. Physical memory is not described in detail. Virtual Memory refers to the amount of memory written into the paging files on the disk. The speed at which paging files read and write data depends on the disk system performance, which is much slower than accessing the physical memory. Therefore, no one is willing to use paging files frequently.

Before you plan to monitor memory usage, you must first check whether the computer has enough memory to run the system and application software. Then, you need to determine how the system uses the memory, check whether any problem exists. We should closely monitor the number of available memory and the number of virtual memory used. If the number of available memory is very small, you may need to add a memory stick. Generally, the number of available memory should not be less than 5% of the total number of physical memory installed in the system. If we find that the number of virtual memory used by Windwos 7 is much higher than the total number of physical memory, we need to add a new memory stick to solve the memory shortage.

In addition, you also need to know how the system uses paging files. If a process requests pages in the memory but the system cannot find them at the requested location, it indicates a page error occurs. If the requested page is located elsewhere in the memory, a soft page error may occur. If the requested page must be retrieved from the page file on the disk, a hard page error may occur. Most processors can handle a large number of soft errors, which may lead to a certain delay. If there are a large number of hard page errors in the system, it will increase the memory consumption, of course, it will reduce the system performance.

After learning about Windows Memory Management, let's take a look at the counters that can be used to check memory bottlenecks in Windows 7. In Windows 7, there are 14 most commonly used counters related to memory monitoring. I chose three of them as key counters for resolution.

Memory \ Available Bytes this counter records the total number of Bytes of physical Memory that can be used to run processes on the computer. If the number of available memory is less than 5%, it indicates that the system lacks the memory and the performance will decrease. At this time, the system will frequently paging the memory to the hard disk to ensure resource requirements. If the number of available memory is less than 128 MB, the performance will be lower. In this case, the system keeps paging the memory to the hard disk and tries to "borrow" the memory from the running process to ensure resource requirements. If the memory shortage is serious, it is generally caused by memory leakage.

Memory \ Committed Bytes this counter records the number of Bytes of the Committed virtual Memory. The value indicates the memory that has been paged to the disk and is in use. If the computer uses more virtual memory than the total number of physical memory installed in the system, the solution to the System Bottleneck is to add physical memory.

Memory \ Commit Limit this counter displays the number of available physical Memory and virtual Memory. As the number of Committed Bytes increases, the maximum number of paging files may be reached. If the initial page file is too small, the system may expand the page file size repeatedly, which requires a certain amount of system resources. Therefore, it is recommended that you set the initial page size based on your actual needs, or directly use the size of the ancient page file. Generally, we can set it to double the physical memory size.

The above three counters are the most commonly used counters in the system memory monitoring. In practice, we can also use other counters to perform more in-depth monitoring on the system memory. By using these counters flexibly, we can monitor the memory in Windwos 7 and find memory bottlenecks that affect system performance.