OT: Good place to ask about XP memory problems

[Adrian C]

How large is your page file? Is windows allowed to let it grow?

've heard folks trying to reduce use of the page file by purposely making the file small in comparison to system memory - which then (according to the above) drives windows a bit mad loading and unloading slightly unused parts of the operating system, when the total system load steps out of RAM and some disk has to be used and it's found insufficent.

I have a little job running about offices installing memory upgrades, and at each event am normally visiting control panel to fatten up the size of the swap file, or let Windows have a go at resetting it to what it likes.

[Chris Bartram]

It can be disabled: . Read the comments though.

[John Williamson]

Nope. I am runnning XP with 2 Gig of RAM and no swapfile perfectly happily. Finding the setting's a bit tricky, though, it's buried about three levels down in the System Properties panel.

I'm doing it because the main drive for the system is a four Gig flash device (Compressed NTFS), and I don't want Windows scribbling all over it and using up the limited write cycles. It does insist on using the C: drive for temp files when it's uncompressing executables, though, and I've not yet found a way to tell it to use D: for that.

[polygonum]

Given sufficient disc space (and with terabyte drives almost given away, that isn't often the limitation it once was), what advantage is there ever in reducing a swap file below the 32-bit XP maximum of 4 GB? (Mind, as I type that, I start to wonder if 4GB really is the maximum for a single swapfile as it was for W2K. Am sure somewhere will correct me.)

[Clive George]

Oh yes. I've no problem with that, the problem comes when it insists on using it rather than the nice DRAM I've given it.

[Huge]

Because it's Microsoft, and therefore shit.

[Dave]

Not at the moment:

[John Rumm]

Run task manager, click the "Performance" tab, and look at the "Commit Charge" figure at the very bottom of the window. If that figure is more than the Physical Memory Total field, then it will be swapping. Ignore what it says is "available"!

[John Rumm]

[John Williamson]

I did that a while ago, but it still insists on using C: as a scratchpad for *something*. If the free space on C: drops below about 450Mbytes, Windows slows to a crawl, while still showing free space. When it goes back above that, it speeds up again.

[polygonum]

True - just reading about that elsewhere. But if I add "until the last few days" in the right place... ?

[Clive George]

No, my problem is a little more sophisticated than that. I've got enough RAM to run everything in memory, but it's still swapping stuff out (I can see the HD thrashing and slowing stuff down). Hence my query about "available".

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

Have you run an I/O monitor? Are you sure it's the swap file that's busy?

Depending on what options are set you could eg be updating eventlogs pretty frequently, and no doubt lots of other stuff.

[Andy Burns]

Do you know tfor sure hat the hard disk activity you're seeing is from paging, or could it be anti-virus doing on-access scanning?

If you switch to the processes tab in task manager, and use view columns to display the page faults delta column, it'll show if it really is paging, and if so which app is causing it.

Windows likes to keep a certain amount up its sleeve, but 1GB sounds excessive.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Do you KNOW its paging RAM and not, e.g. rearranging some temporary directory full of windows history or summat. Or scanning for viruses.

[Clive George]

Not entirely sure, but it only happens when the total page space goes over 2GB. I'll check page faults next time it happens.

(I know when the AV does its stuff, and it's not happening then)

What I'm thinking.

[Man at B&Q]

Not as shit as the new UI on Ubuntu.

MBQ

[David WE Roberts]

Just now fighting with an XP laptop which looks to have had some malware in the past but be possibly clean now. I had to reboot because of a memory leak which had the memory (real and swap) usage up to 2.5Gb on a 1Gb system but nothing large showing up in Task Manager. When I look at the mess some other peoples PCs are in I am thankful that we are fairly conservative in what we do. I think I may talk to them about reinstalling XP if they can find all their data to save, and remember where all their 'must have' applications came from. XP is running like a dog. Laptop is fine because it sails along with Ubuntu.

Cheers

Dave R

[The Natural Philosopher]

I had this in my VM when I foolishly gave XP more than 2GB of RAM.

It simply doesn't seem to be able to use it efficiently.

[The Natural Philosopher]

So I have heard. Unity?

I'll stick to gnome.