The memory usage of the buffers can be increased from an elevated command line prompt or the Windows Registry.

It in theory speeds up situations with many file operations, useful in every situation with an increased amount of read write operations.

Changing the setting with increase the paged and non-paged memory usage of the buffers which indicates that this tweak should only be used if enough spare system memory is available on the PC.

Microsoft TechNet offers the following description of the memoryusage value:

Configures the internal cache levels of NTFS paged pool and NTFS non-paged pool memory. Set to 1 or 2. When set to 1 (the default), NTFS uses the default amount of paged pool memory. When set to 2, NTFS increases the size of its lookaside lists and memory thresholds. A lookaside list is a pool of fixed-size kernel memory buffers that the kernel and device drivers create as private memory caches for file system operations, such as reading a file.

Increasing Memory Usage via the command line

An elevated command prompt is required for this operation. Click start, then All Programs, locate Accessories, right-click Command Prompt in the listing and select to Run As Administrator.

elevated command prompt

Issue the following command to increase the limit of paged pool memory:

fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2

fsutil memoryusage

Windows will return the new value in the same command prompt.

Windows users who would like to restore the old setting can issue the following command instead:

fsutil behavior set memoryusage 1

Increasing Memory Usage via the Windows Registry:

Open the Windows Registry Editor by either clicking on Start again and typing in regedit in the run box or by pressing Windows-R and typing in regedit in the opening run dialog window.

Navigate to the following Registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM \CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

Locate the entry NtfsMemoryUsage in the right window. Three possible values can be set:

• Not Set: 0
• Default: 1
• Increased: 2

registry memory usage

A restart of the computer system is required before the change will take effect, regardless whether it has been applied to the Registry or the command line.

It is probably a good idea to test the system in real-life situations after the restart to see if the speed gains are noticeable and verify that it continues to run stable.

This setting should be available in all Windows NT based systems. We have verified that it is available in Windows Vista, Windows 7 and the Windows Server line. Would be nice if Windows XP users could see if it is also available in that operating system.

(inspiration for this article taken from WebTlk)

A web browser memory usage comparison was recently posted a the Dot Net Pearls website that compared the memory usage of the Google browser Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera 10 and Safari. The web browsers were configured to open 30 tabs over the command line which where then closed manually by the author except for one. A script running in the background recorded the memory usage of all processes during that time which were then used in the comparison.

The results of the web browser memory usage benchmark were then divided into three chars displaying the maximum, average and final memory used by each of the tested web browsers. The Mozilla Firefox web browser used the lowest amount of computer memory of all tested web browsers while the Google Chrome browser showed very high maximum and average memory usage.

And here is where the tester got it wrong. To compute the memory usage all processes where taken into consideration which effectively meant double-counting the shared memory for each process. As the Chromium blog points out:

If you’re measuring memory in a multi-process application like Google Chrome, don’t forget to take into account shared memory. If you add the size of each process via the Windows XP task manager, you’ll be double counting the shared memory for each process. If there are a large number of processes, double-counting can account for 30-40% extra memory size.

To make it easy to summarize multi-process memory usage, Google Chrome provides the “about:memory” page which includes a detailed breakdown of Google Chrome’s memory usage and also provides basic comparisons to other browsers that are running.

Google Chrome’s result would still be higher than that of Firefox even after the adjustments but this is one of the trade-offs of a multi-process browser (which Google Chrome is). You would get the same result with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 if the tester would have tested that web browser as well. This was apparently not possible due to technical difficulties.

Another aspect that needs to be mentioned is the test result of the Opera web browser. Opera is using an automatic setting called Automatic RAM Cache that is enabled by default. This allocated about 10% of the computer memory by default and should be disabled in memory benchmarks. Opera would most likely still have been beaten by Firefox but the gap would probably have been lower.