Win9X/ME question, how are system resources measured?

[brian_riendeau]

Doing work for a large ISP, people around me often tell customers that they keep losing their connections/can not connect because their system resources are too low. Precisely how are the availible system resources measured? Does the number even matter? Thankey.

 

[Warrenton]

loosing connection because of low resources? no way in hell, it may slow to a crawl, but it won't magically disconnect.

With 512MB of ram, even with memory leaks it take 16 hours for me to start getting error messages about low resources. With win2k i have had it run for over 8 weeks straight withe gaming and servers and image editing, all sorts of stuff.

 

[brian_riendeau]

Ever tried using a Conexant winmodem with system resources hovering around 40%? 🙂

 

[AndyHui]

Measured in 64KB stacks, I think Win9x has 2 x 8....8 64KB stacks for GDI and 8 for USER. The Free System resources that you see is the lower of the GDI or USER resource. Normally the lower one is GDI. Kind of not very useful. If you want to free up some resources, close the biggest program open. Even then it won't free up the resources taken properly.

Free system resources cannot really be affected with the amount of RAM that you have.

Win2K/NT does not have this problem as they do not have GDI or USER resources and just straight use RAM.

 

[xtreme2k]

win9x/Me has a resource stack of 16bit (there for the 64KB)
winNT/2000 has 32bit (therefore actually 4MB)

these are the fundermentals of an operating system and there is no way to change it 'easily'

if you running low in resource,
try asking them to restart their computer and low as little programs as possible (at the start)

 

[RSI]

We're sort of straying from the topic here.

"Does the number even matter?"

No, the number is completely irrelevant. I've ran at under 20-30% resources under Win9x with a Cyrix and Winmodem and not lose the connection. I really doubt that by having low system resources you can actually drop a connection.

If they are too low on resources, tell them to quit playing games and do their job. 😛 But seriously, they should not be too low on resources - what kind of systems are they using? Serving the net does take a certain amount of power, but unless your systems suck, you should be fine with that...

-RSI