low virtual memory=bad game performance

hello again,

Recently css has been freezing up. with an application error 0xc000012d.
i did my research on google and figured that this has something to do with low virtual memory or i think tahat's ram.?
any way, by increasing this, will css not freeze anymore? how would you increase this.

btw this is the ttrue list of stuff i did to try to get css to be playable: new drivers, reinstall steam, reinstall css, turn off sound, change graphic settings, lower resoultion, turn alot of eyecandy in game off, stop programs from auto booting, uhh contacting steam(no help) a loooooooootttttttt of stuff, delete files in valve folder

 

You can increase virtual memory by right-clicking on My Computer, going to the Advanced tab, Settings for Performance. Go to the second advanced tab, where you will see Change for virtual memory.

By the way, how much RAM are you running on?

 

supposedly 1 gig


settings for performance?

 

Set to 1536 (both minimum and maximum values)

 

my min is already a 1536, is it safe or better to put higher?

it says 33424mb is available

 

It should be set to one and a half times the amount of memory you have in your system. In your case, it should be set to

Initial Size - 1536
Maximum Size - 1536.

Don't forget to press SET to, as this applies the memory settings.

 

but is it better to put more?

bump? read above^

 

Remember that you can Edit your post and add something you forgot. Please do that.

If you have 1GB of RAM, I'd set 1.5x that as both your min & max as posted.

 

k, i did that but css still freezes

 

You can always try making it a little bigger and see if it helps. Undo the change if it doesn't.

 

k thanks for the answer

 

No, setting it to 1.5x your memory makes no sense.
The idea is that your RAM + page file size should add up to *at least* the total amount of memory you need.

If you use that 1.5x setting on low-end systems, there won't be enough virtual memory. There isn't some "golden ratio" (Except in the sense that the higher you set it, the safer you are), but on the contrary, the less RAM you have, the bigger your pagefile needs to be.

If you want to make sure you don't run into problems, set it to 3GB (You have 1GB memory, and 32-bit OS'es can handle 4GB memory total, so up to 30GB pagefile makes sense.)

You don't lose performance or anything else (other than hard disk space) by enlarging the page file.

 

You mean 3GB?

I normally have mine set to 1.5GB as the min, and 2GB as the max, as I have 2GB of RAM.

 

Err oops, yes, 3 GB. I don't know if Windows would allow a 30GB pagefile, but that technically wouldn't perform worse. it'd just use up a lot of disk space...

 

argh, total confusion lol
i fixed css by doing something verysimple
playing ind direct x 7 and hardware sync)
only problem is horrible graphics
Any way i have my virtual memory at 1900 for min and max, is that ok?
i have 1 gig


if you put a very large number in min and max...can you over clock your RAM?????
that would be odd...

 

I have no virtual memory on anymore. It only slows down my lappy.

 

argh, total confusion lol
i fixed css by doing something verysimple
playing ind direct x 7 and hardware sync)
only problem is horrible graphics
Any way i have my virtual memory at 1900 for min and max, is that ok?
i have 1 gig


if you put a very large number in min and max...can you over clock your RAM?????
that would be odd...


^that and what is the difference with direct x 9 and 7 for games

 

It just allows for better visual effects. For example, In DX9 mode in HL2 you get nice shiny water with waves, and frosted glass effects. DX7 cannot do that.

 

yea because css only runs in dx7 for me...dosent even run in 8 or 8.1

 

What graphics card do you own ? Do you have latest DirectX setup on your system? Are your graphic card drivers properly installed on your machine?

 

yea man i got catalyst 6.8 and ATI x1400 512
i got direct x 9c

 

No it doesn't. It consumes some HDD space, but it doesn't slow you down.

 

HDD space is much slower than Memory space, so in fact it does can slow your system down. But if you haven't enough mem space it will make your pc or lappy faster because the free memory (saved in the virtual memory) could be used for games or other software that's being used at that moment.

 

Yes, HDD is a lot slower, but that doesn't make your system slower. Windows will only *use* the pagefile when it runs out of physical memory (That is, in cases that would either cause programs to crash if you had no pagefile, or at the very least, require much more aggressive freeing of unused memory, which would also lower performance indirectly.

Having a pagefile does not slow down your system because Windows does not use it directly. When something it needs is located on the pagefile, it loads that data into memory, swapping out the least used data. After that, it is in RAM which is fast. So programs never access the pagefile, and once again, won't slow down your system.

By the same logic, getting rid of your system RAM would speed up your system, because the CPU has a cache that's faster. The exact same applies. It uses RAM to store all the stuff that doesn't fit into cache, but the data that is actually being used currently is in the cache anyway, and so doesn't suffer the slowdowns of RAM.
And similarly, the data being used is by definition located in RAM, and so it won't be slowed down by a pagefile.

 

Myth - "Disabling the Pagefile improves performance."

Reality - "You gain no performance improvement by turning off the Pagefile. When certain applications start, they allocate a huge amount of memory (hundreds of megabytes typically set aside in virtual memory) even though they might not use it. If no Pagefile (i.e., virtual memory) is present, a memory-hogging application can quickly use a large chunk of RAM. Even worse, just a few such programs can bring a machine loaded with memory to a halt. Some applications (e.g., Adobe Photoshop) will display warnings on startup if no Pagefile is present."

"In modern operating systems, including Windows, application programs and many system processes always reference memory using virtual memory addresses which are automatically translated to real (RAM) addresses by the hardware. Only core parts of the operating system kernel bypass this address translation and use real memory addresses directly. All processes (e.g. application executables) running under 32 bit Windows gets virtual memory addresses (a Virtual Address Space) going from 0 to 4,294,967,295 (2*32-1 = 4 GB), no matter how much RAM is actually installed on the computer. In the default Windows OS configuration, 2 GB of this virtual address space are designated for each process' private use and the other 2 GB are shared between all processes and the operating system. RAM is a limited resource, whereas virtual memory is, for most practical purposes, unlimited. There can be a large number of processes each with its own 2 GB of private virtual address space. When the memory in use by all the existing processes exceeds the amount of RAM available, the operating system will move pages (4 KB pieces) of one or more virtual address spaces to the computer's hard disk, thus freeing that RAM frame for other uses. In Windows systems, these "paged out" pages are stored in one or more files called pagefile.sys in the root of a partition. Virtual Memory is always in use, even when the memory required by all running processes does not exceed the amount of RAM installed on the system."

Source

 

That's the reason why i disabled the virtual memory. I have much performance gain in ut2004 because of disabling it. And other programs are running smoother too

 

maybe its just network lag...u on cable or dsl? 56k?

 

Why an argument?
is 1900 ram [/I]better than the 1.5 amount of 1532 ram or something?

 

UT2004 shouldn't be running anything but smooth on a Go7900GTX + Core Duo. I don't think RAM is to blame there.

I think it is safer to leave VM enabled. I often go very, very close to using the full 2GB I have on Photoshop (1.8GB+).

 

No, you have not disabled virtual memory, you have disabled the pagefile. Virtual memory is still in use, because that is one of the features that makes it possible to run more than one process at a time. And like said above (at least half a dozen times so far), disabling your page file won't increase performance.

Virtual memory *can* not be disabled, any more than your file system can be disabled.

 

ok what DOES increase performance, and how do you do this?
setting my ram to a greater # makes performance better?

 

If by "setting my ram to a greater #", you mean buying more RAM, then yes, that often helps...

The way programmers see it is in terms of a memory hierarchy. You have multiple "layers" of memory, each one smaller but faster than the underlying ones, and so you obviously want to avoid having to dive into the low-level layers.
If you can fit the required data into the CPU's registers, everything runs insanely fast. Unfortunately, they can hold a combined 64 byte on a 32-bit CPU. Then there's the CPU cache, which is a lot bigger (up to 4MB for level 2 cache, 128kb for level 1), and if you can fit all the currently needed data there, you're still doing good. If that fails, you have to use the underlying system RAM, which is a lot slower, but there's lots of it.
And finally, as a backup, you have the pagefile which is sloooooooooow, and is only really there to take the stuff that didn't fit into RAM.

So the obvious way to improve performance is to ensure that you don't have more data than you have RAM. Either by buying more RAM, or, well, by running fewer, smaller programs...

Pagefile settings won't make a difference on performance, because as I said, it's only there as a safety net. It only affects you in the cases where things go wrong (and then you'd be a lot worse off without it), but as long as things go as planned, it doesn't impact performance or anything else.

 

okay, thanks, maybe i will go to 2 gig one day...

 

The particular error you got in CSS is due to memory being maxed.

I have only gotten this error on my older notebook with an ati mobility 7500 32MB

 

o rly?
wellllllll........
that's not the real problem because in direct x 7 the game works pergfectly...
or could the maxed out memory bethe problem?

 

I can't stand Source with DX7... it's insanly ugly. Why not just play 1.6? But, I guess that goes back to the rule of thumb- Performance over Graphics. I really only play Battlefield 1942 on my laptop, and I don't get any errors, and it runs pretty dang smooth on medium/low settings, 1024x768.

 

It isn't the ram i blame but my harddisk. Ut2004 runs smooth all the time but sometimes when my harddisk begins to work it will stutter for a short time. Now i disabled or pagefiling or virtual memory and Ut2004 doesn't have the harddisk stuttering problem anymore. I know it's weird but it's true it's something with te harddisk whose slowdown some games for a few seconds and the way above is my solution for the short stuttering.

 

Well, I'd expect DX9 mode to eat a lot more memory than DX7. So it could very well be the problem.

Ok, to be precise, Windows does start using the pagefile before memory runs out entirely. This is, ironically, to ensure good performance. It tries to always have a chunk of RAM free, because it doesn't know when a program is going to suddenly try to allocate 100MB of memory. So it tries to gradually, without affecting performance, swap out bits of unused data. If it didn't do this, it'd risk suddenly having to swap 100MB, which would cause it to stall for entire seconds. No one wants that.

About your stutter, there could be several explanations. First, does it keep occurring? It might well happen once or twice early on, until Windows has shuffled memory around satisfactoryily, so it can serve future memory requests without having to use the pagefile. But, and this is important, None of UT's data will end up in the pagefile. Instead, it pushes other programs to the pagefile to ensure that there's room for the currently used data, because this ensures good performance in the long run. So you might simply be trading your short moment of stutter for lower performance the rest of the time, or even saving up for some even bigger stutter. (Or just a program crash when it runs out of memory)
Second, it sounds likely that your IDE drivers have a bit of a problem. I really hope they aren't set to PIO mode (and if they were, that'd probably give you even worse performance), but even if that's not the case, it sounds like they don't handle asynchronous transfers as well as they should.

Basically though, you're playing a dangerous game. You're getting rid of a small amount of stutter (which most likely only occurs for the first minute of playing, or so), and what you get in return can be one or more of the following:
- Risk of program crashes
- Risk of bigger stutter later
- Overall slightly lower performance.

Basically, yes. The point is that you might well need more than 1.5x your memory. The pagefile is a safety net, and if you only allow it to catch half the accidents, it's not really much good. The bigger it is, the more accidents it'll be able to catch. And its ideal size isn't proportional to the amount of ram. On the contrary, the less RAM you have, the bigger pagefile you need.

 

Good point Jalf!

I had that problem with DVD-RW - for no obvious reason the mode switched from UDMA to PIO.

I also think the best thing is to leave the virtual memory alone. Windows manage it. Somebody mentioned XP myths - well I encourage people to read that. I played with it a few times, and was happy for a while until the first crash, stutter, error message etc... I leave it alone and I never have any problems with gaming or whatsoever.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

Ok i will switch paging on, but i didn't have had any crashes at all since i changed it (2.5 months ago)

 

well, the crashes only occur when it runs out of memory.
As long as your 2GB is enough, all is well.

Basically, to give you an idea of the difference between running with and without a pagefile, Chaz said his Photoshop sessions might consume up to 1.8GB. If you've got a big pagefile, you can have all that running *while* playing, and it won't affect your performance. All 1.8GB of data will just be pushed to the pagefile because it's unused. (so yeah, while it's pushing that data, you'll probably see a bit of stuttering, but it'll pass)
If you try that trick without a pagefile, *something* will crash.

 

I have 1024 Paging File on my laptop.

 

I have 2gb of system memory, and a 1gb pagefile. Highest pagefile usage I have seen so far is 84MB, that was encoding a DVD to mp4. Had FEAR and CoD2 running which had no effect on pagefile usage, and also opened Photoshop and about 15 photographs (6mp each). No trouble at all.