System performance issue

  • Thread starter Thread starter ElJerid
  • Start date Start date
E

ElJerid

Not really a hardware problem, but there is a lot of expertise in this
group...
After doing video editing (XP Home + Adobe Premiere) for some time, my
system performance is slowing down and finally the application crashes.
Looking to the Task Manager before the crash, I can see that the PF usage is
154 MB, but the available memory is only 206 MB (for a total memory of 1
GB). Closing Premiere does not change the available memory. I tried to
recover memory with System Mechanic or with Cacheman, but I only could gain
20 MB.
Rebooting the system however results in more than 700 MB available memory.
Questions: where are the missing 500 MB? What are they used for? Is there a
tool that effectively can recover memory without rebooting?
 
ElJerid said:
Not really a hardware problem, but there is a lot of expertise in this
group...
After doing video editing (XP Home + Adobe Premiere) for some time, my
system performance is slowing down and finally the application crashes.
Looking to the Task Manager before the crash, I can see that the PF usage is
154 MB, but the available memory is only 206 MB (for a total memory of 1
GB). Closing Premiere does not change the available memory. I tried to
recover memory with System Mechanic or with Cacheman, but I only could gain
20 MB.
Rebooting the system however results in more than 700 MB available memory.
Questions: where are the missing 500 MB? What are they used for? Is there a
tool that effectively can recover memory without rebooting?
Click to expand...

Well, your issue is trying to find out which aps eating more CPU then go
from there.
 
kony said:
It is fine, even good that you don't have much available
memory remaining as this means windows is making effective
use of it for caching, but that also doesn't rule out memory
leaks. Check the memory utilization of things running in
Task Manager, and if something looks like it is taking a lot
of memory (excessive amount) try closing and reopening that
app.


I don't think this is necessarily a sign of a problem in
itself, windows will flush the filecache and/or page out to
virtual memory more if/when you need more memory, unless you
had manually set a (small or none) size limit to your
pagefile.

If you meant Premiere was the application that is crashing,
I would look at patches for Premiere, investigate the
stability of the video and audio codecs you were using, and
general system stability testing since video
editing/compression tends to be amoung the more stressfull
things a system can do besides gaming. Check memory with
memtest86+ overnight, and run Prime95 (Orthos for dual+ core
processors) to test CPU for at least an hour. If there are
any errors the problem condition must be fixed.


You don't want to undermine windows' memory management, it
almost always makes things worse. If you were previously
using System Mechanic or Cacheman to change memory settings
or free memory, revent those back to the default windows
values and reboot the system. Same with other tweaks, if
you'd made any in the registry or with other utilities it
would be good to get all default values for windows to work
with and go from there. Selectively re-enable such settings
after you have resolved the crashing problem, testing each
setting individually. Also check windows Event Viewer for
anything that's logged, as well as any new files (logs)
seemingly created at a time that coincides with the crashing
or pre-crash error(s).

Having as little free memory as possible is a sign the
system is working as effectively as possible with what it
has. Free memory allocated to a filecache makes HDD rereads
less frequent and sometimes reduced or eliminated for a very
large performance benefit.

What about during other uses? Is there anything else you
can do to reproduce the crashing besides editing with
Premiere? If not, I would focus on seeing if Premiere has
any bugs that may cause this, and if no resolutio is found
through this, try replicating a video editing job as much as
possible using some other video editing app.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your response.
I had a look in task manager and after closing Premiere, nothing is still
running. And only 16 processes are open which are good for 150 MB.
For info, while using Premiere, I always stop most unnessary processes like
networking, firewall, antivirus, aso.
The speed slowdown and crashes only happen with Premiere, and it's well
known that this program requires a lot of system resources (and also has
some bugs). But it's clear to me that Premiere (or XP with Premiere) creates
some havy temporary files that remain in the system until it' s rebooted.
So my question remains: where are the
500 MB (or the temp files) and how to make them again available???
 
ElJerid said:
Thanks for your response.
I had a look in task manager and after closing Premiere, nothing is still
running. And only 16 processes are open which are good for 150 MB.
For info, while using Premiere, I always stop most unnessary processes like
networking, firewall, antivirus, aso.
The speed slowdown and crashes only happen with Premiere, and it's well
known that this program requires a lot of system resources (and also has
some bugs). But it's clear to me that Premiere (or XP with Premiere) creates
some havy temporary files that remain in the system until it' s rebooted.
So my question remains: where are the
500 MB (or the temp files) and how to make them again available???
Click to expand...
CCleaner?? An excellent trash removal program,
and to a certain extend customizable.
 
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