Tuesday 12 February 2013

The memory remains....

..... Well actually it doesn't and no I am not on some weird Metallica kick!!

PC freezing problem started again this morning after a nice long trouble free period. Did my usual hard drive checks and everything appeared to be OK but no boot up. Tried booting into a Linux Mint distro and still nothing so it had to be memory rather than disks. Pulled out 4GB of RAM and boot up was successful with 4GB remaining. Put in 6GB and all was still good. Went back to 8GB and nada.

Sadly this means that I'll have to put up with running with 6GB until pay day when I can replace the knackered memory. As a result of this I started doing a lot more monitoring of CPU and memory usage.

It's quite incredible how many program's are really badly written and hog an extraordinary amount of memory. Google Chrome is a particularly bad offender although I suspect it's all the sites that rely on Flash and Java plug-ins that start to bloat things so I shall investigate further.

Web developers are so lazy these days. Most of them never had to streamline their design to cater for the lowest common denominator which was a 14 or 28K dial up modem. The same applies to modern programmers too I guess looking at some of the memory bloat that goes on when a relatively simple program is launched. Disabling lots of superfluous start up items and we were running well with much more free memory and less CPU problems!

So that's my tech rant over for today!



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