Virtual Memory Question.

Azn_tweaker · #1 03-09-2004, 04:25 PM

is it bad to set ur virtual memory too high or too low?
i set mine to inital-194 and maxium- 384. that sound good?

ESALADUANE · #2 03-09-2004, 05:59 PM

The standard answer for RAM in the 128 to 384 MB range is 1.5 times the amount of RAM you have. For systems with 512 MB or more, that's too much unless you're into video editing or CAD. However, I'm personally just letting XP decide what it wants to use (System Managed Size).

Just one user's opinion. I'm sure you'll get others.

Azn_tweaker · #3 03-09-2004, 08:31 PM

oh so theres no adjustments for my virtual memory right?

jombo · #4 03-10-2004, 07:09 AM

in my oppinion in all versions of winblows setting the swap file to something perm will speed up and improve the way it works. so setting it say 200min 200max takes work out of winblows always doing a resize.
that has worked for me since win3.11 years and years ago. my xp box has 384 meg ram i set swap at 150 and forget it. then run a good defrag that will put the swap at head of disk. im sorta a norton speed disk guy on all but xp it did things i didnt like there so i use Perfect Disk as defrag on the xp boxs. also if ya make a seperate partition to use as swap it will speed things up a tad more.

1 of my xp boxes has a gig of ram and it uses no swap. does well that way at least as far as gaming goes. much faster to load out of ram than disk ya know.

so if ya set the swap too high it actually slows ya down. if you watch the way xp uses the ram with a smaller swap in task manager you will see the point where you need limit swap. i never see over my physical ram used with 384 meg. so my swap at 150 is about right for me. but dont forget winblows wastes ram and dont always release it proper, so the longer the box goes without a reboot the more wasted ram you accumulate. right now after 100 days up xp with 384 meg is using only 200 meg of physical ram. and using just over 100 of the swap its a web server and is highly taxed at times as a sql host for the rest on the lan. and it does my mail fetching. it is rarely used to browse or anything else.

just my thoughts im sure there are many more good ideas out there. but this has worked for me with xp for 3 years and the box isnt speedy its an old cyrix 800 piece of junk lol. if its used as a workstation too then of course 200 or even 250 may be better for you.

the idea is watch your physical ram use as you run what all you run and if you use less than your pysical ram with it all running then try to keep xp from wasting time using the swap by setting it lower.

Jager-bomb · #5 03-10-2004, 03:05 PM

I've done a lot of research on this, and (besides making my opinion of Windoze even worse :-P ) I've so far decided that it's always a good idea to have a constant swap file to reduce fragmentation, and that the idea Windoze has that makes it think you always need 1.5 times your RAM is wrong. ESALADUANE said it best IMHO.

You're always going to need a swap file regardless if you have 1GB or 8GB of RAM, some programs require a certain size, though I have no idea why.

The best thing to do is decide how big your swap file should be before installing Windows, and create a seperate partition (D: for example) dedicated solely to the swap file, during setup. Make sure you have the partition at 10MB higher than your swap file, or your pagefile will end up slightly smaller than intended (Windows requires your pagefile to be at least 5MB below the capacity of the partition). Then set the "minimum" and "maximum" size of your pagefile at the exact same. This will reduce fragmentation greatly.

Also try to have your pagefile partition the next to the system drive (D:) or second to next (E:), or on the fastest of your hard drives. This will reduce I/O overhead.

Anyway in answer to your question, yes it's bad to have it too low, but it's only bad by being too high if you are concerned about disk space.

HTH

Azn_tweaker · #6 03-10-2004, 03:10 PM

so what should i set it too?

Jager-bomb · #7 03-10-2004, 03:20 PM

For yours I would probably set to 384MB which will even out to 512MB available system memory.

I have 1GB of RAM but set my pagefile to 1GB as well, I figure "if it needs it for some odd reason, it'll be there", even though my peak pagefile usage never exceeds 220MB.

ESALADUANE · #8 03-10-2004, 03:29 PM

Or, if what you're using is working well, just leave it were it is. None of this is critical. If it's too small, just increase the size.

Just a note about moving it:

If you move the Paging file from the system partition, Windows cannot write debug information to the disk in the event of a "Stop Error" message (blue screen error).

Jager-bomb · #9 03-10-2004, 03:46 PM

Indeed, thank you for reminding me ESALADUANE

You do need a swap file large enough to hold the memory/kernel dumps on your system drive.

And yes, none of this is critical by any means, and the performance increase isn't nearly as great as some would have you think.

Azn_tweaker · #10 03-10-2004, 07:18 PM

384 for inital and 384 for maxium right?

ESALADUANE · #11 03-10-2004, 07:34 PM

That'll probably be fine - if not change it. I would suggest getting more RAM though. 128 MB is probably the minimum you can have and use XP effectively.

Azn_tweaker · #12 03-10-2004, 08:11 PM

but RDRAM in canda cost so much $$$$

ESALADUANE · #13 03-10-2004, 08:17 PM

Wow. What happened to the prices. I haven't checked them in a while. It wasn't that long ago when we were talking about RAM being dirt cheap.

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio....asp?CatId=992

Azn_tweaker · #14 03-10-2004, 08:22 PM

$356.99 CDN for a 512 MB... cost alot for my age.. i dont have a job.. i might not seem alot to u. but it cost alot for a person like me.

ESALADUANE · #15 03-10-2004, 08:34 PM

For $43 more you can get this refurbished Pavilion with XP Home, 256 MB RAM and a 40 GB hard drive.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0170527