Virtual Memory!

[begsaresponse]

"Your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory page. During the process memory requests for applications may be denied".

This is the 3rd time in as many weeks that this mesage has appeared. Can anyone shed some light on this and should I be concerened?

Thanks in advance for any responses.

begs

[dave_boo]

"Your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory page. During the process memory requests for applications may be denied".

This is the 3rd time in as many weeks that this mesage has appeared. Can anyone shed some light on this and should I be concerened?

Thanks in advance for any responses.

begs

Add more RAM if possible. What's happening is that Windows is swapping out to your hard drive from system RAM. Now, you apparently have it set up for Windows to manage your swap file, so if it thinks that it needs more space it will create it. Hold down the "Windows" key on your keyboard, and hit the Pause/Break button. This will open "System Properties". You should be on the "General" tab and it will tell you how much RAM you have (take note of this). Click on the "Advanced" tab and then on your "Settings" button under the section "Performance". This opens another window that has 3 (three) tabs across the top. You want to click on the "Advanced" tab. Look at the bottom section which says "Virtual Memory". It will tell you the total amount of hdd space is devoted to your swapfile. Now click on on "Change". Yet another window opens. Click the little bullet next to your "Custom size". Remember the amount of RAM you have in your system? Double that (i.e. for 512 put in 1024) up to 2048. Click on the "Set" button (or the changes won't take affect!) and ok your way out of the windows. This should stop you from seeing those messages.

Unless of course your using something with a horrible memory leak. When it comes up with that message, and sorry do this before the last step, open up your task manager and see what is chewing up all your RAM by click on the "Processes" tab and then on the area that it says "Mem Usage". This sorts out the running processes (programs) by how much memory they are using. Don't be surprised if you're using Firefox that's a bit older being the culprit because it used to leak memory like nobody's business.

[begsaresponse]

Thanks.

It was 512 so doubled that. Got into the Ram and the iexplore.exe was by far the worst 131,556. the helpctr.exe was next at 27,514 the rest were all 12,000 and under. A total of 65 were found.

Any thoughts on this?

begs

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi

At the earliest opportunity, go and get more actual RAM for your machine. 512 is the bare minimum at which Windows XP works *somewhat* usable levels..... better is 1 GB, better yet 2 GB. Windows Vista? Don't even touch it below 1 GB (i doubt it would install with less than that present).

Next, install "Firefox". It is a web browser similar to Internet Explorer, but a heck of a lot faster, less memory consuming and much safer. www.getfirefox.com Upon first start it offers you ti import all your bookmarks, passwords, history etc from Internet Explorer so you can surf right away.

Apart from that, do as above mentioned but BEFORE you increase your virtual memory to a personalized size, defragment your hard drive. Otherwise your swap file ("page file" in Windows) may be strewn across a number of segments and be fragmented by itself which will slow things down. When you're running the defragmenter you can see the green bit on the graphic (labeled "unmovable file"), that is your swap file. If that is more than one chunk it's bad.

In such case, do as above but set the size to zero ("no paging file") and reboot the computer. Start it into "safe mode" to avoid any self-starters from demanding memory and run defrag from there. Then reboot again and set your swap file to the desired size (twice the actual RAM is minimum recommended, but you can go higher, i have one machine running here with a 8 GB swap file (256 MB actual RAM only installed, but that thing does nothing but bit torrent).

Best regards......

Thanh

[JetsetBkk]

...Hold down the "Windows" key on your keyboard, and hit the Pause/Break button. This will open "System Properties"...

Thanks for that tip! So much quicker than the right-click on My Computer (which is usually buried under several windows on my PC).

I just checked mine (2 GB RAM) - it was set to "Custom size" 1 MB. So I changed it to "System managed size" and it was doubled to 2 GB (had to reboot), with a recommended value of 3 GB.

[dave_boo]

Hi

At the earliest opportunity, go and get more actual RAM for your machine. 512 is the bare minimum at which Windows XP works *somewhat* usable levels..... better is 1 GB, better yet 2 GB. Windows Vista? Don't even touch it below 1 GB (i doubt it would install with less than that present).

Next, install "Firefox". It is a web browser similar to Internet Explorer, but a heck of a lot faster, less memory consuming and much safer. www.getfirefox.com Upon first start it offers you ti import all your bookmarks, passwords, history etc from Internet Explorer so you can surf right away.

Apart from that, do as above mentioned but BEFORE you increase your virtual memory to a personalized size, defragment your hard drive. Otherwise your swap file ("page file" in Windows) may be strewn across a number of segments and be fragmented by itself which will slow things down. When you're running the defragmenter you can see the green bit on the graphic (labeled "unmovable file"), that is your swap file. If that is more than one chunk it's bad.

In such case, do as above but set the size to zero ("no paging file") and reboot the computer. Start it into "safe mode" to avoid any self-starters from demanding memory and run defrag from there. Then reboot again and set your swap file to the desired size (twice the actual RAM is minimum recommended, but you can go higher, i have one machine running here with a 8 GB swap file (256 MB actual RAM only installed, but that thing does nothing but bit torrent).

Best regards......

Thanh

Good to see you back. And your advice was most excellent, having used a proper swap partition in Linux for so long I had forgotten that you should disable and then defrag.

I do disagree with your 8GB swap file though; that just allows a process so much room to run away that by the time you identify it you're really screwed. I only use a 512mb swap on all my systems, but that's running Linux on the machines ranging from 1GB up to 12GB of RAM. The machine with smallest amount of RAM has only, AFAIK, used 128 MB of the swap; anything with more RAM than that has never, once again AFAIK, used the swap partition. As an aside, I have an old 10k SCSI disk that has a little bitty 512mb swapfile on it; the rest is a temp and that's in my 12GB RAM machine I use as a server/gateway/transcoding machine.

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi

Yeah i'm back, i was just on holiday up north and there without usable internet, so i wasn't lost I even had the pleasure to meet one of the TV moderators in person and he helped me greatly to find a decent motorbike helmet in Chiang Mai, because in Bangkok you're paying thru the nose for one of those

Regarding that swap file, on the machine with 8 GP there is only a really plain Windows XP and uTorrent installed - nothing else on the entire machine, that thing really does nothing at all but run bit torrent 24/7 on a leased line. So there aren't too many processes that could possibly run away, i believe the last time i actually rebooted that thing was at some stage last October or so

Here on my home box i've got 2 GB of RAM and a 4 GB swap partition (running Ubuntu) but i, too, notice that this OS never ever uses that swap at all - Ubuntu does not even come close to using half of my actual RAM, even with a bunch of FF windows open or running tasks like video recoding. When i first installed Ubuntu obviously i wasn't aware of it's low memory requirements so i went the with the "Windows formula" of swap = 2x RAM. Never mind, it's a 80 GB HDD for the OS alone, incl. "home", and all data is on a separate 500 GB HDD that still has the same 4 NTFS partitions it had under Vista - this works so excellent that i see no need to change anything, keeping it in NTFS makes it easier in case of a crash and if i had to fall back to Windows (i still have the HDD with Vista fully installed, when i swapped OS's i simply swapped HDD's).

With best regards.....

Thanh