Another pagefile question

[Bob]

I know this question has been asked a thousand times before and there are a
hundred thousand explanations for it on the net, but I still don't get it:

Why is that with 1GB of RAM on my W2K machine and often over 700MB free that
the swapper is still being used, often over 50MB? The system isn't on the
verge of running out of memory, right?

Just to experiment, I set the minimum swapper size down to a very small
number (leaving the max size high) and I keep getting pop-ups warning me
that the swapper size was being increased.

Using short, simple words could you please explain to this dolt why the
swapper is being used even when there is a large surplus of memory?

 

[Jerold Schulman]

I know this question has been asked a thousand times before and there are a
hundred thousand explanations for it on the net, but I still don't get it:

Why is that with 1GB of RAM on my W2K machine and often over 700MB free that
the swapper is still being used, often over 50MB? The system isn't on the
verge of running out of memory, right?

Just to experiment, I set the minimum swapper size down to a very small
number (leaving the max size high) and I keep getting pop-ups warning me
that the swapper size was being increased.

Using short, simple words could you please explain to this dolt why the
swapper is being used even when there is a large surplus of memory?

Read the following article:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...chnol/windows2000pro/reskit/part6/proch28.asp


Jerold Schulman
Windows: General MVP
JSI, Inc.
http://www.jsiinc.com

 

[Rob Wilson]

Have you set clicked the radio button "No paging file"? it should just use
the memory then

 

[Rob Wilson]

disregard previous post - for 2003/XP you might want to try this
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;257405

 

[Bob]

Read the following article:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...chnol/windows2000pro/reskit/part6/proch28.asp

I can't get there from here (I don't get an article but a long list of
lists).

I should have pointed out that I'm using W2K. Does that make a difference?

 

[Bob]

disregard previous post - for 2003/XP you might want to try this
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;257405

This brings me to:
"FILE: Ramdisk.sys Sample Driver for Windows 2000"

 

[Bob I]

Try the link this way

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000pro/reskit/part6/proch28.asp

 

[Bob]

Try the link this way

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000pro/reskit/part6/proch28.asp

Wow. That's a phenomenonal amount of information for what I ignorantly
believed was a simple question.
I have 1GM RAM on a W2K OS which is way more RAM than I really need but,
hey, memory is cheap and
I wanted to see if the virtual memory was still necessary. I set my min
paging filing system to 10MB and max to 1000 MB. I get pop-ups at about
13MB saying that I'm running low on virtual memory and the system will
automatically increase it.

Of course, I could set the min page size to 50 or 100MB and not get the
pop-ups, but that's not the point. Someone suggested setting the
UnusedFileCache value name to 5 but I'm still getting the pop-ups (I haven't
changed the number to other values yet). My goal is not to use the disk at
all which is why I bought all that excess memory to begin with. There's got
to be an easier way.

 

[Bob I]

Ok, short and to the point.

It ain't gonna happen, at least not with Windows 2000.

 

[Steve Nielsen]

Ok, so you want a terribly oversimplified explanation...

Windows 2000 is a virtual memory operating system (you cannot change
that) and leaves as much physical RAM available for short-term and
immediate use as it can so it swaps what isn't needed
_right_this_second_ to the pagefile. If it did not do that then when the
system needed a big chunck o' RAM _right_friggin_now_ for whatever
reason then the RAM would not be available. Then what? Out of memory is
what. Computer useless is what.

Virtual memory is your friend.

Steve