Thoughts on SuperFetch in Vista

Vista catches a lot of undeserved flack around the web. I have even seen it compared to the horrible mistake known as WindowsME (A.K.A Windows98 3rd Edition), which is a comparison that is not only undeserved but way off base.

Vista (or Windows 6.0 in general) has done a lot of things right. Not only has Vista matured into a very nice and capable Workstation OS, I’m very much blown away by Windows Server 2008 as well. Windows XP was getting…well…no other way to put it but “old”. The (currently) most used Operating System in the world was released upon us in 2001, and received a lot of the same criticism that Vista got upon release (slow, incompatible, buggy, incomplete, etc.). The honest fact was, it was just “different”, and many users simply resist change of any kind. I think one of the many things that lead to Vista’s lack of acceptance was the fact that so much time had passed between the release of XP until the release of Vista that simply allowed XP to “take over” as it were. Sure, there were issues with Vista when it came out, but honestly, most issues were resolved within a few months as drivers (specifically Video drivers) matured. I honestly think that Vista “Basic” was a bad idea – there shouldn’t have been an edition of Vista without Aero, and I think the minimum requirements were way off base – I couldn’t imagine living with Vista with an 800MHz CPU and 512MB of RAM. That being said, I believe with every bone in my body that any machine with at least a Dual-Core CPU and 2GB of RAM will be faster under Vista (in it’s current SP1 state) than with XP. Not only did Vista bring x64 (or x86_64, AMD64 or however you want to say it) to mainstream, it finally knew how to manage a large amount of memory regardless of the architecture of the machine.

Many people complain that Vista “uses too much RAM”. Well, let me give you a news flash (go ahead and write this down, and put it somewhere you will see it regularly): Unused RAM is Wasted RAM. Why would you spend money and equip your shiny new machine with a large amount of RAM and then want it to sit idle, not being utilized?

Let me take this opportunity to clear up some common misconceptions about how Vista uses RAM, and also how SuperFetch using RAM helps speed up your computer (rather than slow it down).

Please take a look at this screenshot of my Task Manager:

In this screenshot, I have two separate areas highlighted: one is Red and the other is Orange.

The area in Orange is the amount of RAM that Vista is currently using for itself. This amount will vary depending on your system, you running applications, background tasks, enabled services and the over-all amount of RAM in your system. Vista will use more RAM for itself (not counting SuperFetch) if it is available. Tom’s Hardware posted an article some time back which shows how Vista will use more RAM for itself depending on the architecture (x86 vs. x64) as well as the amount of RAM in the system. This only makes sense (goes back to “Unused RAM is Wasted RAM”). This only gives the OS more room to stretch out and operate efficiently.

The area in Red shows the total amount of RAM in the system, the amount of RAM used for cache (SuperFetch is included in this) and the amount of “free” RAM which isn’t being utilized at the moment. When I took this screenshot on my machine it had only been booted up for about 43 minutes, so SuperFetch hadn’t finished it’s job, so there was still 60MB of free RAM, however as I type this, “Free” shows 0 on my Task Manager. This is “good” RAM usage. This means Vista knows what you use regularly and is trying to keep that information handy for you so you don’t have to wait for it to be read from disk if you want to access it. This ram will however be instantly released as soon as another application needs it, so it really is still available, which is why I call it “good” RAM usage.

I do hope (as great as I think SuperFetch is) that in Windows 7 SuperFetch gets tweaked just a little more to perhaps only include executable files, and/or documents that are frequently used, and perhaps give us power-users the option to exclude certain files. A good example of what I mean can be seen in this screenshot of my Resource Monitor:

In this screenshot the SuperFetch service is represented by the svchost.exe process and you can see it is actively reading a VirtualBox virtual Hard Drive image of a Windows XP Virtual Machine I have on one of my Hard Drives. While this does make my Windows XP virtual machine boot much faster (since a good chunk of it’s “hard drive” is already stored in my system RAM), I wouldn’t mind waiting for that Virtual OS to boot straight from the HDD and have my SuperFetch cache used for more “useful” stuff such as program executables and/or documents I access freely. I consider this a small peeve however with an otherwise excellent way of properly utilizing large amounts of RAM.

Hopefully this will clarify Vista’s RAM usage for someone out there!