well.. here is one screenshot... this was only one of several tests...




keep also in mind that winamp actually PLAYS the songs, while foobar is idle.....


i must say i was a bit disappointed by this...

I do not see how you manged this? I have never seen foobar get over 2000k. On my system it usually is lower on usage than what your winamp shows. How many plug-ins and what not do you have running in each program? Winamp sucked when I last used it and took up a ton of resources.

thats a very low resource usage for winamp.. i just booted up both winamp 2.81 and foobar, both idle, and they were 7.3 mb for foobar and 7.8 mb for winamp. i used to be picky about memory usage, but after upgrading to 784mb, i usually have some ram free

My foobar is sometimes around 10-11mb in memory.. average is around 6mb.

anyone have any ideas?

Foobar uses about 12 megs on my machine, which has 1024 megs of ram.

Winamp uses about the same amount of ram, yet foobar has better functionality, sound quality and dsps.

Try running foobar with no dsps, no fancy crap, and direct sound. My old pc which only has 128 megs of ram, i can get Foobar to run with about 1.2 megs of ram.

I just checked mine and it is running at 1784k. *nods* I looked several times and it ranged anywhere from 7000k to 10000k usage. Boo. However, when I closed my mixer, Foobar's usage went down to this level. Beats me.

If you minimize foobar2000 to system tray, it will take only 1.2~1.4MB...

minimized to tray, my fb2k takes 3.3 mb while playing an mp3. I think the more memory you have, the more programs generally use.

If you don't look at how much virtual memory is being used you're not really looking at how much memory the program is using.

this is what FAR Manager (http://plugring.farmanager.com/cgi-bin/downld.cgi?Lang=Eng) reports about idle foobar with almost all plugins:



You see? Working set is 5.8 mb, and taskmanager reports ONLY THIS counter, ignoring how much is in the pagefile. So, the more memory you have, the more 'Page File Bytes' will be moved to RAM i think...

And thisis what FAR Manager reports about my WinAMP 2.81 whith lota plugz:



Can you imagine that? On my slow Celeron 500 it takes about 10 secongs to just start WinAMP, and it takes more than 27 megz! TaskInfo (http://www.iarsn.com) reports same numbers. So you should NOT believe taskmanager as it only shows 'Working Set'.

~1700k here, and when minimized it's ~1200-1400k while playing mp3.

EDIT: oh wait, actually it ranges from 1000k (minimized) to a bit over 2000k (showing). Those first ones were just amounts I first saw.

And also, Winamp2.9b2 uses a bit under 8000k while stopped and ~8500k when playing.

"So you should NOT believe taskmanager as it only shows 'Working Set'. "

You can show the VM size in task manager by going to view>select columns while you are in the processes view.

Freaky. Foobar uses 6544K when I open it.
Minimized to tray is only 404K.
Bring it back up and it's 1308K.

All of those numbers are idle, no DSPs. (From the task manager.)

Winamp does the same thing:
Open: 8064K
Tray: 416K
Back from tray: 1096K

As far as I'm concerned, "working space" is the only memory that matters. I could care less what's paged, so long as it stays paged.

Another point is also being missed - large playlists.

With a playlist of 1400 songs, playing, not in tray, foobar takes up 5.5MB here.

With the same playlist, Wimamp takes up 12.5MB, again playing and not minimised to tray.

well i just tried that virtual memory thing...

winamp with gui and fancy skin open and mp3 playing... 8mb... foobar 8mb too...

Hmm, I am not sure why everyone else's memory usage is relatively high compared to mine. My foobar is usually on all the time, even when I'm not at the computer and it's extremely stable in regards to memory usage. It doesn't fluctuate much except when browsing the preferences menu. Other than that, when it's minimized/in the corner, it's memory remains stable. Here are some images, I let the task manager sit for a few seconds before I pressed "Print Screen":





There are my images. Ignore the blurring, just an excuse to use Photoshop I should note however, the following DSPs are loaded:
-- Resampler
-- Advanced Limiter

The output method is Kernel Streaming with a 200ms buffer. My CPU usage usually is 0%, I guess it got caught at a 1% "spike." The playlist had 536 tracks in each screenshot below.

Edit:
CPU: AMD Athlon T-Bird 1.4ghz @ 1.0ghz
Memory: 512MB Corsair CAS 2.5 DDR
Paging File: 256MB static
HDD: 2*80GB - RAID-0

Something to consider: What sort of funky title formatting are you all using? That could affect memory use. Also, database size is unrelated to playlist size. How much info is in your DBs? (Check in Database, in the Prefs window)

I'm at 5.5M when window is open, 2.7 when minimized, ~2700 in DB, ~800 in playlist, 5% CPU w/resampler and ad. limiter.

I would expect that the database wouldn't be loaded in memory. I could be wrong, though.

in my case all settings were standard...

Likewise.. I usually keep foobar2000 minimized, so I don't bother to change the title formatting beyond default.

Lesse... with a playlist of 92 PSFs, I've seen... (memory is listed as real/vm)

Winamp: 10,596/6,904 initialized and playing; 1660/6,904 minimized; 2360/6,904 restored; 1228/3964 minimized and idle.
Fb2k: 9,676/6,764 initilized and playing; 1112/6,764 minimized; 1868/6,764 restored, 392/3952 minimzed and idle.

And Winamp takes >50% of CPU while scrolling. fb2k takes none. Winamp also consumes memory over time -- while playing, it'll take a few kb every few seconds. fb2k is reletively stable in this manner.

This is all using the task manager, of course, but I thought that I'd share that anyway. And thus ends my VERY informal analysis.

Everything was set to defaults in each case, with foobar using kernel streaming and winamp using DirectSound.

Oh, and I dropped about 3872 songs of all types (RARred SPCs, mp3s, oggs, PSFs...I'd have done NSFs, GYMs and midis if they were supported), and it stays around 1000-1500, until a new song starts, when it'll generally gain three megs. Then I just restore/minimize it and it comes right back down. Not gonna try the same thing with Winamp, though I figure the results would be similar (if not more memory consuming).