Heavy paging, yet 320 Mb ram

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup (More info?)

With 320 Mb ram + 478 Mb paging file, I still get heavy use of the
paging file.

What, once and for all, are the right settings? (Paging file is set to
478 Mb min / 478 Mb max.)

Windows 2000 SP4
Most common open apps:
Eudora
Microsoft Word (3-10 docs)
IE
(rarely) Corel PhotoPaint


Dave G.

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup (More info?)

Dave G wrote:
> With 320 Mb ram + 478 Mb paging file, I still get heavy use of the
> paging file.
>
> What, once and for all, are the right settings? (Paging file is set to
> 478 Mb min / 478 Mb max.)
>
> Windows 2000 SP4
> Most common open apps:
> Eudora
> Microsoft Word (3-10 docs)
> IE
> (rarely) Corel PhotoPaint
>

The values you intended to post are MB values, not
Mb. Bits and bytes are entirely different things.

Take a look at the physical RAM usage in Task Manager.
If you are running out of physical RAM, or getting close
to doing so, then Windows will do a lot of paging.

478 MB is a good page file size for the amount of
RAM you have.

Increasing the size of the page file will not stop
the paging, while reducing it might cause Windows
to run out of virtual memory and start throwing
error messages at you.

320 MB is not an awful lot of RAM - especially when
you like to have so many windows open in a memory
hogging application like MS Word. IE is quite a
pig too - 23+ MB for each open window.

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Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup (More info?)

Dave G wrote:
> That's the odd thing - only about half the phsyical RAM is used when
> it starts paging heavily.
>

With the little bit of RAM you have, W2K will always
be swapping bits and pieces of itself between the page
file and RAM. If it didn't do that, then there would
be almost no RAM left for apps to run in.

On a system with lots of RAM, W2K will happily help
itself to about 220 MB - but it can't do that on your
system or there would be next to nothing left for
apps to run in.

Also, W2K seems to go into a real "panic" mode and start
paging heavily when the amount of free RAM drops below
about 128 MB or one-third or the total RAM - whichever
is higher. For example, I have only 1 GB of RAM at home
and I start to see heavy paging when the free RAM gets down
to about 300 MB.


> Then, after RAM is essentially cleared by closing apps & files, the
> paging then will continue when opening IE or any graphic until I
> reboot. (These are not huge graphics - 1-2 MB JPEGS.
>

Those probably *are* HUGE graphics from the standpoint of
RAM usage.

Windows apps *never* display a JPEG to you.
Windows apps display bitmaps and nothing but bitmaps.
Ditto for Linux, OS/2, Unix, Solaris, AIX, and probably
every other OS under the sun.

JPEGs are for file storage only and having nothing to
do with the process of displaying an image. If you
want to see a JPEG, a bitmap must be created from it
first. A typical 1 MB JPEG would be about a 2 megapixel
image. If your display is set to the common 24 or 32
bpp colour depths, then that bitmap uses *FOUR* bytes
for every pixel in the image. So a typical 1 MB JPEG
file will need about 8 MB of RAM in its bitmap form.

If you start editting an image, then you will also see
huge amounts of RAM used to store the undo data. For
example, every time you apply an effect to the full
image a full copy of the previous state of the bitmap has
to be stored or you will not be able to undo your last
change.

> Dave
>
> On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 09:33:54 -0600, Rob Stow <rob.stow@sasktel.net>
> wrote:
>
>
>>
>>Take a look at the physical RAM usage in Task Manager.
>>If you are running out of physical RAM, or getting close
>>to doing so, then Windows will do a lot of paging.
>>
>>478 MB is a good page file size for the amount of
>>RAM you have.
>>
>
> [snip]
>
>>320 MB is not an awful lot of RAM - especially when
>>you like to have so many windows open in a memory
>>hogging application like MS Word. IE is quite a
>>pig too - 23+ MB for each open window.
>
>


--
BOYCOTT GOOGLE !
Partners in crime with the scum that rules China.

For more info search for "Google China Censor Searches".
http://search.yahoo.com/search?_ad [...] n=10&#034;

Google's side of the story:
http://www.google.com/googleblog/2 [...] usion.html