Good to see you back, Keith. Hope you are mending well if not already fully mended!
Thanks, Eddie. I’ve recovered from the Osteomyelitis but I now have some yet undiagnosed malady that has wiped out most of my bone marrow. No chance of a bone marrow transplant at my age, so the clock is ticking just a little louder.
Just installed the additional 16G for a total of32 GB. I opened my largest file (50+ trackes with almost as many orchestral libraies). Immediately check to see the Performance status in Task Manager. So far so good.
Dan, I must have missed the comparison. I think you had 41% under normal conditions, no music apps. Now you have 59% with a large project loaded. But what was that % before you upgraded?
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
Dan, I must have missed the comparison. I think you had 41% under normal conditions, no music apps. Now you have 59% with a large project loaded. But what was that % before you upgraded?
It's in the screenshot sir. He has before and after together. He was maxing out ram before and now just using over what he had before upgrade. So it's good to see he was not needing that much of a boost. Glad the upgrade worked Dan.
Dan, I must have missed the comparison. I think you had 41% under normal conditions, no music apps. Now you have 59% with a large project loaded. But what was that % before you upgraded?
It's in the screenshot sir. He has before and after together. He was maxing out ram before and now just using over what he had before upgrade. So it's good to see he was not needing that much of a boost. Glad the upgrade worked Dan.
Oh, now I see it. 96% down to 58%. More than 16 GB in use. Quite a difference. Since I have 16 GB RAM, I'll think about this.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
Sorry for the confusion with the pictures. Here is the narrative.
Before I dropped in the new RAM I loaded the biggest Reaper Project I have. With this loaded the task manager said was using 15.3 GB equivalent to 96% of my 16GB of total available RAM.
Then I shut down and installed another 16G. Opened the same project and it said I was now consuming 18.4GB resulting in only 58% of my 32GB of RAM.
What I have not yet done is determined if this project will run better (faster) with the new RAM. So I can’t yet speak to improved performance, but I will keep an eye on it and let you know in a week or so.
You weren’t confusing. You ran a perfect test. I just didn’t see it reading on my phone.
If your project plus OS is happiest running 18+ GB of RAM, then it was doing some swapping out to your disk or SSD storage before, slowing your computer. Disk #2 must be the scratch drive for your DAW but it isn’t shown in the ‘after’ screenshot. I would expect it to be considerably lower.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
If your project plus OS is happiest running 18+ GB of RAM, then it was doing some swapping out to your disk or SSD storage before, slowing your computer. Disk #2 must be the scratch drive for your DAW but it isn’t shown in the ‘after’ screenshot. I would expect it to be considerably lower.
I had to repeat the test to confirm what was now going on with the Disk #2 with 32 GB. I confirmed while it was reported at 15% when I had 16GB, it is now at 0% when I ran with 32GB. And by the way Disk #2 is my C:\ boot drive. It is not an SSD. But apparently Reaper uses it as a Ram Drive when needed. Interesting. Oh and by the way... things are faster!!
Windows 10 (64bit) M-Audio Fast Track Pro, Band in a Box 2025, Cubase 14, Cakewalk and far too many VST plugins that I probably don't need or will ever use
Isn't it possible to have over-kill with Ram as well, and it seems to eat into hard drive space too, as I found when I upgraded form 4Gb?
It depends on your virtual memory settings. If you let the Win OS automatically choose to set the paging file size, it MAY increase the size on a RAM upgrade. This is how Windows is by default. You can set it yourself, however. My screenshot shows that I use a fixed size (Initial/Max are the same). With a fixed size setting, it wouldn't matter what RAM changes you make.
Never been down that rabbit hole. When I got there I considered making a change. Mine is set to "auto manage". But then thought best to not monkey with things that are not broken. But that is just me.
Yes, this is an area you can safely let Windows manage. Too little RAM, too large a Paging File, and running a hard disk can all be combined in ways that will hurt performance if you don't know what you are doing.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
Isn't it possible to have over-kill with Ram as well, and it seems to eat into hard drive space too, as I found when I upgraded form 4Gb?
It depends on your virtual memory settings. If you let the Win OS automatically choose to set the paging file size, it MAY increase the size on a RAM upgrade. This is how Windows is by default. You can set it yourself, however. My screenshot shows that I use a fixed size (Initial/Max are the same). With a fixed size setting, it wouldn't matter what RAM changes you make.
Thanks for the detailed tip Steve, very helpful, mine is currently set at 1856 which is probably normal enough Id imagine.
Windows 10 (64bit) M-Audio Fast Track Pro, Band in a Box 2025, Cubase 14, Cakewalk and far too many VST plugins that I probably don't need or will ever use
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