How do I reduce XP's over-aggressive swap-outs?

[Lindley]

I have 4 gigs of RAM in my XP64 system at work. Most of the programs I run are in 32-bit mode, and thus can't utilize more than 2 gigs; but the OS should know how to handle all of it in spite of that, shouldn't it?

I ask because Windows frequently swaps out programs I haven't used in a while-----"in a while" being defined as 10 minutes or so, usually. This produces needless and annoying delays, and is without doubt the thing I hate most about Windows.

Is there a setting somewhere to adjust this behavior? I know swap-outs are sometimes necessary, but whatever the default behavior is, it *clearly* isn't optimal for my usage patterns.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

If you are reasonably sure you won't run more than 2GB worth of programs, you can disable virtual memory entirely. Go to your Control Panel -> System -> Advanced tab, and look at the Performance settings. You can set virtual memory to have "no paging file". Just be sure you won't run out, or terrible things will happen when you do.

From that same menu, you can also set your paging file to a static size--just make the minimum and maximum size identical. This will buy you a bit of a performance gain if you opt to leave virtual memory functional.

I didn't see anything that you could use to reduce the swap frequency. Maybe someone else has some pointers there?

 

[romulus]

I run my PC like that, and hardly ever run into problems.

I now run it with 2GB of ram. I used to do it with 1GB or memory and would sometimes knocked of a game I was playing with "virtual memory running low" if say I was downloading and running other stuff in the background while playing my game. Thats the only problem I ever saw, nothing major, kill the program, in my case game and everthing is fine...for me.

Now with 2GB of mem and a 128MB video card, hasn’t had that problem. My PC is old though so I still want to upgrade it when I get a chance but for what I do 2GB or mem with no pagefile is plenty I just want a faster PC for the games I play and some other programs I use.

 

[Lindley]

I think heavy disk IO may be part of the problem. XP doesn't seem to know how to handle that situation without frequently freezing everything for a few seconds.

It gets particularly bad when the (non-cancellable) periodic virus scan starts running.

 

[Marc]

I think heavy disk IO may be part of the problem. XP doesn't seem to know how to handle that situation without frequently freezing everything for a few seconds.

It gets particularly bad when the (non-cancellable) periodic virus scan starts running.

Can you change the priorty of the a/v scan? Give it a low priority and it will still scan but with a much lower performance impact.

Also isn't the memory for win32 apps 3GB not 2GB (I know the operating system won't see beyond 3GB).

Have you checked your event logs to see if any errors are being recorded because I'm not sure the issue is swapping but some-where else.

 

[USS KG5]

Also isn't the memory for win32 apps 3GB not 2GB (I know the operating system won't see beyond 3GB).

The maximum amount of addressable RAM for 32-bit machines is 4GB, however in a machine with two 512MB graphics card (as many people have these days) you will only ever be able to use 3GB of your 4GB on a 32 bit OS as it needs to reserve addresses for graphics card memory.

I believe XP also reserves a certain amount of RAM for the OS itself, so you probably will find about 2GB is the maximum you can have practically avalable for apps in a 32-bit system.

I'm guessing Lindley is referring to an in-built restriction for 32-bit apps in XP64, as the emulation mode would presumably allow the 32 bit apps to use the full 4GB you can address (if for example you had a server with 8GB+ of RAM on a 64 bit OS and an older database system that was 32 bit, presumably you would want to give it up to the 4GB of RAM it can address?

 

[Lindley]

All I know is that as a programmer, I've run some code with serious memory leaks in it from time to time. The process always dies when the task manager shows approximately 2GB in use.

 

[USS KG5]

All I know is that as a programmer, I've run some code with serious memory leaks in it from time to time. The process always dies when the task manager shows approximately 2GB in use.

Isn't there some kind of arbritary 3GB limit in Windows? If so its quite likely that you top out at 2GB when you take the OS and your graphics cards into account.

Its shocking really how sloppy Windows still can be isn't it?

 

[Lindley]

Seriously.