Top RAM Meter Not Lining up with Process Explorer

[driscoll42]

Hello again! I noticed an interesting issue with the Top RAM Meter. As you can see in the below screenshot, LM Studio as measured by Top RAM Meter is around 800 MB, however in Process Explorer or Resource Monitor is in the multi gigabytes.

Not sure why this is happening and wanted to ask if you had an idea.

[SilverAzide]

Hello! I have some ideas why this shows this way, but I can't really explain it exactly. Trying to do comparisons between all these apps requires you to do a deep dive into the documentation and APIs. Generally, it all boils down to data being aggregated and categorized in different ways, and you end up finding that what you are looking at are apples and oranges.

As you can see from Resource Monitor, there are all types of memory categories (commit, working set, etc.). If you look at the Rainmeter documentation for the UsageMonitor plugin, it specifically says it is reporting from the "Process" category's counter "Working Set - Private" ("Bytes of Private Working Set RAM used by each process"). This would correspond, I think, to that right-most column in Resource Monitor. Task Manager's Details tab shows this same data too in the Memory column.

The next thing to know is that the UsageMonitor plugin is "rolling up" processes by their name. For example, if you look at Chrome or similar apps where there is a separate process for every tab; these values all summed up and reported as a single application with a single value. Resource Monitor and Task Manager don't roll up, they are reporting by process ID instead of name, so Rainmeter isn't going to match either one of these other utilities.

So basically nothing matches exactly because you are looking at different things.

Poking around in the Rainmeter docs, there is UsageMonitor option "Alias=RAMSHARED". This corresponds to "Process" category's counter "Working Set", and seems to line up with the "Working Set" column in Resource Monitor. So if you wanted to experiment, you could do a search-and-replace and change Alias=RAM to Alias=RAMSHARED in all places. When you do, you might get something more along the lines you want.

The only caveat, and perhaps this doesn't matter to you, is that "Working Set" includes memory that is no longer in use. Per the docs:

Working Set is the current size, in bytes, of the Working Set of this process. The Working Set is the set of memory pages touched recently by the threads in the process. If free memory in the computer is above a threshold, pages are left in the Working Set of a process even if they are not in use. When free memory falls below a threshold, pages are trimmed from Working Sets. If they are needed they will then be soft-faulted back into the Working Set before leaving main memory.

The third sentence is key. If you have a ton of free RAM in your machine, Windows will just keep it in the working set for the process. And if you summed up all these values for all processes, it could add up to more RAM than is "in use" in your PC.

Just a thought...

[miquelfire]

Great, now you got me wondering what type of memory is reported on the CPU skin (and the memory graph in Task Manager and Resource monitor). If RAM usage is based on working set, that might explain why I have never noticed my RAM use below 50% on any computer I have used the CPU skin on. (And also why I disable the RAM bar)

[SilverAzide]

LOL... If you enable the RAM bar and the "Show Memory Composition" option, then hover the mouse over the bar, you'll see the exact breakdown... and unfortunately it's still hard to understand. From what I recall (and I might be wrong here) "Used" is the same as "private", "cached" is like "shared" or perhaps "shared - used". It matches Resource Monitor exactly, at any rate.