Use of Memory

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rich Murray
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Rich Murray

My XP system has really gotten slow over the past several
months. By watching system performance, I see that there is
available system memory, but several of my executing
programs appear to be paging (the page fault statistics for
them is steadily increasing). it looks like there may be
some XP limit on process size that may be preventing XP
from loading more of it into the available memory. I just
doubled the size of my RAM and see no improvement.
 
Rich Murray said:
My XP system has really gotten slow over the past several
months. By watching system performance, I see that there is
available system memory, but several of my executing
programs appear to be paging (the page fault statistics for
them is steadily increasing). it looks like there may be
some XP limit on process size that may be preventing XP
from loading more of it into the available memory. I just
doubled the size of my RAM and see no improvement.
Click to expand...

See MVP Alex Nichol's article on virtual memory management in Windows
XP at http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

Most of what you see with regard to the page file is almost certainly
with respect to the *unused* portions of memory allocation requests.
Windows will always map these unused portions to locations in the page
file so as to allow the RAM to be used for items that are actually
being used.

You can download a free utility that will check on the amount of
actual page file usage (that is active memory pages that have been
moved from RAM to the page file so as to allow that RAM to be used for
other, currently more important, purposes) that is occurring on your
computer. Get it from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm or from
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/

I would expect from what you have said that this utility will report
zero actual usage or very close to it.

Hope this is of some assistance.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."
 
-----Original Message-----


See MVP Alex Nichol's article on virtual memory management in Windows
XP at http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

Most of what you see with regard to the page file is almost certainly
with respect to the *unused* portions of memory allocation requests.
Windows will always map these unused portions to locations in the page
file so as to allow the RAM to be used for items that are actually
being used.

You can download a free utility that will check on the amount of
actual page file usage (that is active memory pages that have been
moved from RAM to the page file so as to allow that RAM to be used for
other, currently more important, purposes) that is occurring on your
computer. Get it from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm or from
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/

I would expect from what you have said that this utility will report
zero actual usage or very close to it.

Hope this is of some assistance.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."
.
Click to expand...
Here's some more info on page files

http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/expertzone/columns/mcfed
ries/03june16.asp

http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

Bill
 
I have a similar problem:

I have a message "Virtual memory low"
My RAM is 384 MB.
My original settings for virtual memory were:
C: Paging size 192 - 384
F: Nothing
I change it to the following:
C: 2- 50 MB
F: 100-700.
I still get message Virtual Memory Low. Please help
 
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