soccerchamp76

Two questions:
1) Why when you set the virtual memory to 0, Windows still uses it?

2) If Windows MUST have virtual memory, is it possible to control which programs are set to be stored in virtual memory (such as low-priority iteams), and place higher priority items in physical memory???

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Brian Griffin: Ah, if my memory serves me, this is the physics department.
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Dilbert1234567

how much real ram do you have? if you have a gig you can use this registry tweek

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive

set it to a decimal 1

this will force the system to place more of the system into real memory and not in VM.

i've run it this way for a month and it is stable for me, under winxp.

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soccerchamp76

I have a gig of ram

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Brian Griffin: Ah, if my memory serves me, this is the physics department.
Chris Griffin: That would explain all the gravity.

soccerchamp76

I also cannot find that registry information???

Edit: I found it and I already had the option selected...

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Brian Griffin: Ah, if my memory serves me, this is the physics department.
Chris Griffin: That would explain all the gravity.

Dilbert1234567

then you should already be running mostly in real memory

check out a program called cacheman its a tweaking utility for memory stuff.

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eeef2

Dilbert, i dont understand- is VM badfor performance? why not turn it all the way up and use as much as you can??

MikeSty

Virtual Memory = "emulated' RAM on the hard disk .. much slower.

KnifeMissile

In general, virtual memory increases performance.

The idea is that "you can never have too much memory," or "the more memory, the better." So, you pretend to have more memory than you have and you cache the less frequently used memory on disk. Because it's less used, the performance penalty you get for keeping it on disk won't be noticed as much. The memory that is being used all the time stays in RAM. The result is that you have more memory for your applications, increasing overall performance.

This optimisation can appear to break down if you use all of your system's virtual memory with equal and frequent regularity. However, if you think about it, the reality is that this is merely an indication that you have too little memory for your purpose(s) and your use of virtual memory really isn't the issue.


Interestingly enough, not only does your system employ virtual memory but it also uses file caching. This is pretty much the same thing as virtual memory except in reverse. You cache disk files in memory.

So, your operating system will have files cached in memory while you have memory cached on disk. Pretty funny, eh? This might seem ludicrous but it actually makes sense. It's the frequenly used files that stay cached in memory while the infrequently used memory gets cached on disk. In other words, everything that's hardly being used stays on the slow disk drive while everything that's often accessed gets put in fast memory. Can you see why this is good for performance?

Dilbert1234567

It helps, windows does a good job at balancing where info is stored, in VM and in real memory. If you have a lot of ram, you can tweak the os into putting everything it can into real ram, which will increase performance, you can’t get rid of VM all together, it helps with debugging error and should never be disabled.

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