On Thursday 10 Mar 2005 17:02, Todd Walton wrote: > adding extra RAM would help avoid the badly named "Virtual Memory > Minimum Too Low" message. With more physical memory, Windows should > require a *smaller* swap space. It only creates more swap space when > it runs out of physical memory and the swap space it has. In fact, > that's what the message means.
Unfortunately, because of the absurd way in which the Windows VMM allocates memory, the more physical RAM you have, the more swap you must add. (About 1.5x physical RAM is a typical value for the minimum pagefile size.) Having less swap than physical memory is very bad because Windows wants to allocate a page of swap for every page of physical memory which gets allocated. If you've got 2048MB RAM and 128MB swap, it'll start complaining bitterly as soon as your memory usage exceeds 128MB. I discovered this the hard way back in early 1998 when I built a hefty dual-Pentium II "extreme PC" with the then-almost-unheard-of amount of 256MB RAM, running Windows NT 4. I thought that I wouldn't need swap at all most of the time, so I set the minimum pagefile size to 2MB (the lowest value allowed). Logging on and correcting it to 384MB was quite difficult. The Linux system I now use has 1024MB RAM and a token 256MB swap to allow for emergencies and so that totally idle stuff can be paged out so it doesn't hog RAM unnecessarily. In the rare event that available memory drops below 128MB, a script automatically adds file-backed swap 256MB at a time to ease the pressure. Swapfiles are removed when they are no longer needed. Stephen _______________________________________________ Support mailing list [email protected] http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.support Unsubscribe at http://dodo.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support Or mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
