CleanMem really works - thank you!

[Philip Goddard]

For some time now I've been using Anvir Task Manager (ATM), which is an extremely useful 'Swiss army knife' type of system utility, and one of its functions tucked away in the Options menus is one to "free memory of processes that use more than [50MB set as default]", and I'd had that option checked, to operate every 15 minutes, but noticed that when the memory was getting rather full and things were getting sluggish (normally when I was editing groups of photos in Photoshop Elements 5), nothing seemed to get freed up.

This figured, because on the odd occasion in the far past I'd used memory cleaners or optimizers, and either I'd not noticed any difference or the whole system crashed.

Anyway, today I did a Google search and found your CleanMem, and was encouraged by your writings about it, and now have it set up to be run every 15 minutes by my scheduling program, which latter also enables me easily to run CleanMem on demand when things are getting a bit sluggish.

So, I had a batch of photos to sort through, and loaded some subgroups into Photoshop Elements, and as I did the enhancements and lots more memory was taken up by the undo buffer(s) PE indeed became sluggish, and ATM was showing the memory nearly full, and there was plenty of disk activity as presumably the page file came into use.  But then, after having saved and exited nearly all those files and found things still as sluggish as ever, I did a 'run now' with CleanMem, and immediately the memory load dropped substantially (shown on ATM's system tray memory usage icon), and editing work became much more snappy again. I'm not sure whether processing speed recovered completely at that stage, but it did so a great deal, and CleanMem was clearly the cause.

(N.B. I'm using a Windows Vista Home Premium PC with dual core processor and 2GB RAM.)

So, I'm keeping CleanMem, and I really like its not sitting in memory all the time, adding to overheads. I've therefore disabled the supposed memory freeing function of ATM, and am leaving it all to CleanMem (until any time I know better). And thus, thank you indeed for a memory cleaner that actually works!

Kind regards,
Philip

[Shane]

Anytime

Shane

[Philip Goddard]

Now that I've had CleanMem running every 15 minutes during sessions over a full day, I can comment further. As well as CleanMem's clearing the sluggishness when the memory is obviously pretty full, I find that for much of the time the Anvir Task Manager system tray memory load indicator is showing something like a third less memory occupied than previously for equivalent situations - yet I've not at all yet detected any additional disk activity suggestive of compensatory use of the page file. Also, this morning I did a little test, as follows.

I rarely have cause to use the Windows search facility, so have search indexing turned off, and I had cause to search for a tucked away folder on my C drive. Inevitably there was a lot of disk churning as the search proceeded. Then I ran a search for another, similarly named folder on the C drive, and the search proceeded more or less entirely in memory. I then ran CleanMem and repeated the search. Again, the search was more or less entirely in memory, with no obvious related disk activity. That suggests very much that whatever CleanMem was clearing out was not data that would be genuinely useful - though I'd be surprised if that never happened of course.