Age old question... What's a good virtual RAM setting?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Larry Roberts
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Larry Roberts

I prefer to set virtual RAM at an exact setting. With 1GB of
RAM, I set it at 2GB. I now have 2GB. Is it best to set it at 4GB?
Would that be a waste of space? This is on WinXP Pro SP2.
 
| I prefer to set virtual RAM at an exact setting. With 1GB of
| RAM, I set it at 2GB. I now have 2GB. Is it best to set it at 4GB?
| Would that be a waste of space? This is on WinXP Pro SP2.

I have my pagefile in its own 1GB partition on a second HDD (set at 50MB min.
with max at partition size). Additionally, I set a pagefile for my boot
partition of 2MB min. and 50MB max. XP has never seen fit to create that. My
physical RAM is 1GB.

I've never needed more virtual memory than that and doubt you would with 2GB of
physical RAM. Theoretically, the more physical RAM you have, the less likely XP
is to use virtual memory.

If you have questions about the amount of virtual memory you are using, check
the size of your pagefile.sys occasionally. Mine rarely goes much above its
50MB minimum.

Larc



§§§ - Change planet to earth to reply by email - §§§
 
btw this post belongs in a Windows group where Windows experts are
there to assist. This is for HARDWARE only, not software.

but as Larc said, firstly put it on another drive (not just partition)
as your system/files drive(s) in case it does actually have to create
one.

And i would say it's really a question of how often you hit your RAM
limit. If you're doing memory intensive apps (such as panorama
stitching) that cause your system to swap to disk, then set it to
something reasonable, but swapping to disk is EXTREMELY slow and
time-consuming and if you set it to 4GB and actually swap 4GB to your
hard disks, you can walk away from your computer for a week and it'll
still be chugging away when you get back!
 
Larry Roberts said:
I prefer to set virtual RAM at an exact setting. With 1GB of RAM,
I set it at 2GB. I now have 2GB. Is it best to set it at 4GB?
Click to expand...

Nope, leave it the way it is, you need less page file with more physical ram.
 
Larry Roberts je napisal:
I prefer to set virtual RAM at an exact setting. With 1GB of
RAM, I set it at 2GB. I now have 2GB. Is it best to set it at 4GB?
Would that be a waste of space? This is on WinXP Pro SP2.
Click to expand...

512 MB Swap space is more than enough if you have 1 GB of RAM (on XP,
not Vista). If you ever get "out of memory" errors, raise it. If you
know you use programs that use a lot of RAM and you know how much (e.g.
altogather more than 1.5 GB), then adjust the swap file space
appropriately.

The windows's Task Manager (Performance tab, Commit Charge area) can be
used to determine how fares memory usage on your system (Total =
currently used; Limit = Amount allocatable according to current RAM and
Swap space setting; Peak = most memory used/needed since boot [I
think]).

Allocating more Swap space will not only waste disk space, but also RAM
and processing power, due to some stupid programming by Microsoft...
basically your computer has bigger numbers to crunch when pushing
memory blocks back and forth and more searching to do on
page-fault-like events.
 
Larry Roberts je napisal:
Click to expand...
With Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2, which has a 4 GB limit,
and modern disks, I would chose something slightly less than
4 GB. Say 3.5 GB. This gives you some warning as to when
you are going to run into the hard limit and have to change
your program or operating system. Note that your programs
might start taking 100s of times longer to run than if they had
enough real memory, but at least they would run.

If you had an operating system that supported much larger virtual
memory limits, I would suggest figuring a limit of about 3 times
real memory for each process can grow large and needs to run
at the same time. I would use 10 times real memory as
a starting point.

For fun you might try convincing Windows to put a paging file
on a flash memory device. Either a USB key or a USB key with
an SATA or PATA converter on it. Sequential access will be
much slower than real disks, but random access will be
much faster. Actual relative performance will depend on
the programs.

Sometimes it is helpful to suspend one program when
two programs that normally can run at the same time
without paging happen start paging due to the particular
data being processed.
 
With Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2, which
has a 4 GB limit, and modern disks, I would chose
something slightly less than 4 GB. Say 3.5 GB.
Click to expand...

You dont need anything like that with 2GB of physical ram.
This gives you some warning as to when you
are going to run into the hard limit and have
to change your program or operating system.
Click to expand...
Note that your programs might start taking 100s
of times longer to run than if they had enough
real memory, but at least they would run.
Click to expand...

Very unlikely indeed with 2G of physical ram.
If you had an operating system that supported much
larger virtual memory limits, I would suggest figuring
a limit of about 3 times real memory for each process
can grow large and needs to run at the same time.
I would use 10 times real memory as a starting point.
Click to expand...

Thats mad with 2G of physical ram.
For fun you might try convincing Windows to put a paging file
on a flash memory device. Either a USB key or a USB key with
an SATA or PATA converter on it. Sequential access will be
much slower than real disks, but random access will be much
faster. Actual relative performance will depend on the programs.
Click to expand...

Thats silly with 2G of physical ram.
Sometimes it is helpful to suspend one program when two programs
that normally can run at the same time without paging happen start
paging due to the particular data being processed.
Click to expand...

Again, you are ignoring the 2G of physical ram.
 
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