On Sunday 05 December 2004 00:09, you wrote:
> Bob wrote:
> >It's set for 450 MB out of a total of 512. What do you recommend?
>
> That means only 112MB is left over for you (and your OS) to use! I'd try
> 256 to start, and if you still find it unusable, try 192. If that's still
> too slow, go for 128.

Depending entirely on what else you're running. Even XP _ought_ to run OK in 
~64 MBytes without application load. If you are having trouble with one 
particular application with a big memory footprint (e.g. photo/video editor) 
or which is sensitive to load (CD burning etc) it would probably be better to 
use the "PauseWhileRunning" directive in prime.ini to ensure that the 
application isn't impeded. You will know if memory loading is a significant 
problem as the disk access light will be on more or less permanently.

FYI I have DayMemory=320, NightMemory=320 on a _dual processor_ 512MB Win 2K 
Pro system (the other CPU is running ECM on small exponents), 
PauseWhileRunning=fs9 (MS Flight Simulator is the only good reason I have for 
running Windows at all) (the problem with fs9 appears to be due to the 
scheduler rather than actual load on memory, in any case stopping Prime95 
speeds up the frame rate by a factor of about 2) and no problems running 
anything else - scanner software, Photoshop Elements or even burning CDs with 
Nero.
>
> And thanks Steinar...P-1 factoring it is. :-)

Yup. Even then only in stage 2 (stage 1 takes about the same memory as LL 
testing - i.e. approx. twice the size of the save file).

One tip for reducing performance droop under heavy memory load - create a 
permanent swap file (Control Panel/System/Advanced/Performance/Virtual 
Memory) and if neccessary defrag it (using a proper defragger - the built-in 
Windows utility is more or less useless) - the point being that a temporary 
swap file will likely be in hundreds of discontiguous pieces, which will slow 
read/write access to the swap file to a crawl compared with what the disk 
system is capable of. Similarly in my experience linux systems work better 
with a dedicated swap partition than with a swap file.

Regards
Brian Beesley
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