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BF2 sucking RAM dry...

fixxxer0

Senior member
I disabled my pagefile because after about 15 minutes of play the game would start getting choppy. I noticed this is because the game started using the pagefile and dumping stuff to my hard drive. This is odd because I have 2GB of ram, which should be plenty for this game, and always has been.


Now lately, since the 1.31 patch pretty much I've noticed it start to use the pagefile more and I get memoery error crashes because I run out after about 15 min. WTF?



How do I go about fixing this...

Sure I could turn my pagefile back on, but instead of the game crashing after 15min, it will run choppy and almost unplayable... the weird thing is it didn't always do this!


http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/5620/bf2memoryerror0td.jpg


P.S. That first peak and plateau where it drops off again is the usual random crash to desktop on my first run of the game.
 
is your ram flaky? are you overclocking? i have 2gb of ram and bf2 sails smooth on my machine. how about some spyware in the background or a virus?
 
my ram has been rock solid this whole time, this is the only game that gives me problems.


this is a fresh install of windows, no spyware at all, only 24 processes running.
 
i'd probably run memtest and prime 95, see what you get. let each one go overnight maybe. and update to 1.4 if you haven't already.
 
1.4 for what? bf2????


The crash isn't my memory erroring, its my computer running out of memory because BF2 is trying to use ALL of it. (2GB+)
 
yeah but here is the problem. a lot of people aren't having this problem with 2gb of memory, and if it's a fresh install and you haven't messed with any bf2 system files then it's gotta be something with your system right?

1.4 is beta, sorry. memory slip.
 
I had a simular issue with FEAR. After I installed the patch the game slowed, crashed and did all sorts of nasty things. I had to completely uninstall the game and reinstall it to get it working great again. Sometimes game patches cause other problems. I beleive in the "if it aint broke dont fix it" philosophy.
 
Why dont u raise ur pagefile size ? is ur HD that small.....give it 2560Mb initial + max, then see how she runs 😉
 
You don't EVER turn off the page file. ALso its a misconception that you can fully turn off the page file; Windows still pages. There's a link for that, but I lost it.

I have 2GB RAM also, and I leave my pagefile on...

1536 - 3072 is what I set it at.
 
The reason I turned it off is because the game starts to use it after like 15 minutes of playing.

If you've ever played a game where most of the data is being paged in and out you will know how crappy and unplayable it is.
 
Don't turn your pagefile off -- believe me... turning off pagefile (/not having enough free harddrive space) was the #1 cause of bluescreens in 16/32 bit windows (95/98/etc)

Not enough harddrive space and no RAM space makes windows not know where to put the pending processes -- so instead of overwriting data it BSOD'd and killed the application.

Another major cause of BSODs were swapping between 16 and 32 bit kernels but that's off topic.

To see just how important a pagefile is to operating -- go ahead and fill up a modded Xbox's harddrive to only ~20 megs left... then go play a game... and just WATCH your framerate crumble.

good luck!!



 
Originally posted by: fixxxer0
I disabled my pagefile because after about 15 minutes of play the game would start getting choppy. I noticed this is because the game started using the pagefile and dumping stuff to my hard drive. This is odd because I have 2GB of ram, which should be plenty for this game, and always has been.


Now lately, since the 1.31 patch pretty much I've noticed it start to use the pagefile more and I get memoery error crashes because I run out after about 15 min. WTF?



How do I go about fixing this...

Sure I could turn my pagefile back on, but instead of the game crashing after 15min, it will run choppy and almost unplayable... the weird thing is it didn't always do this!


http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/5620/bf2memoryerror0td.jpg


P.S. That first peak and plateau where it drops off again is the usual random crash to desktop on my first run of the game.

have run a/v, malware and spyware programs? what resolution/settings are you gaming at?

also, turn the pagefile back on, you will actually get better loading times with it on, personally i just let the os handle the isze since space isn't an issue for me. also tonight throw in a memtes cd and let her run for some time, at leat 4-5hrs to get a couple of passes, then run prime95 for a couple of hours at least.

the graph you showed doesn't look like a bf2 graph because ususally the most amount of ram is used when loading new maps, then it will be up and down, yours shows another issue that i am not sure the orgin of.
 
There has been alot of issues with the 1.3 patch. I'm running it now, I would often get crashing to desktop on a few servers and other servers are fine. Never had any of these issue with the previous patch. I uninstalled the game and reinstalled and installed 1.3 full. now it seems abit better alot less frequent, but none the less still there. Believe its an issue with the patch. I've not seen the running out of ram errors u are getting tho, I also have 2GB of ram.
 
I changed the shader options and stuff, now I dont have the problem.

It had something to do with the graphics settings apparently.
 
Hi I have exactly the same problem. Been getting into the servers okay bar getting the connection error sometimes, but have noticed that memory usage is going thru the roof. Have 2 gig installed and windows uses about 30%. When Bf2 loads gets to about 70% and all seems fine and dandy, but after a few rounds mem usage goes to 99% and I'm laggy as crap, also happened in single player as well. Looked in the event viewer and it reports that "The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed". Did a full uninstall and reinstalled BF2 + SF then full 1.3 patch + punkbuster. Problem seemed to disappear but has reared its ugly head again. Interested to see if anyone is having the same issues/same event view logs about memory not being freed?

fixxxer0 what res are you running + which shader options did you select???
 
I disabled my pagefile haven't had any blue screens

I did have to turn it back on when playing FEAR

edit: well i googled some stuff up

Myth - "Disabling the Pagefile improves performance."

Reality - "You gain no performance improvement by turning off the Pagefile. When certain applications start, they allocate a huge amount of memory (hundreds of megabytes typically set aside in virtual memory) even though they might not use it. If no Pagefile (i.e., virtual memory) is present, a memory-hogging application can quickly use a large chunk of RAM. Even worse, just a few such programs can bring a machine loaded with memory to a halt. Some applications (e.g., Adobe Photoshop) will display warnings on startup if no Pagefile is present." - Source

"In modern operating systems, including Windows, application programs and many system processes always reference memory using virtual memory addresses which are automatically translated to real (RAM) addresses by the hardware. Only core parts of the operating system kernel bypass this address translation and use real memory addresses directly. All processes (e.g. application executables) running under 32 bit Windows gets virtual memory addresses (a Virtual Address Space) going from 0 to 4,294,967,295 (2*32-1 = 4 GB), no matter how much RAM is actually installed on the computer. In the default Windows OS configuration, 2 GB of this virtual address space are designated for each process' private use and the other 2 GB are shared between all processes and the operating system. RAM is a limited resource, whereas virtual memory is, for most practical purposes, unlimited. There can be a large number of processes each with its own 2 GB of private virtual address space. When the memory in use by all the existing processes exceeds the amount of RAM available, the operating system will move pages (4 KB pieces) of one or more virtual address spaces to the computer's hard disk, thus freeing that RAM frame for other uses. In Windows systems, these "paged out" pages are stored in one or more files called pagefile.sys in the root of a partition. Virtual Memory is always in use, even when the memory required by all running processes does not exceed the amount of RAM installed on the system." - Source"

Myth - "Moving the Pagefile to a different partition on the same drive improves performance."

Reality - "Moving the Pagefile to a different partition on the same physical hard disk drive does not improve performance. Simply using a different partition on the same drive will result in lots more head-seeking activity, as the drive jumps between the Windows and page file partitions. Even though moving the pagefile in this case can have the positive effect of defragmenting it, the loss in I/O performance out weighs any gains. It is better to simply defragment the pagefile using PageDefrag and keep maximum I/O performance by leaving the pagefile where it is with a single drive setup. - Source

Notes - However you can enhance performance by putting the pagefile on a different partition and on a different physical hard disk drive. That way, Windows can handle multiple I/O requests more quickly. When the pagefile is on the boot partition, Windows must perform disk reading and writing requests on both the system folder and the pagefile. When the pagefile is moved to a different partition and a different physical hard disk drive, there is less competition between reading and writing requests."
 
Originally posted by: denno
Hi I have exactly the same problem. Been getting into the servers okay bar getting the connection error sometimes, but have noticed that memory usage is going thru the roof. Have 2 gig installed and windows uses about 30%. When Bf2 loads gets to about 70% and all seems fine and dandy, but after a few rounds mem usage goes to 99% and I'm laggy as crap, also happened in single player as well. Looked in the event viewer and it reports that "The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed". Did a full uninstall and reinstalled BF2 + SF then full 1.3 patch + punkbuster. Problem seemed to disappear but has reared its ugly head again. Interested to see if anyone is having the same issues/same event view logs about memory not being freed?

fixxxer0 what res are you running + which shader options did you select???

I had this problem also I would get the connection error in BF2 while playing online but in single player I had no problems this is the BF2 demo I am talking about. I recommend going into BF2 options and checking your internet connection speed mine was set on like the high setting I forgot what it said but turning it down to the lower setting fixed my problem. I guess I had my connection setting set too high.

 
Thanks for the tip w00t. Anyways my issue has gone after setting graphics quality down to medium instead of high and Ram usage now remains at a stable level. Although this wasn't a problem I was experiencing b4 the 1.3 patch.
 
Originally posted by: denno
Thanks for the tip w00t. Anyways my issue has gone after setting graphics quality down to medium instead of high and Ram usage now remains at a stable level. Although this wasn't a problem I was experiencing b4 the 1.3 patch.


good choice

read this tweak guide I already have it on the video options part
http://www.tweakguides.com/BF2_5.html
 
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