Virtual Memory Use in XP?

[Maezr]

I'm on XP profession, with 512 megs of DDR ram.

But under the system task manager, a LOT of programs are using large amounts of virtual memory, even when only like 100-200 or so megs of the physical ram is in use. Is this normal? Why does it happen? Wouldn't using entirely physical be faster?

 

[Apatewnas]

Well, it seems that Microsoft is making a turn towards unix like systems and their behavior. This is inevitable as Unix-like systems are far more reliable using computer resources not to mention the high network abilities. What comes first when thinking of unix though is the large and i mean Xtra Large swap file it uses. It is used almost every time as if there is no memory installed. I think that what really happens is that the core frees as much contiguous ram for the the foreground application and dumps everything else into swap. WinXP (i'm using the Pro edition) has showed numerous hints of such unix-like behaviour so u shouldn't bother with swap file tuning. U have more than enough RAM and u can at least stay happy with what u have. Long live DOS!