Virtual memory low while playing games!?!

Hey when i play a game called New World it pop ups a window where it says that may virtual memory page file is low or something like that? What does it mean? How can i fix it? Is it dangerous for my performance or something?

 

it means you are not having enough virtual memory ( pagefile). have a look how much space is left on the partition your pagefile is located ( typically it yould be c:\)

solution
if there is enough space on the hdd left, you could manually increase the amount of virtual memory( pagefile).

 

Either you are very short of HDD space or you have a fixed size for virtual memory which is too small (My Computer > Properties > Advanced System Settings > Advanced > Performance > Advanced). Virtual memory uses the HDD. Either way, you need to investigate and fix the problem.

John

 

okay i fixed it by incresting page memory thing from min 256-max 512 to min 512 and max 1024. What is it and what happens when i change it? can the more the better? can i enter 999999999999? lol

 

The machine uses some part of HDD instead of RAM and loads non priority process there. this is called virtual memory or pagefile. the default location is c:\pagefile.sys (hidden&system file). All machines use some pagefile. however a machine with lower RAM needs to use more and more of pagefile. this is what is happening in your case. your games and windows background processes exceeds the size of currently allocated RAM & pagefile (1.5xRAM size by default) and windows is automatically increasing size of the page file.

Although this is not harmful. too much paging will surely decrease performance. i dont think u will get any speed increase by increasing size of pagefile. (remember RAM is about 10 times faster than the best HDD). your 512 MB RAM is too inadequate for todays games. the best advice for you is to buy more RAM

you can also try stopping unnecessary processes using task manager and msconfig to free up more memory. also use some cleaner like ccleaner or easy cleaner to clean your system. however these wont give any good as compared to buying new RAM.

 

512MB is very small, 1024MB is better and 2048MB would probably give you a good buffer. get your game and a few other applications running and use Task Manager to check how much virtual memory you are using.

Once you have worked out what is a good size (with some ((~1GB?) spare space) then I recommend that you fix the size (min = max) and use PageDefrag to defrag the file for best performance.

Since the paging file is on the HDD you don't want to make it excessively big.

John

 

Just let Windows manage it. Gets you better performance generally, and you avoid any risk of crashing (which is what happens if it runs out of virtual memory)

Under XP in particular, I've found that setting a large fixed size pagefile ruins performance. Setting a small fixed size pagefile, however, gives you warnings like you got, and causes applications to crash as they run out of virtual memory.

If you let Windows manage it, you pretty much get the best of both worlds. It doesn't do the insane amount of swapping that happens with large pagefiles, and it doesn't crash either.

 

Add some more RAM, and you will be good.