Advice with "virtual memory" versus RAM

[dkryan]

(Feel free to jump in on this one, OVERK1LL, what with your other post touting 2 trillion GB of RAM, or at least it seemed like it!)

I have an HP a230n desktop running Windows XP. It has an AMD processor (2800+, I believe) and 1 lowly GB of Crucial DDR2 2700 RAM.

Lately, I've been getting a warning window indicating my "virtual memory" is low. Now, I use Live OneCare to defrag the hard drive and keep the system "cleaned up" on a weekly basis. I believe the warnings began when I began running "multple tabs" in Explorer, i.e., my homepage, BITOG, ESPN, etc. Normally no more than five tabs open at once in Explorer, plus Netscape mail.

Could the multiple tabs be causing the VM problem? I know, try one website at a time and see if the VM warning goes away. But one would think that five websites and a mail account idling at one time would not tax a system RAM-wise.

Crucial scanned my system and claimed I was at my limit for RAM (1GB). I coulda sworn it was expandable to two!

The task manager shows only one website as being open, plus the mail account. The "processes" tab shows numerous activity occuring (tons of ".exe." files running).

Any ideas?

 

[javacontour]

I'm not a windows expert, but today the typical O/S deals with VM so applications don't know the details of where a page of memory is located. Most O/S's do "magic" to move pages of memory used by applications from RAM to the page file or swap device and back when it has more demand for RAM than there is physical RAM available.

I'd start looking at what changed. You may have installed about bunch of resident software that is now using up more and more memory.

I run a pretty heavy workload on my Celeron 1.8GHz machine with only 768MB of RAM and don't have too many issues. So if you are just surfing the web and reading e-mail, I can't see blowing through 1GB of RAM, unless there is a bunch if iTunes, a few spyware defenders, etc and other things in the taskbar that have crept in recently.

Of course the other thing to consider is are you infected with some spyware, malware, or virus such as Windows

(OK, maybe not Windows itself

)

 

[john1782]

Try checking tour VM.

Left click MY COMPUTER> Right click properties> Advanced> Under performance click settings> Click ADVACED tab> Click change VM.

Ideally, VM should be 1.5 times the amount of RAM you have. You could try increasing your VM a little at a time and make sure the initial size and the maximum size are the same. Hope this helps.

 

[ksJoe]

Hit control-alt-delete and bring up the task manager.

Click on 'view' to pick what columns are shown. Check the memory size and virtual memory size boxes. Then click ok. This will add these columns to the info displayed for each process.

Now look at the list of processes. Sort by virtual memory size (click the column header). What is the highest numbers, and what process is responsible for it?

The memory size is how much memory it has allocated. The virtual memory size is how much memory it thinks it has allocated. Basically the OS lets applications allocate more memory than actually exists, and pages out (copies to your hard drive) the memory that there isn't room for.

Running out of virtual memory can be because you're running "a lot" of stuff, or something you're running is leaking memory.

Leaking memory means the application allocates memory but loses track of it and allocates more. It keeps doing it over and over again, using more and more. All this gets cleaned up when you reboot.

Which raises another point. How long has it been since you've done a reboot? As in really shut it down and reboot it. Not suspend, or hibernate. If its been a while, try that and all may be fine again.

Often free little programs (chat programs, weather watchers, email checkers, etc) leak memory. You know, the kind or programs teanagers will have installed within 5 minutes of getting on your PC

Try this stuff and report back what you find.

-Joe
(software engineer)

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted By: john1782
Try checking tour VM.

Left click MY COMPUTER> Right click properties> Advanced> Under performance click settings> Click ADVACED tab> Click change VM.



I would suggest setting it to 2048MB for starters, for both the min and max size (a static pagefile performs better) and see if that resolves the issue.