Bad idea to disable pagefile?

[binkyvamp]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

n7, you are correct. If if there is RAM available, Windows will still use its page file if it is enabled.

No, it won't. The accounting provided to taskmgr and perfmon is wrong because it includes pagefile reservations which aren't actually in the pagefile yet and may never be.

You're wrong, it will use the pagefile. Windows constantly tries to keep a certain amount (God only knows how they calculate this) of RAM available for applications to reserve in physical memory immediately. You might recall programs that claim to speed up your PC by 1000% and so forth. Most of these programs do this by allocating RAM and deallocating, hopefully forcing all of the old programs out into the pagefile and leaving fresh physical RAM for new applications to quickly start in. Well, Windows, at least Windows XP does this extensively already so programs like this are virtually useless and would probably do more harm than good (ie: swap more than is needed).

Even a monkey would notice that when they click on applications they haven't used in a while, bits and pieces show up gradually on the screen and the hard drive chugs away. That's because it's been swapped. I've got 2GB of RAM, currently only using 1.21GB, yet 779MB of my swapfile is in use. I have World of Warcraft running in the background, and Windows XP see it fit to allow only 198MB (at one stage it was ~50MB) of the 490MB to be committed to physical memory - the rest resides on the disk. This is mirrored in game, when i run around in the most popular area (with the most textures and models), with the game freezing and HDD chugging as the memory is all swapped back in. However, once this is done, 273MB of physical memory is used. When i open up different applications, even the Start menu, the hard drive chugs along as it swaps everything back in. Open Winamp, same thing. Open a fresh IE, same thing. Chug chug chug. Even with 2GB of RAM.

I'm currently researching this phenomenon, trying to get answers as to how to force Windows XP to not swap so many of my programs (especially system programs) into the pagefile. I have 2GB of RAM and a 768MB pagefile, and Windows even warns me sometimes that it's increasing the pagefile and that some applications may fail, even when only about 1GB of RAM or less is in use. I don't believe i have a virus or trojan on my computer. I have no spyware and none of those "speed-up" programs installed. There's no reason why Windows should swap so much of my physical memory. Yet it continues. My only solution seems to be to set the pagefile to 2MB min, 2MB max. This is the minimum and will at least allow BSOD crash dumps (not that i get any) to be logged so i can later WinDbg them.

The same thing happens on my wife's computer. She only has 1GB, runs World of Warcraft in low quality mode (uses around 300MB or so), and frequently has the freezing problem where Windows swaps all of your pages back into physical memory, causing her to fall off paths and so forth in the game while the HDD chugs for about 5 seconds. She runs maybe 1 or 2 MS Word instances in the background, 10-20MB each. There's no reason why her computer should suffer "swappage" either.

On the lighter side, i have a Linux box that runs a web, mail, and file sharing server which doesn't use the swapfile at all. This is obviously where your experiences lie, and you have little experience or knowledge of how Windows swaps.

Any comments or ideas would be appreciated as to the original posters idea of disabling the swap file (or at least limiting it to 2MB), and also as to how to tweak Windows XP's handling of the pagefile and free physical memory (through the registry perhaps?).

Regards.

Edit: By the way, an easy way to see a (not always accurate) figure of how much RAM a program is using and how much of it is in physical memory is to use Task Manager. The "Mem Usage" is the Physical memory in use, and the VM Size is the total space allocated by the application. Sometimes for some reason the Mem Usage is higher than the VM Size, i don't know what's up with that, but you get a rough idea. Also, this is a great way to see how Windows XP swaps your stuff into the pagefile. For example, right now, MSN Messenger shows 5.7MB Mem Usage, 32.3MB VM Size. But i'll just open MSN up, fire up a conversation window, and watch (as Task Manager is on top) the Mem Usage rise to... 23.1MB, my HDD chugging like a ah heck the meantime. It took around 4 seconds for MSN to popup while the HDD chugged. YET I HAVE ONLY 1.22GB in use and 2GB of RAM and only a few small applications open and a 500MB game! Why Windows? Whyyyyyyy?

 

[Nothinman]

You're wrong, it will use the pagefile. Windows constantly tries to keep a certain amount (God only knows how they calculate this) of RAM available for applications to reserve in physical memory immediately. You might recall programs that claim to speed up your PC by 1000% and so forth. Most of these programs do this by allocating RAM and deallocating, hopefully forcing all of the old programs out into the pagefile and leaving fresh physical RAM for new applications to quickly start in. Well, Windows, at least Windows XP does this extensively already so programs like this are virtually useless and would probably do more harm than good (ie: swap more than is needed).

First, you don't seem to understand how paging works. Windows won't put a program in the pagefile unless the data in memory has been altered (i.e. dirtied) because it already has a home on disk in the form of the original executable file that you ran. Same thing for shared libraries and any other data file, as long as it wasn't modified in memory it will just be evicted from memory and have that memory reused without any pagefile activity.

Even a monkey would notice that when they click on applications they haven't used in a while, bits and pieces show up gradually on the screen and the hard drive chugs away

Yes, but that monkey won't know where on the disk they're coming from as you've just demonstrated. Hard drive activity doesn't automatically indicate pagefile activity.

I'm currently researching this phenomenon, trying to get answers as to how to force Windows XP to not swap so many of my programs (especially system programs) into the pagefile

The first thing you should do is get a copy of "Inside Windows" and learn how paging and memory management actually works, but I really doubt Windows has any tunables that will let you adjust this behavior.

On the lighter side, i have a Linux box that runs a web, mail, and file sharing server which doesn't use the swapfile at all. This is obviously where your experiences lie, and you have little experience or knowledge of how Windows swaps.

I have a Windows machine at work with 1G of memory and the pagefile activity is minimal even running FireFox, CoLinux and some random other things. Yes most of my experience is with Linux, but I do use Windows occasionally and Windows isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.

Also, this is a great way to see how Windows XP swaps your stuff into the pagefile.

VM size does not have anything to do with pagefile usage.

 

[binkyvamp]

Wow, what a nitpicker...

Originally posted by: Nothinman

You're wrong, it will use the pagefile. Windows constantly tries to keep a certain amount (God only knows how they calculate this) of RAM available for applications to reserve in physical memory immediately. You might recall programs that claim to speed up your PC by 1000% and so forth. Most of these programs do this by allocating RAM and deallocating, hopefully forcing all of the old programs out into the pagefile and leaving fresh physical RAM for new applications to quickly start in. Well, Windows, at least Windows XP does this extensively already so programs like this are virtually useless and would probably do more harm than good (ie: swap more than is needed).

First, you don't seem to understand how paging works. Windows won't put a program in the pagefile unless the data in memory has been altered (i.e. dirtied) because it already has a home on disk in the form of the original executable file that you ran. Same thing for shared libraries and any other data file, as long as it wasn't modified in memory it will just be evicted from memory and have that memory reused without any pagefile activity.

No, actually, the problem here lies in the fact that you don't know how Windows pages. You may understand paging, as i similarly do, but you don't understand it in Windows. You need more Windows time and less Linux time buddy, definitely.

Windows will put any part of a program into the pagefile if feels necessary, and on my machines it seems to feel it necessary a lot, for most of the programs. Windows either doesn't have this efficient dirty-page-detecting scheme that you're on about, or it has a really bad memory management policy and keeps dirtying newer and more needed swapped pages, thus inducing disk activity. In fact i can almost guarantee that Windows always marks a page as dirty as soon as it has been swapped, because of the sheer number of times i've seen HDD chugging with "Mem Usage" in Task Manager rising when alt-tabbing back to an application, on machines that have very very little total memory usage. Maybe this is how your lovely Linux there shines over Windows.

Even a monkey would notice that when they click on applications they haven't used in a while, bits and pieces show up gradually on the screen and the hard drive chugs away

Yes, but that monkey won't know where on the disk they're coming from as you've just demonstrated. Hard drive activity doesn't automatically indicate pagefile activity.

Oh come on, you can see the Mem Usage go up as the HDD chugs away. It's clearly moving the data from the pagefile into physical memory. Why on earth would MSN Messenger, for example, deallocate 27MB of its RAM, and then use the disk for 4 seconds while it brings up the GUI while it allocates the 27MB of RAM again. Duh. As i said, even a monkey can see this. You clearly don't. Are you dumber than a monkey? The same goes for any other program other than MSN Messenger too. They chug, display slowly, and Mem Usage rises when you alt-tab to them. Plain as day. If you can't see that, you're either dumb, never even investigated it, or just, i don't know, argumentative?

I'm currently researching this phenomenon, trying to get answers as to how to force Windows XP to not swap so many of my programs (especially system programs) into the pagefile

The first thing you should do is get a copy of "Inside Windows" and learn how paging and memory management actually works, but I really doubt Windows has any tunables that will let you adjust this behavior.

I'm a Senior C++ Developer in a software company building C++ frameworks and programs using those frameworks, i know perfectly well how memory works and have developed from scratch many memory classes myself, thank you very much. I'll disregard your insulting implication. I will agree that i doubt Windows has any tuneables. But, it was worth a try.

Also, this is a great way to see how Windows XP swaps your stuff into the pagefile.

VM size does not have anything to do with pagefile usage.

I didn't say it did. It stands for Virtual Memory and quite clearly, that's how much of its virtual memory space has been allocated but not necessarily committed, whether that be physically in RAM or on disk in the pagefile. Interesting how you cut the other sentences out and take things out of context and fail to quote anything that backs up my theories. Oh well.. Another nitpicker/flamer, i'll just ignore you and wait for somebody intelligent to come along. My time is worth a lot more than it is writing replies to lame ass forum posts.

Regards.

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

 

[MrChad]

Easy there, binkyvamp. You seem like a pretty intelligent and well-spoken guy for a first-time poster, but personal insults won't get you very far on this forum.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: binkyvamp
Wow, what a nitpicker...

Down, boy.

Considering this is just your second post, you need to chill out.

The OS forum can get a little snooty/picky at times, especially if you try to get into technical topics like the ugly details of virtual memory or thread scheduling.

In my experience, Windows will not normally toss out inactive applications' pages just because it feels like it. However, it will discard them in favor of filesystem cache -- so if you have a program open that is doing a lot of disk I/O (whether in the foreground or background), you will end up flushing most of your other data out of RAM to be used as file cache for that I/O. There does not seem to be much way of tuning/controlling this behavior.

 

[binkyvamp]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
In my experience, Windows will not normally toss out inactive applications' pages just because it feels like it. However, it will discard them in favor of filesystem cache -- so if you have a program open that is doing a lot of disk I/O (whether in the foreground or background), you will end up flushing most of your other data out of RAM to be used as file cache for that I/O. There does not seem to be much way of tuning/controlling this behavior.

Well, we've got some different experiences then.. Sometimes Windows works beautifully and as you say, won't normally just toss out a program. But sometimes it chugs like a filthy hog because it's throwing out applications when a) There's very little I/O, and b) There's plenty of free physical RAM and the setting in the control panel is set to favour programs over system cache. I can see no other reason for Windows to do this other than to make sure that new programs have enough free space to load into quickly (like those RAM/PC boosting programs make your OS do by swapping everything in existence), or i don't know, bad memory management.

All i'm looking for is a way to tweak it. Any insights. I'm not here to start an argument about paging or virtual memory..

I certaintly don't want to see ego-boosting out-of-context insult posts like that coming from Nothinman.

Regards.

EDIT: Oh dear God, i can't believe i spelt favour as "favor". You Americans are getting to me! (not that i know if you're American or anything.. just saying in general, you know..)

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: binkyvamp
EDIT: Oh dear God, i can't believe i spelt favour as "favor". You Americans are getting to me! (not that i know if you're American or anything.. just saying in general, you know..)

Ah, a Brit. That explains it.

(kidding, kidding... but don't get me started on your extraneous "u"s, or using 'aught' and 'zed' instead of 'zero' and 'z'...)

FYI, mostly Yanks here. AT is a US-based website.

I can see no other reason for Windows to do this other than to make sure that new programs have enough free space to load into quickly (like those RAM/PC boosting programs make your OS do by paging everything in existence), or i don't know, bad memory management.

Bad memory management? In Windows? Surely you jest!

The biggest problem with the memory management (IMO) is that it's too opaque; NOBODY seems to really know what it is doing. I've seen complaints from other people about programs getting paged out 'unnecessarily', but it doesn't seem to happen on my system, and I'm not inclined to go looking for trouble.

 

[Nothinman]

Windows will put any part of a program into the pagefile if feels necessary,

And you know this how? And noticing hard drive activity when you restore an app doesn't count as evidence since the I/O could be coming from anywhere on the disk.

Windows either doesn't have this efficient dirty-page-detecting scheme that you're on about, or it has a really bad memory management policy and keeps dirtying newer and more needed swapped pages, thus inducing disk activity. In fact i can almost guarantee that Windows always marks a page as dirty as soon as it has been swapped, because of the sheer number of times i've seen HDD chugging with "Mem Usage" in Task Manager rising when alt-tabbing back to an application, on machines that have very very little total memory usage

Unless you can provide real proof of this, all you're doing is posting speculation.

Oh come on, you can see the Mem Usage go up as the HDD chugs away. It's clearly moving the data from the pagefile into physical memory

It could just as easily be loading the pages from the original executable or some shared library that was evicted earlier. Once again, disk I/O doesn't always indicate pagefile activity.

I'm a Senior C++ Developer in a software company building C++ frameworks and programs using those frameworks, i know perfectly well how memory works and have developed from scratch many memory classes myself, thank you very much. I'll disregard your insulting implication. I will agree that i doubt Windows has any tuneables. But, it was worth a try.

Writing a userland memory class and designing a kernel level memory manager are two completely different things. And I know a lot of developers that have absolutely no clue how the underlying OS works so just saying "I know C++" doesn't mean a whole lot.

However, it will discard them in favor of filesystem cache -- so if you have a program open that is doing a lot of disk I/O (whether in the foreground or background), you will end up flushing most of your other data out of RAM to be used as file cache for that I/O. There does not seem to be much way of tuning/controlling this behavior.

Sadly XP seems to be even more aggresive than it's predecessors.

 

[binkyvamp]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: binkyvamp
EDIT: Oh dear God, i can't believe i spelt favour as "favor". You Americans are getting to me! (not that i know if you're American or anything.. just saying in general, you know..)

Ah, a Brit. That explains it.

(kidding, kidding... but don't get me started on your extraneous "u"s, or using 'aught' and 'zed' instead of 'zero' and 'z'...)

FYI, mostly Yanks here. AT is a US-based website.

lmao. Actually i'm Australian, but close enough. Ok, ta for the info, mate. lol.. (I don't really talk like that)

I can see no other reason for Windows to do this other than to make sure that new programs have enough free space to load into quickly (like those RAM/PC boosting programs make your OS do by paging everything in existence), or i don't know, bad memory management.

Bad memory management? In Windows? Surely you jest!

The biggest problem with the memory management (IMO) is that it's too opaque; NOBODY seems to really know what it is doing. I've seen complaints from other people about programs getting paged out 'unnecessarily', but it doesn't seem to happen on my system, and I'm not inclined to go looking for trouble.

lmao again. Good to see some positive input - humourous to boot! Well, thanks your your input. I usually don't have a problem with things either on my system, nor does my wife. But sometimes, you know, just for no reason - shrug. Windows has a mind of its own. I will admit that it might have something to do with the odd occasion of running eMule, but it's doing such little I/O that it's negligable, and it itself gets swapped out too.

Let's take my current system status.

2,096MB total Physical RAM
167MB file cache usage
1,050MB Physical RAM usage
621MB Pagefile usage
1324MB Apparant free Physical RAM (including file cache obviously)

It just doesn't make any sense why the cache is so small, the free physical is so high, and the swap is so high. I haven't used anything big enough to chew up my remaining free physical.

I've had some experiences while developing software for Outlook Express that OE likes to allocate ALL of your remaining Physical memory as it rebuilds mailboxes. Maybe it's doing it at other times too, because i do have Outlook Express open at all times (though set to not auto-rebuild). I haven't noticed any spikes in a system monitor i use called TaskInfo though. Who knows, eh?

Oh well.. I'll just set the swap file to 2MB min/max and see what happens. I never use more than 2GB of RAM.

Regards.

 

[binkyvamp]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
It could just as easily be loading the pages from the original executable or some shared library that was evicted earlier. Once again, disk I/O doesn't always indicate pagefile activity.

Well, does it really matter whether it's the pagefile or other disk I/O? This can all come down to simple semantics. The fact of the matter is, Windows is "evicting" things it shouldn't be in favour of something else, whether that be file cache, another program, just because it felt like it, or to make room for future programs. You could even say that whole or partial module eviction is essentially "swapping" - why would Windows make a copy in the swapfile when it has a copy on disk. We can argue day and night what the I/O really was but when it comes down to it, Windows is acting dumb. Which is no suprise. In fact, i shouldn't have even ventured down this path in the first place because we all know Windows is pretty stupid.

I'm a Senior C++ Developer in a software company building C++ frameworks and programs using those frameworks, i know perfectly well how memory works and have developed from scratch many memory classes myself, thank you very much. I'll disregard your insulting implication. I will agree that i doubt Windows has any tuneables. But, it was worth a try.

Writing a userland memory class and designing a kernel level memory manager are two completely different things. And I know a lot of developers that have absolutely no clue how the underlying OS works so just saying "I know C++" doesn't mean a whole lot.

I said, "I know C++ and have developed and used many memory classes". So, yeah, that does mean something. I'm pretty positive you can't call yourself a "kernel-level memory manager developer" so i doubt you can say much more yourself. Also, don't you know what a framework is? If i'm developing frameworks for Windows they're likely going to be dealing a lot with Win32 API calls (and they do), so yeah, i do have a lot of experience with Windows' inner workings, not just "I know C++".

Regards.

EDIT: Argh, damn typos!

 

[Nothinman]

Well, does it really matter whether it's the pagefile or other disk I/O?

Yes, because tweaking the pagefile (the topic of this thread) won't make any difference if it's not.

I said, "I know C++ and have developed and used many memory classes". So, yeah, that does mean something. I'm pretty positive you can't call yourself a "kernel-level memory manager developer" so i doubt you can say much more yourself. Also, don't you know what a framework is? If i'm developing frameworks for Windows they're likely going to be dealing a lot with Win32 API calls (and they do), so yeah, i do have a lot of experience with Windows' inner workings, not just "I know C++".

But since what you wrote was only usable in userland you still don't have to deal with all of the virtual->physical translations or balancing memory usage between an unknown number of processes, threads, filesystem cache and whatever other caches Windows implements internally.

 

[wexsmith]

Originally posted by: binkyvamp
Even a monkey would notice that when they click on applications they haven't used in a while, bits and pieces show up gradually on the screen and the hard drive chugs away.

Yet another reason why I need a monkey!

Alright, I made my joke. Now...normal pagefile = teh good! No pagefile = teh bad! Memory overflow slowing your computer to a crawl because your pagefile is being dumped on too much = teh worst!

Just use the pagefile as it was meant to be used. Are we really trying to cut down our IE or Outlook load time by 1 second? Give it a rest. The pagefile is there to hinder performance of your computer when you don't have enough memory to run your applications. That's it. Yes it does hold some other information, but I wont get into that.

Flame on!

 

[KoolDrew]

Oh well.. I'll just set the swap file to 2MB min/max and see what happens. I never use more than 2GB of RAM.

There is really no reason to setting a fixed size. Either leave it system managed or make a dynamic sized pagefile with a high enough initial size.

 

[binkyvamp]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Well, does it really matter whether it's the pagefile or other disk I/O?

Yes, because tweaking the pagefile (the topic of this thread) won't make any difference if it's not.

It still deals with the general concept of the topic - memory exhaustion. So, yeah, i don't think it matters what I/O it is. Sure it's a bit off-topic and sort of derailing the thread, but, meh.

Obviously i'm not going to find any answers around here so i'm off. It was fun while it lasted. You won't see any more posts from me.

Regards.

 

[Nothinman]

Obviously i'm not going to find any answers around here so i'm off. It was fun while it lasted. You won't see any more posts from me.

You weren't looking for answers in the first place, you came in here spouting speculations without really listening to what anyone else had to say. If you want to have a real, technical conversation that's fine but yelling "Look there's disk I/O when I restore something so it must be the pagefile!!!" and plugging your ears doesn't cut it.

 

[binkyvamp]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Obviously i'm not going to find any answers around here so i'm off. It was fun while it lasted. You won't see any more posts from me.

You weren't looking for answers in the first place, you came in here spouting speculations without really listening to what anyone else had to say. If you want to have a real, technical conversation that's fine but yelling "Look there's disk I/O when I restore something so it must be the pagefile!!!" and plugging your ears doesn't cut it.

Ok, one more post since you were so darn fast. Wow, i mean, you're so fast at responding to any of my posts, do you even have a life outside of the forum? I mean, look at your post count. Seriously, do you sit there and refresh constantly, or subscribe to every thread or something?

As to listening what other people say, yes i DID listen to what you said if you'd actually read posts instead of nitpicking bits to boost your ego. I considered your module eviction theory and that's a big possibility. What we're dealing with here with memory exhaustion and thus eviction for no good reason - it might be pagefile, it might be module eviction. I didn't "spout" my speculations. I gave them, we had some arguments, and then you opened up another avenue for my pursuit of the answers. That's technical conversation. We had it. But it's over now, get over it. I didn't shout and plug my ears.

Regards.

 

[Nothinman]

Ok, one more post since you were so darn fast. Wow, i mean, you're so fast at responding to any of my posts, do you even have a life outside of the forum? I mean, look at your post count. Seriously, do you sit there and refresh constantly, or subscribe to every thread or something?

I actually do have a life outside of these forums, I just didn't feel like doing anything productive at work today. And if you'll notice my previous reply was a whole 3.5hrs after yours so I don't think you can say I was sitting here hitting refresh all day.

As to listening what other people say, yes i DID listen to what you said if you'd actually read posts instead of nitpicking bits to boost your ego. I considered your module eviction theory and that's a big possibility.

My ego isn't a concern here, hell this conversation is about Windows which I don't really care about anyway. But I've gone through these conversations so many times with people who want to do stupid things like put their pagefile on a sperate partition to avoid fragmentation or disable it completely thinking they don't need one since they have N gigs of memory. The thing is NT assumes a pagefile is there, there's no way around that. It was much worse back in the days of NT4 where disabling the pagefile would cause a BSOD on boot, but XP still assumes one will be there and there are things that will fail if it's not. I have to assume that XP Embedded doesn't have this problem, but I doubt you'll be able to get a copy let alone install it on a normal machine.

The NT VMM might be a little over zealous about making room for filesystem cache recently, but it's not going to waste time putting things in the pagefile that can be retried from disk just as well from the original files they were paged in from. If you want confirmation get a copy of "Inside Windows" and read the memory management chapters, hell since you do Windows development you might be able to get work to pay for it or write it off if you're self-employed.

 

[Wolfshanze]

So to sum it all up... is it a good idea or a bad idea to disable the page file if you have a lot of system memory?

Aussie and American opinions both welcome (and it's spelled "Armor" not "Armour"... why do you need all the extra vowels?)

 

[ValuedCustomer]

Originally posted by: Wolfshanze
So to sum it all up... is it a good idea or a bad idea to disable the page file if you have a lot of system memory?

It's a bad idea to disable pf no matter how much RAM you have installed.

Aussie and American opinions both welcome (and it's spelled "Armor" not "Armour"... why do you need all the extra vowels?)

fyi, it's spelled "Armour" in more English speaking countries than not. And it?s been that way for the last 500 years or so. Ignorance and/or lack-of-respect for little things like that are a good part of the impetus for the "Ugly American" tag.. personally I think jealousy/envy of the US plays a much larger role than those types of semantics but let's not give the America-haters any more fodder than we need to, k?

 

[Wolfshanze]

fyi, it's spelled "Armour" in more English speaking countries than not. And it?s been that way for the last 500 years or so. Ignorance and/or lack-of-respect for little things like that are a good part of the impetus for the "Ugly American" tag

I dunno... what's the combined population of England, Canada and Australia compared to the population of the US? Just curious.

Websters Collegiate Dictionary definately spells it as "Armor". Just because something is 500 years old, doesn't mean it should be that way today. Assumption and/or belief that all things English are superior simply because it's British is a good part of the impetus for the "Snobby Brit" tag. Kinda like the Brits snubbing the entire European continent to keep the "500 year old British Pound" instead of adopting the Euro like everyone else. Lets not give the French and Germans any more fodder then we need to, K?

Sometimes change is good (like dropping useless vowels).

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: binkyvamp

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Obviously i'm not going to find any answers around here so i'm off. It was fun while it lasted. You won't see any more posts from me.

You weren't looking for answers in the first place, you came in here spouting speculations without really listening to what anyone else had to say. If you want to have a real, technical conversation that's fine but yelling "Look there's disk I/O when I restore something so it must be the pagefile!!!" and plugging your ears doesn't cut it.

Ok, one more post since you were so darn fast. Wow, i mean, you're so fast at responding to any of my posts, do you even have a life outside of the forum? I mean, look at your post count. Seriously, do you sit there and refresh constantly, or subscribe to every thread or something?

As to listening what other people say, yes i DID listen to what you said if you'd actually read posts instead of nitpicking bits to boost your ego.

"Seriously", you need to lay off the personal attacks and stick to the technical topics. It's fine to stick to your guns, but don't get personal unless you want a vacation. And I mean, you just got here. Put your feet up, stay a while. Have a Foster's or something. :beer:

I considered your module eviction theory and that's a big possibility. What we're dealing with here with memory exhaustion and thus eviction for no good reason - it might be pagefile, it might be module eviction. I didn't "spout" my speculations. I gave them, we had some arguments, and then you opened up another avenue for my pursuit of the answers. That's technical conversation. We had it. But it's over now, get over it. I didn't shout and plug my ears.

Regards.

I played around with this a bit last night (since I now have 2GB in my desktop -- got the RAM upgrade before the new MB/CPU/Vid card, since it's transferable). I loaded a bunch of programs (totalling maybe 2-300MB of RAM), then fired up WoW and played for a few hours (walked through several zones, including a very busy Ironforge). Now, WoW doesn't use *that* much RAM (maybe 300-500MB by itself at any given time), but it is constantly spooling new content up from the disks (since it is a 'seamless' world). My filesystem cache was well over 1GB when I had finished playing, with RAM usage topping out at ~850MB.

When I exited, I went back to some of the apps that I had minimized and left sitting there. I didn't see any disk activity when I brought them up, and they responded quickly. I'll try to run some more experiments (maybe with Prime95 set to eat up a *lot* of RAM, and/or less RAM in the box), but it didn't seem like any of my inactive apps were kicked out of memory before they 'needed' to be. This would seem to hold up with my previous experience.

Edit: I actually just remembered that I had been messing around with my pagefile settings after I installed the new RAM... I'll have to check what I had it at when I ran that test. I'll see if changing the pagefile size/settings affects this behavior.

 

[ValuedCustomer]

Originally posted by: Wolfshanze

fyi, it's spelled "Armour" in more English speaking countries than not. And it?s been that way for the last 500 years or so. Ignorance and/or lack-of-respect for little things like that are a good part of the impetus for the "Ugly American" tag

I dunno... what's the combined population of England, Canada and Australia compared to the population of the US? Just curious.

it's a moot point; I said more "countries" not more "people".

Websters Collegiate Dictionary definately spells it as "Armor".

lol, while you're in there why don't you browse to the "D" section and find out how to spell "definately"

Just because something is 500 years old, doesn't mean it should be that way today. Assumption and/or belief that all things English are superior simply because it's British is a good part of the impetus for the "Snobby Brit" tag.

I never said one was "superior" to the other.. you made a false assumption. - so far you're getting bad marks in reading comprehension - Anywho, way to completely miss the point. One more time.. just because you do think a certain way or appreciate a certain thing, or speak w/ whatever accent, or eat one thing or another or, etc, etc, etc doesn't mean you're "right" and surely doesn't mean the other is "wrong". It means you're different from the person(s) in question. And visa versa. -

Kinda like the Brits snubbing the entire European continent to keep the "500 year old British Pound" instead of adopting the Euro like everyone else. Lets not give the French and Germans any more fodder then we need to, K?

uh huh, it's that simple.. look if you actually think the only reason the Brits "snubbed" the Euro was because they are stuck on the "500 year old British Pound" then you really need to crack the financial section of the newspaper at one point in your life. "nose-dive" seems to be the current favorite descriptor by financial analysts of the Euro's value in relation to other 1st World currencies.

Sometimes change is good (like dropping useless vowels).

- -
Look man, if you're really that concerned about change and the "good" it does in regards to diction/written-word then maybe you oughta pick your battles and start w/ the 10's of thousands of words in the English dictionary that have double "tt's", "rr's", "cc's", "ee's", "tt's", ad nauseum..

 

[Wolfshanze]

it's a moot point; I said more "countries" not more "people".

I didn't think it was a moot point when you were trying to make a point that "numbers" counted... as in "more countries" makes it "more important" to use a certain spelling. Ergo, if you think numbers count, why do you skate around another numbers-related question?

I'm sure you're sitting there looking up numbers and dates to try and prove your point on everything... WHATEVER... I was HAVING FUN with the earlier posts in the thread... you're obviously taking things waaaaaay too personal bringing up "ugly Americans" and all that other nonsense just to be crass.

In case you couldn't figure it out, I was joking about stuff... you're the one getting all offended at stuff... lighten up guy.

 

[ValuedCustomer]

Originally posted by: Wolfshanze

it's a moot point; I said more "countries" not more "people".

I didn't think it was a moot point when you were trying to make a point that "numbers" counted... as in "more countries" makes it "more important" to use a certain spelling. Ergo, if you think numbers count, why do you skate around another numbers-related question?

Whether or not you think this or anything else is "moot" is, well, "moot". The only mention of the word "numbers" in this entire thread is by you.. 4x in a single post, btw. - there's those reading comprehension skillz letting you down again.

I'm sure you're sitting there looking up numbers and dates to try and prove your point on everything... WHATEVER... I was HAVING FUN with the earlier posts in the thread... you're obviously taking things waaaaaay too personal bringing up "ugly Americans" and all that other nonsense just to be crass. In case you couldn't figure it out, I was joking about stuff...

Worst attempt at backtracking ever.. not to mention the misapplication of the word "crass".. or did you really mean to use the antonym? - and who's taking anything "personally"? me thinketh thou doth protest too much

you're the one getting all offended at stuff... lighten up guy.

"offended"? moi? oki doki.. ironically, judging by your use of CAPS and the backtracking attempt(s) it seems the only one that's had any fun has been me.

"lighten up" indeed

 

[Wolfshanze]

My posts are shorter... yours just go on and on and on, quoting every five seconds. It's clear who needs to see a therapist.