How to get XP (PRO & HOME) to use more RAM & less SWAP?

J

john czarnuszewicz

I have 2 PCs, Both have 1 GIG of RAM. One is XP PRO, the other XP HOME
versions.

Seems that both do not want to use more than about 25% of installed RAM.
SWAP file on HD always seems to be busy.

I placed
CONSERVATIVESWAPFILEUSAGE=1 into SYSTEM.INI. What else can I do?

By contrast, my LINUX systems have no trouble using RAM first then SWAP
space.
Reason for all the ram is that both new boxes to become dual boot. Then I
will give the old boxes to some relative.
 
D

David Candy

Conservative does nothing in XP. It won't even know you put it in
system.ini. XP does not use system.ini (if you had programitically changed
system.ini you'll find the change ended up in the registry - this one is
ignored there too)

What do you base these suppositions on. Why do you think it's using 25% of
memory. If you start a program the program file on disk (or part of it)
becomes virtual memory so if the program needs to be swapped it doesn't need
to be written first. Windows speculatively writes stuff to the swap file, so
if it needs to be swapped out it's already been written and the memory can
just be cleared. Programs reverse the maximun memory they want, this is
allocated from the swap but is not actually used untill requested, if
requested.

As an example, MS Word is a disk file editor. It is designed to edit files
on disk not in memory (which is why don't use it on a floppy). If you type a
character it writes that character to disk (it keeps a 64K text cache in
memory and also a 1 meg picture cache for speed).

Similarly operating systems are designed (these days) to use disk memory.
The OS is designed around the virtual memory system.

So you need to provide the reasons you think what you do as it's unlikely
that what you say is happening is happening.
 
R

Ron Martell

john czarnuszewicz said:
I have 2 PCs, Both have 1 GIG of RAM. One is XP PRO, the other XP HOME
versions.

Seems that both do not want to use more than about 25% of installed RAM.
SWAP file on HD always seems to be busy.

I placed
CONSERVATIVESWAPFILEUSAGE=1 into SYSTEM.INI. What else can I do?

By contrast, my LINUX systems have no trouble using RAM first then SWAP
space.
Reason for all the ram is that both new boxes to become dual boot. Then I
will give the old boxes to some relative.

I seriously doubt that your Windows XP is actually using the paging
file to any degree while there is still a significant amount of unused
RAM.

There is a free utility that you can use to check for actual usage of
the paging file. Download it from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm or from
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/ and use it to check how
much, if any, of the paging file consists of active memory pages
actually moved from RAM.

However the paging file in Windows XP also has another function, and
that is to satisfy the memory address space for the unused portions of
memory allocation requests. These requests are typically overstated
by both Windows components and application programs, often very
substantially so.

The XP Memory Manager will automatically assign the unused portions of
these requests to the paging file, leaving RAM for only those portions
that are actually used. Note that this does not require any actual
disk activity - just entries in the memory mapping tables maintained
by the CPU. And when some application or Windows component decides
that it needs to use some of the requested but previously unused
memory then it can be instanteously remapped to an available location
in RAM.

Hope this clarifies the situation.

Good luck




Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."
 

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