- "Windows is increasing the size of Virtual Memory" - Why???
- Posted by Tony on May 5th, 2008
I'm occasionally getting messages in WinXP Pro that Windows is increasing the size of
virtual memory... but my system has 2Gig of RAM, and every time I get this message I see
that I have about 1.3Gig of RAM available (according to Sysinternals Process Explorer).
Isn't WinXP supposed to use up my RAM before going to the swap file? Why get this
message when so much RAM is available?
Tony
- Posted by Robert Moir on May 5th, 2008
Tony wrote:
No.
Because a program running on your system has asked for a lot of space to be
reserved.
- Posted by Victor on May 7th, 2008
"Robert Moir" wrote...
It's my understanding that if WinXP has 2G or more RAM, then RAM is used as
part of the swap file to to make Windows run much more efficiently.
There's also a registry tweak somewhere that allows more RAM to be used as
swap file if you have less than 2G.
RAM can be used as the entire swap file if you disable Virtual memory, but
it's not recommended unless you know what you are doing. You need to track
your RAM and swap file usage with a monitor program. If peak RAM used plus
peak swap file usage never goes above 80% of your total RAM, you can then
disable virtual memory.
Also, a program like CacheMan can be used to tweak your RAM vs. sawp file
usage:
http://www.outertech.com/
Not necessarily.
- Posted by Robert Moir on May 8th, 2008
Victor wrote:
That makes no sense. Unless you mean creating a ramdisk, which makes no
sense for the swapfile for very different reasons.
I doubt it.
I don't know who told you this but they have a very fundemental
misunderstanding of how virtual memory and swap files work.
- Posted by Victor on May 11th, 2008
"Robert Moir" wrote...
No, it makes perfect sense.
If you are not swapping out RAM to disk as often, it speeds up Windows. It
makes perfect sense because RAM is faster than disk.
No, you have a a fundamental misunderstanding of how virtual memory works.
Here is a direct quote from kb308417:
"When your computer is running low on RAM, and you must have more RAM
immediately, Windows uses hard disk space to simulate RAM. This is known as
virtual memory."
O.K., so if you have 2G of RAM and you disable virtual memory, how does
Windows XP operate with lots of RAM and no swap file?
- Posted by James Egan on May 11th, 2008
On Sat, 10 May 2008 23:26:58 -0400, "Victor" <vic222@yahoo.com> wrote:
It doesn't make sense to swap ram out to ram. What is the purpose of
such a swap?
Jim.
