Running out of Virtual Memory?

[maddogchen]

I found recently that everytime I play a game (Farcry, City of Heros), after I exit, I get a warning from Windows XP stating that I was running out of Virtual Memory and it was going to expand it. Whats going on? I have a 1giga AMD with 256mb DDR ram. Does it mean I need more RAM? to play new games?😕

edit: whoops this should be in the OS forum

 

[Nohr]

The permanent solution would be to buy more RAM. 256MB is the absolute bare minimum for current games. 512MB is much better, 1GB is the best.

To increase your virtual memory go here:
Control Panel > System > Advanced tab > Performance Settings > Advanced Tab > Change button
In there select Custom size and set the Initial and Maximum sizes to the same thing. I'd suggest setting both to 1024 if you have the hard drive space available.

 

[cpars]

Originally posted by: maddogchen
Does it mean I need more RAM? to play new games?😕

YEP

 

[warcrow]

Originally posted by: maddogchen
I found recently that everytime I play a game (Farcry, City of Heros), after I exit, I get a warning from Windows XP stating that I was running out of Virtual Memory and it was going to expand it. Whats going on? I have a 1giga AMD with 256mb DDR ram. Does it mean I need more RAM? to play new games?😕

edit: whoops this should be in the OS forum

Buying more RAM is not a permanent solution, but the best one. Permenant would mean he would never have virtual memory issues ever again. 😉

Virtual RAM, maddon, is pseudo RAM that resides on your Harddrive as "Virtual RAM" or "Virtual memory". That = much much much slower access when compaired to RAM. Like the guys stated previously in the thread, more RAM is a solution, but not permanent. But if you're running on 256MB RAM, you would see a huge increase in performance (load times especially) if you were to jump to 1GB of RAM.

 

[Nohr]

Originally posted by: warcrow
Buying more RAM is not a permanent solution, but the best one. Permenant would mean he would never have virtual memory issues ever again. 😉

Well, permanent = the life of his current system. By the time he needs more than 1GB of RAM he'll be needing a new system anyway.

Nitpicker.. 😉

 

[maddogchen]

ok, thanks for the responses, greatly appreciated. More RAM it is

 

[warcrow]

Originally posted by: Nohr

Originally posted by: warcrow
Buying more RAM is not a permanent solution, but the best one. Permenant would mean he would never have virtual memory issues ever again. 😉

Well, permanent = the life of his current system. By the time he needs more than 1GB of RAM he'll be needing a new system anyway.

Nitpicker.. 😉

LOL! I'm mostly bust'n your chops, Nohr. But when talking to peeps who're unclear, it might confuse them more thats all.

 

[Nothinman]

Virtual RAM, maddon, is pseudo RAM that resides on your Harddrive as "Virtual RAM" or "Virtual memory"

Even though in many places MS misuses the terms, the pagefile is not the same thing as Virtual Memory, Virtual Memory is (for lack of better terms) the memory management using virtual memory addresses as opposed to real/physical memory addresses. Virtual Memory is always in use even if there's no pagefile or swap space available because each process has it's own address space that overlaps with every other process. On a 32-bit system there's 4G of VM available, on Windows 2G of that is reserved for the kernel and 2G is available to each process. The virtual address of 0x10000000 exists for every process but probbaly points to a difference physical memory address for each process. The pagefile is used as a repository, when memory is low memory is paged out to the pagefile for storage to free up physical memory and when the data in the pagefile is needed it's paged back into physical memory. If the pagefile really was "Virtual RAM" there would be no need to page the data in and out of the filesystem for storage.

 

[BFG10K]

The two best solutions are to buy more RAM and to not play with the Windows swap file settings (i.e. just leave it on the default values).

And Nothinman is correct, a swapfile is only a subset of what virtual memory provides and turning it off doesn't disable VM.

 

[PhoenixOrion]

Farcry peak use at 832MB.

winxp uses 128MB.

mad dog has total sys mem of 256MB.

 

[PowerEngineer]

Given that you have just 256Mb or physical memory now, I agree that bumping it up to maybe even 1024Mb is a good idea.

That said, I wouldn't shy away from changing the default virtual memory setting if necessary too. Some big programs, particularly ones written in JAVA, require lots of memory. I have a simulator progam at work that requires 2 Gb of virtaul space!

If you do increase your virtual space, it'd be best if the entire amount were contiguous. Some defragers (like PerfectDisk) have off-line defrag options that allow you to defrag the virtual space.

 

[Nothinman]

If you do increase your virtual space, it'd be best if the entire amount were contiguous. Some defragers (like PerfectDisk) have off-line defrag options that allow you to defrag the virtual space.

A) 'virtual space' is constant at 2G per-process, the pagefile is what's adjustable.
B) Making the pagefile contiguous gains you nothing, the pagefile isn't accessed in large sequential blocks so pagefile fragmentation causes just about 0 slow down.
C) Setting an upper limit on the pagefile (other than the obvious limit of disk space) does nothing but put a ceiling on how much you can page out and increase the potential for an OOM situtation.

Just let the OS manage it and be done with it, unless you think you know more than MS VM developers.

 

[Creig]

I have a 1giga AMD with 256mb DDR

everytime I play a game (Farcry, City of Heros)

Ouch... A 1.0 GHz processor (Thunderbird or Duron?) and 256mb memory playing Farcry (probably one of the most graphically/system intensive games currently released). I didn't think it would be possible to have the game playable with hardware like that.