How much virtual memory in windows XP?

[Infohawk]

A while back, while using bittorrent, Windows told me it was increasing my virtual memory. This never happened before. I'm wondering if Windows made a good decision. Right now it's set to the "custom size" radio box with a range value of 360 to 720. Should I change the setting to "system managed size" or "no paging file"?

In general what's a good formula for determining the size of your virtual memory cache?

I'm on a 900mhz duron with 240mb of ram running windows xp home. I only have a 20gig harddisk so I'd prefer not to have too much space being used by a paging file.

If you know any good sites or posts that deal with this subject, please feel free to point me to those, but I'm also interested in hearing anandtech opinions.

Thanks.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm wondering if Windows made a good decision.

Since the only other choice was to fail the memory allocation and cause that program to either quit or crash, it probably was a good decision.

Leave it system managed, the default size will probably be less than 500M which isn't that much on a 20G disk and if it keeps increasing the size you should buy more memory anyway.

 

[NEVERwinter]

i think there's a 'recommended' option on winXP virtual memory setting tab (ctl Panel -> System -> ADvanced | performance [Settings] | Avanced [Change] )
I set it on Custom, and fill min+max to the recommended

 

[Nothinman]

I set it on Custom, and fill min+max to the recommended

Then you have no room to expand if you need to and that'll cause more problems than making them the same fixes, because making them the same fixes nothing.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I set it on Custom, and fill min+max to the recommended

Then you have no room to expand if you need to and that'll cause more problems than making them the same fixes, because making them the same fixes nothing.

Shh!!! Why don't you understand that every random AT member is smarter than VM-subsystem programmers?

 

[Nothinman]

Microsoft should make you answer 3 questions about VM and paging before it shows you the pagefile dialog =)

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Microsoft should make you answer 3 questions about VM and paging before it shows you the pagefile dialog =)

1. What is Virtual Memory?
-An extra level of storage in computers between RAM and disk performance/speedwise.
-Hard drive space which temporarily holds data that is (hopefully) not immediately needed in RAM
2. What is a page fault?
-When someone makes a typo on a web page
-A page isn't in RAM, and must be fetched from disk... something like a cache miss.
3. What is LRU?
-Logical Reallocation Unit
-Least Recently Used

If you get any one wrong, the OS should immediately switch itself into Idiot mode, which makes it as locked down as OS X with root disabled and void any tech support contracts you may have .

 

[Panther505]

Originally posted by: CTho9305

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Microsoft should make you answer 3 questions about VM and paging before it shows you the pagefile dialog =)

1. What is Virtual Memory?
-An extra level of storage in computers between RAM and disk performance/speedwise.
-Hard drive space which temporarily holds data that is (hopefully) not immediately needed in RAM
2. What is a page fault?
-When someone makes a typo on a web page
-A page isn't in RAM, and must be fetched from disk... something like a cache miss.
3. What is LRU?
-Logical Reallocation Unit
-Least Recently Used

If you get any one wrong, the OS should immediately switch itself into Idiot mode, which makes it as locked down as OS X with root disabled and void any tech support contracts you may have .

LMFAO.... I like it. Would save on local BOFH frustation and then luser abuse.

Page file- Typically I set an XP/2K PF to x2 the RAM in case the CAD programs start getting grabby. Often I will set the Min and Max the same. But when you have 4 GB of RAM and * GB of PF if the system gets PF grabby then there is a real problem.

 

[digitalman]

it may have meant that you were out of resources for that session and was temporarily incressing the virtual memory. that can happen when an app has a crashes and fills your memory and VM. by restarting a computer the ram and VM are flushed. if this is what happened then it shouldn't have permanitly changed the size of your VM.

 

[Nothinman]

GDI Resources are per-process in NT, only Win9X has that out of resources problem. Unless you truly ran out of memory and swap space, but then you can just startup taskmanager (waiting patiently while binaries and shared dlls are evicted back to disk and taskmanager is paged in) and kill whatever's eating up all your memory.

If an app crashes and it's process exits (normally or abnormally) NT cleans up all of it's resources, any memory it may have been using is freed and available to the rest of the system. If the process doesn't exit on it's own you can kill it with taskmanager.

VM is not the pagefile, you can't flush it by rebooting. Technically you can't flush it in the manner you're speaking of at all.