Virtual memory and Vista?

I have disabled my virtual memory as I have 4 GB of RAM.

But rain meter is still reporting like 3 GB of virtual memory is being used.

What gives?

 

do you see a pagefile.sys on the system drive? it is a hidden system file so you will need to enable the option to see these types of files.

 

Do not disable virtual memory. Some programs depend on it to run certain things, so disabling it will cause crashes and instability in many programs, while offering pretty much no performance gain.

 

I agree with MidnightSun. Most photo/video programs, CS3 & CS4 for example depends on this virtual memory to run well.

 

oh ok i'll reenable it then

 

I set it to a fixed size of1536 MB

 

Virtual memory will be a combination of RAM plus paging file(s). If you disable the paging file(s) you be left with just the RAM as your virtual memory which in your case appears to be 3GB.

So if you set your paging file(s) to a total of 1536MB your virtual memory will probably now be 4.5GB.

 

That's a fairytale. If you have plenty of memory, your system will run just fine without a page file. The same is true for any applications, including Adobe stuff. Photoshop may whine about the lack of a page file, but it will run just fine.

 

I beg to differ. Microsoft themselves recommend you have at least the minimal pagefile setup, just in case. If you are like me and run Firefox with 30- tabs, Word, Outlook and media player, then you may run into low memory errors like I did when I turned off virtual memory.

Here is an interesting post on virtual memory. The interesting point the post makes is that having a pagefile allows Windows to free up memory to be used as cache.

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/11/17/3155406.aspx

 

surfasb, Pirx did say "if you have plenty of memory" which I would take to mean more memory than you would ever use and as you ran into low memory errors then you did not pass that criteria and of course need a page file to supplement.

I believe the minimal page file MS recommends your referring to is for in the event of a BSOD, being able to dump the kernel for debugging and would be up to the individual if they require that.

Very nice link you provided, Mark Russinovich writes excellent articles and while with Sysinternals (now under MS http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx) came out with some great utilities.

IMHO whether or not to use paging file(s) and how much will vary depending on the system (and the person) i.e. there is no 'one shoe fits all'.

 

It all depends on the programs you'll going to use. When I used CS3 Extended with the pagefile set or eliminated altogether, Photoshop would constantly remind me I needed more memory even though I had 4gb on board. If you have ample HDD space to play with then I don't see the reason of eliminating or decreasing the pagefile. It's also said that there isn't that much significant performance difference with the pagefile set or deleted.

 

So it sounds like if you have plenty of RAM (I have 8GB), then you don't necessarily need the page file. Though I have a different reason for wanting to disable it.

I have an SSD drive and though I think the generally consensus is the write lifespan is not your typical user's worry, I do wonder about the pagefile's impact on that aspect. Any thoughts?

 

Shouldn't be a problem madrush - at least on better drives.
Search the forum with respect to defragmenting SSDs - there was a nice post about the lifespan of SSDs.

About Adobe - doesn't Photoshop have its own pagefile? And you can set the amount of memory it may use (RAM)...
At least Elements (!!) 6 does that...

 

Technically, the virtual memory reported under task manager doesn't mean memory available in the pagefile.

I can find a good article for ya.....

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/11/17/3155406.aspx

scroll down to where it talks about Committed memory.