Service Pack slowdown - Will extra RAM help?

[Benny P]

Hi

I have suffered from the dreaded slowdown effect since upgrading to
service pack 1, which I needed for the USB 2.0 support.

However, I am considering upgrading my RAM from 256Mb to 512Mb. Would
this show much of an improvement?

The Processor is an AMD 2500+ and the graphics card is a Geforce
4200ti. I mainly use the computer for animation and graphics uses.

Thanks for any advice!

Regards

Ben

 

[Colin Painter]

What is your memory utilization now when you are doing whatever it is that
you normally do? To find this out start the task manager and pick the
Performance tab. Down at the bottom are 4 display areas. The top right one
and the bottom left one give you info on your memory usage. Do this when
your are running whatever apps you normally run and in particular when you
experience the "dreaded slowdown".

The Total Commit Charge (lower left area) tells you what the memory demand
XP is currently experiencing. If this number is greater than the Total
Physical Memory (upper right area) by a large amount then indeed you may
want to look at getting more physical memory. However, if the Total Commit
is less than or not a whole lot more than the Total Physical then you are ok
on memory.

On my system right now total commit is 246716K and total physical is 523268K
(512MB approx). So, I am well into sweet territory.

My situation changes dramatically when I open my fav app. Then total commit
changes to 551992K. So now I am using all available physical memory. When I
open a second instance of that app the total commit goes to 785012 and I am
way over the red line. My pc is very slow when I move from app to app. This
is because it's paging its brains out. In fact my page file is not that
huge - I actually cannot open a third instance of my app....if I did XP
would whine and complain and possibly even cease to function. As I'm typing
this XP just realized it's level of distress and issued a pop-up with the
"Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low" message which I will ignore because I
normally never run two instances of this app. The Commit Charge Limit value
is interesting because that limit can dynamically grow...I think this
indicates that XP has grown the page file in response to the perceived
distress.

Hope this helps

cp

 

[Benny P]

Hi Colin

Thanks for the advice! I'll give it a try (my computer is not
connected to the Internet, so I can't test it now) and let you know
what it says.

Thanks again!

Ben

 

[Alex Nichol]

I have suffered from the dreaded slowdown effect since upgrading to
service pack 1, which I needed for the USB 2.0 support.

However, I am considering upgrading my RAM from 256Mb to 512Mb. Would
this show much of an improvement?

The Processor is an AMD 2500+ and the graphics card is a Geforce
4200ti. I mainly use the computer for animation and graphics uses.

Those are demanding tasks, so it probably would help. Get the tool 'XP
Page file monitoring utility' from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/index.html
(near the bottom) and use it to monitor how much actual *use* of page
file you make. If it is say 100 MB or more then the extra will pay off
significantly - and this figure gives a good guide on how much to add.
You can always expect to see a small use - say 20 or 30 MB - anyway.

Make very sure that any RAM modules you add are a proper match to
existing ones.

 

[Alex Nichol]

What is your memory utilization now when you are doing whatever it is that
you normally do? To find this out start the task manager and pick the
Performance tab. Down at the bottom are 4 display areas. The top right one
and the bottom left one give you info on your memory usage. Do this when
your are running whatever apps you normally run and in particular when you
experience the "dreaded slowdown".

That is a very misleading measure - read up at
www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm for why

 

[Colin Painter]

The referenced page does not mention the total commit charge value.
Empirical evidence indicates that the "Total Commit Charge" value can be
meaningful and useful. If this value is dramatically larger than physical
memory and there is context switching between apps (or there is one large
app running all over its virtual address space - like a video editor for
example) then things can behave very badly. It is possible to write apps
which create a huge virtual address space (which will casue a big jump in
commit charge) but that actually have relatively small numbers of real pages
and which behave just fine in relatively small working sets. It is also
possible to write apps which have huge virtual address spaces filled with
real pages but if these pages are not referenced for some reason the again
the app may run just fine in a small working set. Real world experience says
that these apps just don't happen. They are pathological.

cp