Technical question on PC Virtual Memory

E

ex-railwayman

New member
Can the computer whizzkids answer a relatively simple question please....
I obtained a brand new PC in December, doing a bit of housekeeping last night, I noticed in my Performance Options that the virtual memory was defaulted to 1151 mb, and I wish to know if I need to change this up or down please. I operate an Acer 2 gig hard-drive 160 gig memory 800 bus with AMD Athlone 64x2 dual core processor 4000, I think the ram is 1gb, she runs like the wind, great graphics and performance is absolutely fab, but if I need to change the virtual memory can someone let me know please, oh, and what is it supposed to do for me as well......:hehe:

Thankz and cheerz.

ex-railwayman.

An old fart who hasn't a clue about computers:hehe:
 
ex-railwayman said:
Can the computer whizzkids answer a relatively simple question please....
I obtained a brand new PC in December, doing a bit of housekeeping last night, I noticed in my Performance Options that the virtual memory was defaulted to 1151 mb, and I wish to know if I need to change this up or down please. I operate an Acer 2 gig hard-drive 160 gig memory 800 bus with AMD Athlone 64x2 dual core processor 4000, I think the ram is 1gb, she runs like the wind, great graphics and performance is absolutely fab, but if I need to change the virtual memory can someone let me know please, oh, and what is it supposed to do for me as well......:hehe:

Thankz and cheerz.

ex-railwayman.

An old fart who hasn't a clue about computers:hehe:
Click to expand...

Should you computer run out of real memory the operating system can use some disk space as memory, hence the name virtual memory. Disks are measured in milliseconds, memory in nanoseconds so using your hard drive as virtually memory is about 10,000 times slower than using real memory.

Its working I'd just leave it as it is.

Cheerio John
 
As John said above, your computer will only use 'virtual' memory if it runs out of 'physical' memory (installed RAM), usually this is set to 1.5 - 2 times the amount of 'physical' memory you have installed. With 1GB (1024MB) RAM 'physical' installed 'virtual' memory should be around 1536 - 2048MB.

I like manually setting it, this stops the computer (well more to the point windows) from increasing and decreasing the 'virtual' memory as needed.
 
Just use the defaults which is to allow Windows to manage it. Unless your hardisk is getting very close to full everything should just sort itself out fine.

I could give a lecture on the various virtual memory schemes implemented by computer operating systems but I think for most folks it would be as bad as listening to Vogon poetry. :)

Cheers
Dave
 
Many thanks Gentlemen for your advice and thoughts, and Dave, I think us trainzers would much rather you sit and create wonderful items for us than go into the field of lecturing Vogon poetry, or any other topic for that matter.....Unless it pays better, of course.:hehe:

Cheerz. ex.
 
"Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime..."

eldavo said:
...I would give a lecture on the various virtual memory schemes implemented by computer operating systems but I think for most folks it would be as bad as listening to Vogon poetry. :)

Cheers
Dave
Click to expand...

Dave: Go ahead...John Whelan gave a very good explanation about hard drives and using defrag in another thread that was very informative and helpful. Those of us who don't know about the "internals" of programming and computers, can then understand the limitations and how to use the program/computer better.
( It's been a long time since I took those classes for Boolean algebra and Karnaugh mapping !) :confused:
Thanks, Durff
 
john259 said:
Virtual memory = swap file = page file. There may be technical distinctions between the three but to the laymen AFAIK they are the same thing.

My understanding is that is by far the best policy to let Windows manage the virtual memory settings automatically.

John
Click to expand...

Hi John,

Not always the best idea, it is the easiest way though, let windows do all the work, but how does windows know the amount of 'virtual' memory that the program/game will require when loading?

Because, windows has a min nad max setting, depends on how much 'physical' RAM/memory you have installed, but usually this is min is 1.5x what you have installed and the max could be around 3x what you have installed. Now, as the game loads into 'virtual' memory and suddenly runs out, windows has to increase the size, a pagefile.sys file is stored on C: this is where the 'virtual' memory is so this file must increase in size.

Problem you have is as this file increases it could lead to "fragmentation" of the file causing slow loading times, game stuttering when playing and a few other things also.

I always set my 'virtual' memory straight after installing windows, the min and max sizes are set to the same amount, this causes windows to create a pagefile.sys of a certain size, then run "Disk Defragmenter" to organize the files correctly, on this system having 2GB RAM 'physical' memory, I have set the min and max size to 4096MB (4GB) 2x what I have installed.

A little more then normal, but with 465GB of hard drive space and I know that no program/game will use that amount, I know i'm safe, the pagefile.sys is 3.96GB in size. This is something that I have done since Windows98, because as I said above, how does windows know the amount of 'virtual' memory that the program/game will require, it doesn't.


Hope that makes sense... :)
 
AussieNightcrawler said:
Hi John,

Not always the best idea, it is the easiest way though, let windows do all the work, but how does windows know the amount of 'virtual' memory that the program/game will require when loading?

Because, windows has a min nad max setting, depends on how much 'physical' RAM/memory you have installed, but usually this is min is 1.5x what you have installed and the max could be around 3x what you have installed. Now, as the game loads into 'virtual' memory and suddenly runs out, windows has to increase the size, a pagefile.sys file is stored on C: this is where the 'virtual' memory is so this file must increase in size.

Problem you have is as this file increases it could lead to "fragmentation" of the file causing slow loading times, game stuttering when playing and a few other things also.

I always set my 'virtual' memory straight after installing windows, the min and max sizes are set to the same amount, this causes windows to create a pagefile.sys of a certain size, then run "Disk Defragmenter" to organize the files correctly, on this system having 2GB RAM 'physical' memory, I have set the min and max size to 4096MB (4GB) 2x what I have installed.

A little more then normal, but with 465GB of hard drive space and I know that no program/game will use that amount, I know i'm safe, the pagefile.sys is 3.96GB in size. This is something that I have done since Windows98, because as I said above, how does windows know the amount of 'virtual' memory that the program/game will require, it doesn't.


Hope that makes sense... :)
Click to expand...

I also agree with this, see if you can put the virtual memory file on a separate disk to the operating system as well. Disks are cheap these days and spreading the reads and writes over two or more physical disk drives does help performance.

Cheerio John
 
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