RAM usage drops drastically after encoding

[Moontrash]

Since i'm using Win 7 64 now I've come to deal with the RAM usage is a bit higher than xp's was. Normally sitting around 900mb's in startup or a bit higher when surfing, I've gotten use to it. A few weeks back I used FAVC and noticed after the conversion finished, my HD light stayed on quite a while....2 to 3 minutes then stopped and proceeded in its normal fashion. On a lark, i decided to look at the task manager and see what was running to make it work for so long and low and behold, my RAM usage went from 912mb's to 444mb's. To say i was a little bit surprised would be an understatement. I mean I'm not complaining but wouldn't it be great if Win 7 was using that little all the time? And even odder than that, I used MultiAVCHD the other day also, encoded sumthin, and it did the same thing. I thought I'd pose a question to anyone in here and ask, what processes do you think these encoding apps have shutdown? or what dll's were dumped or what could it be. I've seen or felt no performance issues from this positive or negative. i just thught this was very odd.

The other day, out of boredom, i noticed my RAM usage over a few hours creeped up past 1gb...so I found a stray avi and ran it through FAVC to test and yup, RAM went down. I think I may have found a way to free up some RAM in WIN 7 LOL....encode some movies with these 2 apps

[RabidDog]

Was there any page faulting going on? task mgr is no great guide to anything going on inside windows. Its W7 prefetch working, it knows that normally you fire up your browser for porn, and then, when you dont, it rolls those dll's out to disk, this happens on the start-up of your encode program but is only noticed afterwards.


AFAIK

[jagabo]

What's probably happening is parts of Windows and any sleeping applications are getting swapped out of memory to make more room for the disk cache (which doesn't count as memory usage in Task Manager) and by the encoding program. So as more and more stuff gets swapped to disk it looks like more memory is free (because it's being used by the disk cache). When the encoding program terminates any memory it was using also becomes free.