The 3.5 GB is not for just one process. It's the total for all 32-bit processes running at once, most of which are workunit applications.
The hard drive is a little busy at such times - enough for the hard drive light to flash perhaps once a second. The best I can tell, at least one of the applications HP supplied for processing keyboard input is also 32-bit, and therefore more likely to be affected by crowding too much into the same 32-bit memoryspace. - Robert Miles ----- Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:40:51 -0400 From: "Rom Walton"<[email protected]> Subject: Re: [boinc_dev] 32-bit workunits under 64-bit Windows 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. _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
