Im upgrading all 6 of my computers (gonna 24 box) to 3700 Athlon64 (single) and a nforce3 250 mb with 4 slots of ram "up to 4 gig".
I will need to run 4 toons per computer reilably. I have had 4 up and running no problem on even my older ones but I really want to go all out for the best.
Im reading that windows (I use win2K) will not allow a single process to use more then 2 gig ram.
It does not seem that I can put 3 gig into this system, either 2 gig or 4 gig.
I can make a ram drive that looks like a sata drive - which can hold 4 gig.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480
It seems that I would be best off having 2 gig motherboard ram and 4 gig of sata ram drive ram and put the pagefile.sys on the ram drive.
What do you think?
2 gig max system ram?
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Xp 64 and win2003 server are the only things that can address more then 4gb of ram, no matter what format it is in. If you have any sort of decent video card or SLI, you will be lucky if anything shows up past 3gb of ram even with 4gb in the machine.
I am not sure why you feel you can only put 2gb or 4gb in a machine. If you have 4 memory slots on the board, you can use 2x1gb and 2x512 for a total of 3gb. This way you can still use 32bit WinXP or Win2k without a problem and not be wasting the physical ram that the OS won't use anyway.
Further, while there may be a limitation on memory usage per process, it certainly does not affect the per session usage in this instance. For example, eq (I assume we are talking about eq) is still launched in individual sessions. None of these sessions will approach 2gb of ram, they will float up to 600 - 700 or so and that's it when you use low to medium settings (like you should be when boxing).
Regarding the ram drive for swap file . . . that's just crazy talk.
I am not sure why you feel you can only put 2gb or 4gb in a machine. If you have 4 memory slots on the board, you can use 2x1gb and 2x512 for a total of 3gb. This way you can still use 32bit WinXP or Win2k without a problem and not be wasting the physical ram that the OS won't use anyway.
Further, while there may be a limitation on memory usage per process, it certainly does not affect the per session usage in this instance. For example, eq (I assume we are talking about eq) is still launched in individual sessions. None of these sessions will approach 2gb of ram, they will float up to 600 - 700 or so and that's it when you use low to medium settings (like you should be when boxing).
Regarding the ram drive for swap file . . . that's just crazy talk.
Well....
Ok so going to 4 gig on the motherboard is what you are suggesting, as if there are 4 sessions of EQ, the more ram for each one the better.
Why is the sata ram drive with the page file on it crazy talk exactly. Windows spends a lot of time going to its virtual ram does it not?
Ya we are talking EQ1, so each time I log in a different character thats a different process which can use up to 2 gig, and not 2 gig for everquest total?
Why is the sata ram drive with the page file on it crazy talk exactly. Windows spends a lot of time going to its virtual ram does it not?
Ya we are talking EQ1, so each time I log in a different character thats a different process which can use up to 2 gig, and not 2 gig for everquest total?
32-bit Windows has a 3GB RAM limit because the upper memory address are reserved for the kernel. It used to be 2GB limit and you had to specifically flip a switch to make it 3GB, but I think they recently changed that, at least in XP. With Win2k I don't know if the switch exists or if it's 2GB or 3GB by default, never looked it up since 2k was never really a favorable desktop OS except for specific groups of people. Regardless of process limitations, Windows itself will not show more then 3GB available.
The question of whether to go 2, 3 or 4 gigs of RAM really depends on whether you plan to upgrade to a 64-bit OS at some point. If yes, then perhaps 4GB is fine. If no, then afaik you might as well stick with 3GB with fearless's recommendation of 2 1GB and 2 512MB.
The page file issue was more prevalent before Windows XP, and the issue was that Windows did not exhaust physical RAM before resorting to disk accesses. With a current OS, massive amounts of RAM and a pagefile with a nonvariable size, pagefile slowdowns should never happen. But, that is an optimization that some people swear by. I dismissed it a few years ago myself
The question of whether to go 2, 3 or 4 gigs of RAM really depends on whether you plan to upgrade to a 64-bit OS at some point. If yes, then perhaps 4GB is fine. If no, then afaik you might as well stick with 3GB with fearless's recommendation of 2 1GB and 2 512MB.
The page file issue was more prevalent before Windows XP, and the issue was that Windows did not exhaust physical RAM before resorting to disk accesses. With a current OS, massive amounts of RAM and a pagefile with a nonvariable size, pagefile slowdowns should never happen. But, that is an optimization that some people swear by. I dismissed it a few years ago myself
Ok is this consistent with your experience: (I posted this over at the eq tech support forums):
Well on my win 2000 machines I bring up task manager and sort by memory usage and EQ with one trader is 606K. Total machine usage is 816K. Its all a bunch of small usage stuff in background like winamp is 12K. Dosnt really seem much can be turned off. Machine has 2 gig ram.
Ok now with 4 in the game each one takes like 150K, 223K, 224K and 287K in regular memory and each is about 600K in Virtual Memory (hard disk). This with all models on on all 4... I do find it odd that I am not using all my 2 gig ram up even with 4 characters in the game ... they are only using 800K or so of the 2000K available ...
The active screen has more "page faults" then the others so I guess that is what is to be avoided.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_fault
Probably over a long time these page fault cause "thrashing" which is what you are calling memory leak.
I guess you could set aside 700K for each EQ instance and 200K for windows and be ok. So with 4 characters running you need 4 X 700 plus 200 or 3 gig.... "Windows" itself dosn't seem to be much of a hog, at least according to task manager.
I guess if you have 3 gig and you shut off page file you won't get page faults, I think Ill try that on my 3 gig machines later. I would guess that without a pagefile Virtual memory setup if you need more then 3 gig you will just stright up crash.
They are all running "OK" though even with 2 gig (I upgrading to 4 gig soon).
I guess that 4 gig ram should be more then sufficient to run 4 or even 5 instances with all models on. Ya it seems very clear that each instance of EQ is a seperate process and the "windows 3 gig max" is not going to be even near a limit.
So it appears that the move is just to get 4 gig system ram and turn off pagefile ...
Well on my win 2000 machines I bring up task manager and sort by memory usage and EQ with one trader is 606K. Total machine usage is 816K. Its all a bunch of small usage stuff in background like winamp is 12K. Dosnt really seem much can be turned off. Machine has 2 gig ram.
Ok now with 4 in the game each one takes like 150K, 223K, 224K and 287K in regular memory and each is about 600K in Virtual Memory (hard disk). This with all models on on all 4... I do find it odd that I am not using all my 2 gig ram up even with 4 characters in the game ... they are only using 800K or so of the 2000K available ...
The active screen has more "page faults" then the others so I guess that is what is to be avoided.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_fault
Probably over a long time these page fault cause "thrashing" which is what you are calling memory leak.
I guess you could set aside 700K for each EQ instance and 200K for windows and be ok. So with 4 characters running you need 4 X 700 plus 200 or 3 gig.... "Windows" itself dosn't seem to be much of a hog, at least according to task manager.
I guess if you have 3 gig and you shut off page file you won't get page faults, I think Ill try that on my 3 gig machines later. I would guess that without a pagefile Virtual memory setup if you need more then 3 gig you will just stright up crash.
They are all running "OK" though even with 2 gig (I upgrading to 4 gig soon).
I guess that 4 gig ram should be more then sufficient to run 4 or even 5 instances with all models on. Ya it seems very clear that each instance of EQ is a seperate process and the "windows 3 gig max" is not going to be even near a limit.
So it appears that the move is just to get 4 gig system ram and turn off pagefile ...
Well...
Oh ya it seems taht 4 gig is not a waste. You are right about windows not seeing more then 3 gig BUT it will use that other gig for AGP Apature ram if you set your bios to 512MB apature, thats 1/2 of it right there (and its almost like you have another 1/2 gig ram on your video card) and it will use up more as your base 640K ram (I THINK). So going to 4 gig is not a waste.
Also I see in my BIOS there is a "use 4 gig ram" setting (after I hit the ctrl F1) so I guess thats the switch you are talking about.
I have more ram on order so Ill be able to see whats up with 4 gig soon.
Also I see in my BIOS there is a "use 4 gig ram" setting (after I hit the ctrl F1) so I guess thats the switch you are talking about.
I have more ram on order so Ill be able to see whats up with 4 gig soon.