DISABLE Virtual Memory!!! Improved permormance??? Help!

[Whitedog]

I was talking with my Network guys here at work yesterday and the idea of No SWAP FILE (or Virtual memory if you want to put it that way) "Improves" performance??? Both of these guys are engineers and "claim" they used to run computers like that all the time... as long as it has Enough Memory...

So, given that, I thought about it. If you have 128MB Ram and a swap file of 140megs... IF you double your ram to 256 and DISABLE swap file, wouldn't you effectivly be doing your computer a favor? I mean, memory is 1000 times faster at access time, and has about 50 times the transfer rate!!!

SO.... I got home last night and disabled Virtual memory. I have 256MB Ram running ME.

Everything seemed to work Fine until I tried to play a game (Dues Ex). It started filling my Ram up with gobbs of data and THEN IT STOPPED! "Out of Virtual Memory" error message I got and the game terminated!

Now, are games Stupid enough not to look at windows to SEE that I have it disabled???? I guess STUPID Programming is going to cause me to have to enable it again huh. The game says it will play on 32 MEGS ram!! I HAVE 256 MEGS!!!! ARG!

Wasn't virtual memory designed to give your computer more memory? What if I decided to ADD MORE REAL FUSKING MEMORY INSTEAD OF USING A SLOW A$$ HARD DRIVE FOR MEMORY?????

With memory as cheap as it is now ($115 for 256MB), I'm thinking about expanding to 768MB. (gonna cost me a whopping $250.. HAHAHAHAHA!!! I LOVE IT!)

Am I doing this in vein??? I'd like to be able to Run my system without using the FUSKING hard drive for memory if I could... but if STIPUD program "REQUIRE" you to do this!!! ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRG!!!!!

So, any of you out there that have played around with this, or better YET! Know anything about this.... POST YOUR .02 please! Thanks

 

[Noriaki]

<< THEN IT STOPPED! &quot;Out of Virtual Memory&quot; >>

That's why you don't disable Vmem..



<< The game says it will play on 32 MEGS ram!! I HAVE 256 MEGS!!!! ARG! >>

That's assuming you *have* Vmem...do you have any idea how much your disk will thrash running D.Ex on 32MB of RAM?

If you had 768MB you woudln't need a swap file for a while..

But look at it this way:
You start playing D.Ex, and windows will swap out everything else..ICQ, Explorer, TV-Wonder drivers..whatever...so they are still &quot;running&quot; but they aren't using any physical memory and windows will give it all to DeusEx to run with it....then when DeusEx is done and you want Explorer back (your desktop) it will swap it back in...it's just like if you shut it down while you were playing...
Having no Virtual Memory *is* faster than having it...but in reality you get to point where it's just silly..while DeusEx is starting and stopping there will be some swapping...but with 256MB you probably aren't going tosee much if any while the game is going.
I really can't think of a good reason to disable Vmem.

I don't think anything requires virtual memory, Vmem is application transparent, that out of Vmem message comes from windows. A game just sees a 32bit address space and uses it..windows handles where the games data actually goes.
*shrugs* if you are that paranoid about it get 768MB use 384MB and make a 384MB Ramdrive and use that RAMDrive for your Vmem. But even that won't last you forever...
Edit: In case you couldn't tell from my poor sense of humour that last line was sarcasm.

 

[Xcrown]

Yeah, diddo. Basically, you would need alot of physical RAM to be able to run a computer with the swap file disabled succesfully. And even then, you would not be able to run many programs at one time.

Xcrown

 

[Mutilator]

A lot of games won't even start if you don't have virtual memory enabled... and most of the time if your computer is good enough you wouldn't notice much if any disk thrashing anyway except maybe during level changes.

 

[randomlinh]

Heh, deus ex seems to be the wrong example here, that thing hits the disk HARD.

 

[Whitedog]

and make a 384MB Ramdrive and use that RAMDrive for your Vmem

uhmmm, isn't ramdrive limited to 32 megs? that's what I thought. If not, How then?

I am going to put 768 megs in my computer no matter... memory is just too cheap. It might be somewhat of a waste, but it will be fun to play with.

I think Vmem is just another one of MS blunders...

 

[br0wn]

What is virtual memory ? Why disabling vmem will improve performance assuming
that you have enough physical memory ?

Virtual memory is a technique employed by Operating System to manage
several execution program although they may not completely in the memory.

Before Virtual memory was discovered, to execute a program, the whole
program has to be loaded into the physical memory, thus this create a limit for
programmers because they have to be concern over memory availibility.
Now this is 1 program, imagine if you want to run several program simultenously,
like running Win2K (or any OS), games, and a lot of background processes, without
vmem, you won't be able to run all of these in the same time.

Vmem solved the above problem, by loading just part of the program that needed
to be accessed in the memory, and when other parts of the program that are not
in the memory is needed, they will be load (swap) into the memory.
The idea works like caching although they serve different purposes.

Now, you can see how vmem can damage performance, because it requires a lot
of swapping from hard drive to memory, but without vmem you won't be able
as many applications as you would have.

 

[Whitedog]

OK, I know what VMEM is and how it's used... pretty much. I just thought Windows would be (and it should be) smart enough to say &quot;Hey, this computer has a LOT of memory, lets allocate it so that we don't have to use the hard drive at all!&quot;

But, I guess it's sad to say that's not the case. Thank you Microsh1t.

The thought of having a Ram disk and using it crossed my mind, but as I said in a below post I thought ramdrive.sys was limited to 32 megs.. Does anyone know of anyway to create a Ram Drive any bigger? Let me know.

I'm just trying to be a little inovative here with this if you can understand that.

Brings back the old days when I had an Amiga. I had 9 megs memory in it. I used to load my games into RAM DISK and play them entirely from RAM. It was AWESOME!

The old days of &quot;WOW! I have 128MB RAM!&quot; is Over! Memory is so Dirt cheap... I'm going for the WOW! again. 768!

 

[Need4Speed]

There is an very simple solution for this problem....

Here is what windows does in normal mode, it uses some ram and BEFORE IT RUNS OUT OF RAM, IT STARTS USING THE SWAP FILE. This is bad because the swap is slower. What you want, is to use all the ram first, then use the swap. But how do u tell windows to use all the ram first without turning of the swap? Easy...open your system.ini file and add the follwing under the [386enh] section


ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1

Leave the swap file settings at auto, ie let windows take care of it. This switch will ensure that all the ram is used before using the swap...enjoy

 

[Whitedog]

Oh Joy! So, in other words, if I have a GOBB of memory, I won't have to worry about my hard drive ever being used for memory. Cool. Tanks.

 

[Celstar]

Need4Speed, how much performance increase do you get from that?

 

[Noriaki]

Oh yeah Need4Speed's got a good idea there...

I didn't know what the conservativeswapusage tag did...but if it's that then that's a great thing to use that should help you out enormously with disk use.

The 384MB RAMdrive was a joke..you see the company I work for has several AS/400s...the main production machine has more RAM than the other production machine has disk, so my group (in charge of the big one) makes fun the poor little group all the time about RAM disks, so the RAM disk quip just rolled right out I didn't mean it tho.

But if need4speed is right, then hell I'm doing the same thing I'll only have 384MB not 768, but still 384 is enough to have very little swap usage.

 

[Whitedog]

HEY!!! IT WORKS!!! I took a Win98 machine here at work win 128MB RAM and did this. Rebooted and C:\Windows\win386.swp is ZERO KB!! I opened up like 15 web sessions of IE and it only was using 4MB swap. I can live with that!

THANKS Need4Speed!

The 384MB RAMdrive was a joke.. Damn! I was hoping I could have a Ram Drive that big!

OK, now. one more question. DOES THIS WORK WITH NT/2000????

 

[Need4Speed]

Glad it worked for you...it certainly adds some zip to win98, or at least it seems more responsive...not sure if it works with nt/2000, but i dont think it would. not sure if win2k even has a system.ini

someone try and let me know

 

[Whitedog]

Well, my WIN2000 machine here at work has 256megs ram. Yes, it does have a system.ini with a section [386enh]

I used to have a static page file of 400megs (prevents fragmentation).

I added the line to my system.ini and changed Page File minimum/maximum to 2/400

I rebooted and everything is working Great! I got a funny message at bootup about the page file being small, but I think it was just Windows going &quot;Uh, that 2 meg page file ya got there is aweful small there bud&quot;

I've opened up my usual GOBBS of apps I run (NWADMIN, 3 browsers, Outlook98, Usermngr, Exchange ADmin, a few client/server apps written in Powerbuilder, 3 or 4 excel spreadsheets...) I went and checked my page file and it's only 6 megs. So, the trick seems to be working under Win2000 too. Although Task manager shows 150 megs of memory being used (120 physical and 30 kernel) and roughly 100 megs free, everything is working Sweet! I believe that if I were to use up that other 100 megs, Windows would start using page file.

So, to conclude, the proceedure DOES work under Win2000 too. My system is using PHYSICAL memory purely!

If anyone out there does have extra cash laying around, I do recommend splurging and Upgrading your computer to 256 megs of ram (or 768 like I am going to at home) and configure like we've been talking about.

 

[Ben]

Anyone try this in NT?

My system.ini file says &quot;for 16-bit apps&quot; at the top. Does that mean the settings are for 16-bit applications only?

 

[Cknyc]

I got the same results here whitedog. Using win2k and with 100 megs or memory being used only 5 is in the pagefile. Now I will need to upgrade to 512 from 256.

 

[LocutusX]

I'm surprised it worked in NT/2000. The system.ini for those operating systems is supposed to be for compatibility purposes only (i.e. when running 16-bit Windows apps).

 

[Spoooon]

I've got 256megs of ram in my Win2000 computer. My pagefile size is 100megs max/min and I haven't run into any problems yet.

 

[lowtech1]

RamDrive - a 75k program let you config up to a max of 2GB physical ram

 

[Moonbender]

I just added the line, but I doubt it will be any good on my Win2k machine with 96 megs :| (now don't tell me I ought to get more RAM - it's not that I don't wanna ...).
Anyways, there are quite a lot of funny uses to the ramdrive. A computer magazine configured a computer to create a 300 megs or so ramdisk during booting, and to copy a directory from disk to it. That DIR contained a complete installation of Win95 (mind you, that's less than 200 megs!), and additionally, parts of MS Office.
After copying the computer boots from the RAM disk, in mere seconds. The Office apps of course, started in seconds, too. Kinda cool.

 

[WoundedWallet]

Just to add one more piece of info to this subject.

If for some reason you use all your RAM, W2k goes nicely into your HD and enlarges the pagefile.

But do not worry if you notice that your pagefile stays that large aftr you finish whatever is that you were doing. Cause W2k will still use your physical memory before going into that enlarged pagefile.

I did the test and got these results. And now I got a pretty good excuse to get 3 256MB chips for my machine.

 

[The Stigenator]

tried it in 98SE. Boot seemed faster.. So far I havent maxed it.
My swap is set at a seperate drive and its set for 128MB to 384MB. I am going to change it to 256 - 256 and see what happens.

TGG

 

[Ben]

Too bad that RamDrive program is a 16-bit application.


<< I'm surprised it worked in NT/2000. The system.ini for those operating systems is supposed to be for compatibility purposes only (i.e. when running 16-bit Windows apps). >>


Ya, that's what I thought too.

 

[WoundedWallet]

The_good_guy, since you have it on a separate drive like me, you won't have to worry about fragmentation. So you don't need to have a high minimum.

WW