"Insufficient system resources"

[wviperw]

With my recent computer upgrade I went to 1gb of RAM, so I figured I'd test out how many programs I could open at once. To my surprise, WinXP popped up an error box saying "Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service" after only loading a relatively few programs (Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat Reader, couple instances of IE, explorer, Dev-C++, background stuff). According to my memory stats, the pagefile usage is less than 200mb (of a possible 512), and the actual physical memory usage is only at like 250mb. Therefore, I should have a TON of space left, especially in physical RAM where it should be.

So what's the deal. Is there another reason why Windows would be popping up that error so quickly? I found surprisingly little regarding this through google and microsoft KB, so I'm wondering if you guys know anything.

 

[johnjkr1]

Try setting your pagefile to "system managed size". I have a gig and windows put my pagefile well over 512. Also, just because you have alot of ram doesn't mean you don't still use a pagefile...lots of things are stored in the pagefile.

 

[wviperw]

Well I had always heard that w/ large amounts of RAM you could turn off the page file to increase performance. I tried that, and you're right, there are some programs that require a pagefile to be set up (e.g. photoshop). Though, when I had no page file at all, and tried loading a bunch of programs, I was able to load a TON more than what I was able to WITH a page file. I had probably a good 30 windows open with all kinds of different programs ranging from acrobat reader to quake 3 to 3dmark03.

 

[acemcmac]

you might have spyware or something in the background with a memory leak... I'd purge your run on boot lists in the registry....

 

[wviperw]

Nope, no spyware. This is a fresh install of WinXP, and I've already made sure all the background running processes are okay.

 

[johnjkr1]

Yep, people seem to think you can just turn the pagefile off when you have a bunch of ram, unfortunately windows and most programs are designed to use the pagefile constantly.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: wviperw
With my recent computer upgrade I went to 1gb of RAM, so I figured I'd test out how many programs I could open at once. To my surprise, WinXP popped up an error box saying "Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service" after only loading a relatively few programs (Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat Reader, couple instances of IE, explorer, Dev-C++, background stuff). According to my memory stats, the pagefile usage is less than 200mb (of a possible 512), and the actual physical memory usage is only at like 250mb. Therefore, I should have a TON of space left, especially in physical RAM where it should be.

So what's the deal. Is there another reason why Windows would be popping up that error so quickly? I found surprisingly little regarding this through google and microsoft KB, so I'm wondering if you guys know anything.

Many people do not know this, but W2K and XP still have a "system resource limit", just like Win9x OSes do. The only difference is that the limit in NT-based OSes is much higher, and is unlikely to be hit in the general case by most people. There is a per-process limit of 10000, which is adjustable in the registry, and an apparent OS-wide limit, that I haven't found any explicit mention of a limit, but that empirically seems to about around 16K (16384? that many 32-bit handles would fit into a 64KB chunk of memory perfectly).

Open Task Manager, and check the User Handles and GDI Handles columns. If they aren't there, then you may have to add them to the display, click "View", "Select Columns...", and then check off the items that you like. I also like to add real memory, virtual memory, and I/O reads/writes, to get a fuller picture of what my programs are doing.

Edit: Corrected typo - "pre-process limit" = "per-process limit"