Assessing Overloaded Memory

Determining that memory is overloaded is easy. Right-click the Taskbar and choose Task Manager from the context menu. Select the Performance tab and you’ll see a display similar to the one shown in Figure 2.9. This display shows current processor and memory usage in general terms. The processor usage should decrease to nearly 0 percent when you’re not doing anything with the system. When this value remains high, it means that something is going on with your system that you need to check, including various kinds of hard drive or memory thrashing. A high memory usage percentage tells you that you need to clear some memory.

FIGURE 2.9 Task Manager provides an overview of both processor and memory usage.

NOTE Sometimes an application that runs in the background will try to use 100 percent of the system resources when you aren’t doing anything. For example, United Devices peer network runs in the background and performs tasks when you aren’t using the system. If you see an application using 100 percent of the system resources, try to place it in a snooze mode so that it’s resting and you can make the appropriate measurements. When this fails, exit the application, make your measurements, and restart the application whenever possible (make sure nothing terrible will happen before you stop the application).

Below the graphs showing overall memory and processor usage are statistics such as the number of processes (applications) and threads (application tasks) running. Look at the Physical Memory (K) statistics as a good indicator of the memory health of your system. This value isn’t a true indicator of the memory that Windows is using — it merely shows how much physical memory is in use. Windows pages physical memory to the hard drive to create virtual memory. However, for the purposes of determining health, you want at least 25 percent of physical memory free. Lower values mean that Windows is having a hard time finding memory to place on disk. When the physical memory approaches 0 percent, the system will crash. In this case, the available memory is 297,076 KB or 56 percent of the physical memory is free.