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Geek Culture / RAM And Virtual Memory

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BiggAdd
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 05:40
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I have 1GB of Ram.... but I then increased my paging file to 8GB. Does this mean i have 9GB of RAM????

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OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 05:55
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More or less - although I doubt even Windows will even get close to using all of it.

George "Dubya" Bush says: 'I play AtomZ to keep my brain supple. Here it found be:http://www.nichkk.plus.com/'
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BiggAdd
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 05:56
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how much virtual memory have u got?
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OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 06:15 Edited at: 14th Jul 2005 06:19
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768Mb - its best to be kept low as possible, as the bigger it is, the slower the computer gets.



George "Dubya" Bush says: 'I play AtomZ to keep my brain supple. Here it found be:http://www.nichkk.plus.com/'
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BiggAdd
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 06:18 Edited at: 14th Jul 2005 06:20
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i managed to make a sphere with 40 million polygons b4 i ran out of memory.... and now i have to restart because things are getting slow.
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OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 06:20
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Thats a lot.

George "Dubya" Bush says: 'I play AtomZ to keep my brain supple. Here it found be:http://www.nichkk.plus.com/'
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BiggAdd
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 06:21
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why how many polygons can ur system handle?
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OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 06:22
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Doubt it'll be 40 million...

George "Dubya" Bush says: 'I play AtomZ to keep my brain supple. Here it found be:http://www.nichkk.plus.com/'
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dark coder
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 08:05
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well 40millions polys wouldent take up anyway near 9gig of ram, maybe your pc was trying to render it all at the same time?


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PiratSS
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 11:32
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Virtual memory is paged to the disk. Meaning it's a whole lot slower. It does not increase your performance, however it is has it's uses. For example, a program can use paging instead of RAM if it is doing a lot of background tasks, but having no paging does not improve your system performance.

50 Million polygons does not mean 60 fps and paging ram does not improve your video card performance.

JessTicular: Evil Stick, and Metal Artz - I've newb slapped you both.
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OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 16:37
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Except it Windows XP it is now better to let the OS maintain it.

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geecee3
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 21:51
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I was always under the impression a 'permanent swap file' was much faster. due to the constant re-sizing of a 'temp swap file' or 'dynamic swap file'. surely the process that governs the workings of a dynamic swap file has some performance hit as the container has to be resized to accomodate heavier RAM usage. Hey, I could be wrong though. it just seems to makes sense.

grant.

mmmm....computer....
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OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 22:06
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According to all sources, there is no advantage for having a permanent swap file in Windows XP. With previous OS's that was certainly not the case though.

George "Dubya" Bush says: 'I play AtomZ to keep my brain supple. Here it found be:http://www.nichkk.plus.com/'
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BiggAdd
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Posted: 14th Jul 2005 22:16 Edited at: 14th Jul 2005 22:18
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I have 400GB of memory.... so i'm not bothered about 8GB realy

SSDD
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Andy
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Posted: 15th Jul 2005 11:44
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>I have 400GB of memory.... so i'm not bothered about 8GB realy

RAM is memory, Harddrive is storage

Virtual memory means you can use part of your storage as memory.

Pros: It's transparent, so if the OS supports it, every program will as well. You can run programs requiring more memory or more programs at any one time.

Cons: It's extremely slow, generally leads to fragmentation and is susceptiple to both software and hardware problems.

To answer your original question:
>I have 1GB of Ram.... but I then increased my paging file to 8GB.
>Does this mean i have 9GB of RAM????

No, it means that you have 1 gigabyte of RAM and has designated 8 GB of storage to act as RAM.

Andy
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Metel Artz
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Posted: 15th Jul 2005 12:50
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well guys, i friend of mine made a page file calculator, it can be found at my site, or his, it is accurate. i reccomend using it.

"Fade" To Be Released mid-2006
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Three Score
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Posted: 15th Jul 2005 14:27 Edited at: 15th Jul 2005 14:31
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it only is swapping unused memory in to the page file and memory needed out of the swap file

edit:
after noticing how many (logical) drives u got im wondering how many hdds u have and u do know that having over 2 partitions is almost always bad even in 100gb+ hdds

and u know that if u set both of those paging files to different partitions but they are on the same physical hdd it solves nothing

n00bs will be shot on spot...
It only gets more logical from here(sigh)
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Eric T
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Posted: 15th Jul 2005 14:41 Edited at: 15th Jul 2005 14:42
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I guess this is the best place to ask about it...

I have 1gb ram, Amd64 3200+, 120gb 7200rpm HD, WinXP64 pro (SP1)...

How big of a page file would you recommend I do for this computer? Right now I'm sitting at 2000mb. Obviously I do a lot of gaming and media stuff. I'm clueless on the subject.

Looking for the best performance of course.

Eric

http://blog.myspace.com/erict An Alternative to Mouse's blog. Now with more lowbrow opinions.** Warning - explicit language**
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BiggAdd
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Posted: 16th Jul 2005 01:33
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When i get the money i'm buying some more RAM. 1 DDR 512 Ram card cost £70. i think i have 4 or 3 more ports left to slot it into.

SSDD
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indi
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Posted: 16th Jul 2005 10:43
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yeah all g5s and some newer pc mobos can handle 8 gigs (8 x 1g)

If no-one gives your an answer to a question you have asked, consider:- Is your question clear.- Did you ask nicely.- Are you showing any effort to solve the problem yourself 
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BiggAdd
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Posted: 16th Jul 2005 10:49
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i may have 2 slots. Maybe i miss counted, the 3rd slot i saw may have been a different thing all together. I dnt know much about the insides of pcs but i managed to fit myself 2 new fans though

SSDD
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Andy
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Posted: 16th Jul 2005 23:29
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>generally leads to fragmentation... not with XP... XP makes the
>file and never deleates it. If you set it too low it will fragment
>though.

Most people leave it to Windows to set their pagesize, and as they use the system and install a bunch of crap, the system needs to increase and decrease page size, leading to defragmentation. I'll give you this though, XP does a better job than NT and 2K did, but it still happens.

>Big SWAP files DO NOT slow the system down... only when in use do
>they slow anything down. But it is better than waiting for windows
>to free system resources.

Actually they can do. Often Windows will be paging to or from disk, while trying to read or write to the very same disk, leading to horrendous slowdown.

>And the storage really isn't acting as ram. Just as a storage place
>to dump information.

Not true, the whole point of virtual memory is to have the memory management unit map the entire memory even though it physically spans several different memory or storage systems.

To the OS, it is transparent, meaning that the OS doesn't care whether the memory is in RAM or on disk, although it will try to optimize memory use, based on access speed(major improvement in 2K and XP).

>How big of a page file would you recommend I do for this computer?
>Right now I'm sitting at 2000mb. Obviously I do a lot of gaming and
>media stuff. I'm clueless on the subject.
>Looking for the best performance of course.

take the worst case scenario, and check how much memory you are using. That's how much you will be using on a bad day, but worse days are likely to come, so double it and round to the nearest power of 2 and use this number as your size. Generally you will get the advice to make it 2-2.5 times your RAM size, but that only works well if you have a decent amount of RAM.

Andy
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dre
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Posted: 18th Jul 2005 11:18
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Okay, if you have 1 gig of ram, that's more than enough to run todays games. Very few programs will need more than a gig of ram, for example extreme image editing, which will use the page file on virtually any pc (thats when a fast hd comes in handy). If you do not do any image, video, crazy modelling with tens of millions of polygons on the scene, or ultra multi tasking a smaller page file can actually help performance. WinXP always tries to keep a good amount of ram free, but when you have 1 gig+, you can lower the page file to about 200mbs or less (unless you do 1 of the things I said above). That will force Windows to use as much ram as possible without bothering the hd. That's my know-how, hope it helps.

Athlon 64 X2 4400+, nForce 4 Ultra chipset, 1 gig ddr400 d-channel,Radeon X850XT PE PCI-E,2 WD 74 gig Raptors in RAID
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