I'm confused. On Windows, out of the box, the largest amount of memory a
single 32-bit program can allocate is 2GB (3GB with a special boot
option). I believe that is even true on a 64-bit system.

When your system starts to slow down, is the hard drive busy?  It sounds
like what you are experiencing is paging related.

----- Rom

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert Miles
Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2012 5:36 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [boinc_dev] 32-bit workunits under 64-bit Windows

I've found that my computer tends to slow down user response quite a bit
as the total memory used by 32-bit workunits and other 32-bit programs
approaches 3.5 GB, as I'd expect if all 32-bit programs must fit within
a single 4 GB memoryspace even though the computer has 8 GB of memory
installed.  Could you check if this is actually what's happening,
especially on 64-bit versions of Windows with the lower limits on the
total amount of memory they can use?  If so, can you find a way to give
each 32-bit workunit a separate 4 GB memoryspace, even if some of it is
shared with other workunits?

Another possibility is that the portions of the SysWOW64 software needed
to run 32-bit programs is similar in size to the programs that need it,
and therefore you should consider counting SysWOW64 software against the
memory limit allowed for BOINC.  Or just count 32-bit workunits twice
against the limit, but 64-bit workunits only once.  Or even allow
setting the limit for 32-bit BOINC software and workunits to be lower
than the total amount of memory BOINC can use.

I'm using 64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium SP2 on that computer.  I
haven't found any way to check which if either of the above
possibilities is correct.  Currently using BOINC 7.0.25, but I have seen
the same problem on earlier versions back to at least some of the 6.12.*
versions.

This may be a good reason for the more memory-hungry BOINC projects to
start offering 64-bit applications, even if those 64-bit versions offer
no performance improvements over the 32-bit versions.
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