anyone using no virtual memory?

[Huw]

Quote[/b] ]If the swap file is dynamic, growing the file takes time, and may lead to a fragmented swap file, which may decrease performance if lots of swapping is going on

Sorry but this is just another one of those urban myths, setting a fixed swap file of 500Mb doesn't make the pages in the paging file any less fragmented at all, the important thing is setting your minimum size to the correct value in the first place, then it won't grow anyway., but can if it needs to, but isn't wasting lots of drive space because you have a 2Gb fixed paging file which isn't being used

[bitter_old_man]

I didn't say it made the all pages less fragmented. If the swap file is dynamic, and the OS has to enlarge the swap file, you cannot be guaranteed that the new part of the swap file is contiguous to the old part of the swap file. If the pieces of the swap file are non contiguous, a lot of seeking may occur, especially if the system starts thrashing.

Barry

[Stimpy]

Forgive me if I sound stupid here, maybe I'm missing the point but on my system I have 256 MB physical RAM and looking at task manager GB-PVR typically takes up about 62 MB and GBPVRRecordingService takes up about 22 MB. After adding up all the other processes, I'm typically left with about 50 MB of available physical memory. In fact the peak value under "Commit charge" has yet to exceed the "Total" under physical memory.

What exactly is the benefit of going up to 512 MB or even more?

[reven]

windows often requires lots of memory to just run, its windows, having more memory means if it needs it, it will use it and not use virtual memory as much. and what if you want to perform other tasks like comskip, convert a video file etc. 256 isnt really enough these days, 512 is kinda the recommended amount (i think 256mb is recommended by microsoft, but must ppl recommend 512, black viper recommends 2GBs). memory is cheap these days, upgrading from 256 to 512 shouldnt cost that much.

[Huw]

Stimpy,

You will find that if you upgrade to 512Mb, and then add up all your commited memory again, it will probably come to more than the 256Mb that you have installed now, that is the thing with windows, the more you give it the more it actually uses. I would recoment more than 512Mb, but 2Gb is overkill, I know it is cheap, but why waste £100 when you probably won't ever use the second 1Gb

[Guest]

of course you can go without swap on disk. I am using windows 2000 and XP for 3 years without any problem and without swap on disk. I have 2GB of ram also.:blues:

[reven]

yeah that just went over my head

[Gulla]

Physical memory is also used by the Windows File System Cache. The size of the cache is adjusted dynamically by the OS, based of the amount of free RAM available. The maximum cache size in W2K is 960MB (I’m not sure if this applies to XP).
So the more RAM you have, the larger the system cache will be. But this doesn’t mean, if you used 2GB RAM that the system cache would be 960MB. It only grows when it needs to.

The reason why the file system cache will improve performance is because when the system need to write data to disk, it writes it to the cache(RAM), and then the cache manager will write the data to the disk at it’s leisure. Also when the data is read from disk, the OS will read ahead and store that data in the cache. Then if contiguous data is required, it will be able to read it from the cache and not from disk. That’s why it takes longer to open an application for the first time, than it does in subsequence attempts

In W2K/XP the ‘Performance’ Tab in the ‘Windows Task Manager’ will tell you the current size of your System Cache. If the cache size is low, then additional RAM may help. Also if you find the System Cache keeps on growing then shrinking in size then additional RAM will help.

I hope this makes some sense!