display is missing pieces in low memory situations

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bill Kearney
  • Start date Start date
B

Bill Kearney

I've search a bit and haven't hit upon the right keywords to describe this
situation.

When using a number of browser and other appilcation windows I'm finding that
the UI starts dropping out bits of what it displays. As in, something like the
media player starts not showing it's controls or their background. IE starts
not showing fonts, Netscape stops displaying contents of drop-down menus. When
a number of things are closed the UI returns to it's proper method of displaying
things. It's like it's running short of memory and decides not to show stuff.

This, however, is on a W2K box with 768mb of RAM and 2GB of swap. And we're
talking something on the order of 24 browser windows being open. This while the
task manager reports it's memory usage at no more that 64mb.

So I'm thinking, where's the setting that tells the OS to give the UI more
memory to do it's thing?

-Bill Kearney
 
The former. There is not, nor should there be a way to override the OSes
memory allocatiaton. The potential for disaster is really high.
Click to expand...

Uh, given I've been coding since '79 I'm pretty familiar with the risks. That
said there are places in the OS where Windows makes allowances for whether or
not certain things are paged, how large some sizes are and the like.

This is a machine with 768mb of RAM. It's not like it'd be unreasonable to
allow the OS to allocate more to something that on lesser machines might be
considered swappable.
Again, HOW MUCH OVERALL memory are you using in these situations. How about
a straightfoward memory upgrade?
Click to expand...

As my original message stated, this box has more than enough resources to
accomodate this sort of thing.
And, regardless of os, at some point you will simply overwhelm available
memory.
Click to expand...

Indeed, but one might expect to actually SEE that sort of thing in the perfmon
or the task manager.
Also, video memory MAY be an issue. What video card are you using? And
while you're about it, how about the rest of the system specs?
Click to expand...

Now this gets closer to possible problems. It's an ancient 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee
card (w/16mb on-board) running at 1600x1200 at 16bit color depth. It's using
version 5.00.2180.58 of the banshee.dll and version 5.00.2167.58 of the
banshee.sys drivers. Off to go check and see if there's anything newer...
Anyone else want to chime in? That's about all i can think of.
Click to expand...

Yeah, my point here is to discover if there's a configurable setting that affect
how the OS handles display management. Given the variety of choices for memory
management and the general 'secret unitl you know the reg key name' aspect of
registry it seems reasonable that there /might/ be a way to affect this.

-Bill Kearney
 
Back
Top