Low virtual memory

What is virtual memory and why is mine always reported to be too low. The information box then says it is expanding the memory cache.

How do I fix this problem?

 

Conrol Panel > System > Advance > Performance > Advance > Virtual Memory. Set it to twice your on board mem.
Edit: Virtual mem is HDD space that emulates RAM,allows apps to operate as though the computer has more mem then it does.

 

Twice your RAM can be harshly exaggerating. I have 2GB RAM and I've got a 3GB allocated pagefile, and it sees over 1GB worth use RARELY.

edit. the point was, if you have large amounts of RAM, 1,5times your figures on virtual SHOULD really be enough.

 

hmm, I've heard the 1.5 times you ram, but I've read up on it and agree with a different solution. I have 1 gig of ram, running winxp pro, and I have a VM set to 50MB on c, with 512-1200 on my d drive (2gig partition just for pagefile) and I haven't noticed any difference from when I had it set at 2gigs all the time. there are small utilities that show your current page file usage (VM), and with web browsing and winamp, Its only using 62 meg of VM. I've only once ever had a msg pop up saying windows needed to increase the pagefile size, but that was when I had it set larger anyways.

 

Also it would help to know some system spec's, especialy your cpu, ram, hard drive, and what your trying to run (OS and programs).

 

Admitted, I could probably live with a smaller pagefile too, but there's a partition for it, so I can't really be arsed to do anything about it. Maybe Vista won't require a pagefile, and I'll move on in my life once it hits in on a usable level (SP1 eh).

 

I've mine set max 2048, min 1533. Works for me.

 

The whole "pagefile should be <insert number here> x your RAM" idea is flawed.

The entire *point* in the pagefile is that it should cover the cases when you run out of RAM.
That would suggest that the *less* ram you have, the *bigger* the pagefile should be. Just like Keizafk suggested.

A better rule of thumb is that your RAM + your pagefile should equal at least 2GB. 2GB is about as much memory as most users ever need at any one time.

So if you have 256MB RAM, better set your pagefile to at least 1.7GB. (Yes, you might be able to get away with less, because no one in their right minds run memory-heavy stuff on a 256MB system, but if we want to make sure we don't get problems)

If you have 2GB RAM, you won't need the pagefile much at all, but it shouldn't be disabled.

I'd say always give the pagefile *at least* 1GB.

So, the final rule would be something like this:
(Pagefile = 2GB - RAM), or (pagefile = 1GB), whichever is biggest

 

tbh i think its time to get more RAM when you run out of virtual memory. Using pagefile is too slow.

Jalf: I wonder if I could get like 4 gig of RAM and disable pagefile? I assume it would be okay, since I have installed xp onto a pendrive with pagefile disabled. But I don't know if it will actually increase the performance.

 

That depends on how much virtual memory you have.

If you run out of virtual memory because you've set a 2MB pagefile, you can safely increase the pagefile size without losing any performance.

The thing is that most data isn't actually used. A program might ask the OS to allocate 50MB of data, and then only need the first 50kb. Then the remaining 49MB can be paged out, and you won't lose *any* performance because it never has to be loaded back into RAM.

So it's really no problem that some data is put into the pagefile. It's only if the pagefile is being constantly read from and written to, you have a problem.

Technically you could (You *could* do it with less than 4 gigs of RAM as well, but then you risk instability if you run out of RAM).
A 32-bit OS can only keep track of a total of 4GB of memory anyway (by default, anyway. You can get Windows to handle more than that), so if you have 4GB RAM, you should be able to disable the pagefile without any problems.

But there wouldn't be much point. You'd save a bit of harddisk space, and that's it. Performance-wise, it'd be *exactly* the same.

The pagefile is only used when Windows is low on RAM. If that never happens, it'll never write anything to the pagefile. And if it never writes anything to the pagefile, it'll never try to read from it either.

However, no matter what, I'd keep the pagefile enabled. Even if it's set to 64MB or something tiny and pretty much useless, it's just safer because some obscure part of Windows might expect a pagefile to exist, or some other unexpected situation might occur where it actually makes a difference.