Virtual Memory on XP........

[Seal89999]

Ok, Whenever I play a really long game on Emperor for lets say the game goes on for a couple of hours. After a while we start disconnecting. And up pops the 100 count gets to about 87 and then re connects. That happens over and over until eventually it disconnects and dosent ever regain a connection. Then the game crashes. And an error message on my taskbar pops up and sais Virtual Memory low. Is there a way I can download more or somehow fix this problem????????

It is really annoying me. ??? I dont have this problem with other games like Star Craft. Is it an EBFD problem or what?????? Any help with Virtual Memory would be greatly appreciated!

[GhostHunter]

Alright, truthfully I doubt its Emperor myself, but just the fact that Emperor requires a chunck of graphics that not many games can beat...

What your probaly want to do first is upgrade your drivers and get a windows update, this should fix any nasty annoyences, I'll get somes links in a second..

[emprworm]

well my experience with Windows XP is that it is an great manager of Virtual Memory, however I usually manually set my VM so that minimum always equals maximum and is 1.5 X RAM. So if you have 512MB of physical memory, I manually set the VM to 768. If you have low physical memory like 256, I might even go RAM X 2.

But this is just my personal opinions on the matter, others may differ.

[Seal89999]

well my experience with Windows XP is that it is an great manager of Virtual Memory, however I usually manually set my VM so that minimum always equals maximum and is 1.5 X RAM. So if you have 512MB of physical memory, I manually set the VM to 768. If you have low physical memory like 256, I might even go RAM X 2.

But this is just my personal opinions on the matter, others may differ.

How do i get to the VM options menu? is there one. How do i set it?

[number6]

Do you have a lot of free disk space? If not you could run into this virtual memory problem. I am guessing that the game does not deallocate memory correctly (called a memory leak) and continues to consume all physical as well as virtual memory (hard disk). I would suggest starting a game of emperor after rebooting the system. This way you will have the maximum ram available before starting the game. Make sure you don't start any other app up before or during your session of emperor. Even though XP is supposed to manage memory better than previous versions of Windows it's possible that the game is managing it's own memory very poorly and constantly asking the OS for more chunks of memory (until there is none left). You can get memory management utilities like FreeMem Pro ( http://www.sysopt.com/freemem/ ) that can background memory reallocation once you drop below a certain threshold (I use it on Windows 98 and I never run out of memory).

[emprworm]

well my experience with Windows XP is that it is an great manager of Virtual Memory, however I usually manually set my VM so that minimum always equals maximum and is 1.5 X RAM. So if you have 512MB of physical memory, I manually set the VM to 768. If you have low physical memory like 256, I might even go RAM X 2.

But this is just my personal opinions on the matter, others may differ.

How do i get to the VM options menu? is there one. How do i set it?

This is on XP Pro (which I'm hoping is the same with XP Home)

Start--> Settings --> Control Panel --> Performance and Maintenance --> System

OR Right Click the "My COmputer" icon

Click Advanced. Under "Performance" click settings. Then click Advanced. under virtual memory click "Change"

set your minimum and maxmimum memory values to your RAM x 1.5 or RAM x 2.

If you have more than 1 physical hard drive, put the VM on the hard drive that is not where windows is installed (speeds it up)- assuming that it is not some old slow harddrive.

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/features/optimize_pcaudio3.htm explains a bit about optimizing VM in XP. Many people in the tech industry say that the min and max should be the same- I am not sure if this is just an IT urban legend or if it has actual merit. Well, I have always set them as the same value and I never have any problems doing it.

again, all my opinion, others may differ, but i havent had any probs

[mechadragon]

First, how much actual RAM do you have?

Second, how much free hard drive space do you have?

Third, when was the last time you defragmented?

If you think that increasing your swap may help you, you can manually set it via the control panel.

Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced (tab) -> Performance Options... (button) -> Change... (button)

Set the initial size to what ever you want, by default it's about 150% of your actual RAM ize. The Maximum size is probably more important though, by default, it is around 200%-300% of your actual RAM. If you have enough free hard drive space to accomidate a larger Maximum, then up that number and see what happens.

StarCraft has fairly low memory requirments compareed to EBFD, so a comparison is apples and oranges.

Virtual memory cannot be downloaded, it is space on your hard drive that is used to write stuff from RAM to clear more RAM for other things. The stuff writtin is still technically in RAM, but is swaped to the hard drive for whatever you are currently running. If you are running somehting that requires more RAM than you have, some of it will be paged to this Virtual Memory where your system or the program will be slowed down or halted (read crash) when it tries to read it quick, but cannot read it quick enough. RAM is much faster than a hard drive. Think of it like this:

You have a brain and can hold so many things in your memory at once (RAM). So you carry a book with you to write all the things you can't forget (Hard Drive). The book is actually very large, but you use it to do all your homework and stuff in, which you need to keep forever (Files and programs, etc.). At the front of the book, you have a few pages set aside so you can make quick notes that you need to remember, but don't need to keep forever (Virtual memory). If you run out of space on these pages before erasing them, you can always use more pages that are blank to take notes, but you can only use up to whatever you have said to be the maximum, or however many pages are left in the book. If you run out of pages or hit that maximum, you have nowhere else to keep this information and it will be lost, and you will fail civics (crash the program) because you didn't write that one name down.

[emprworm]

almost forgot to mention: once you change VM you should defrag your drive. ;)

[mechadragon]

Derfrag first! Otherwise you will fragemnt the pagefile itself, which slows it down even more.

EDIT: The pagefile itself, is unmovable when active, and is always active when windows is running.

[Muad dib]

Try not running any other programs. Close some programs that are standard as soon as you start up the computer. (the ctrl+alt+delete)

[number6]

I have never seen so many people helping out at once :) .

Keep up the good work.

[Seal89999]

Thanks for all your help guys. There was a setting called System managed size. i selected it. Im going to give that a try. Defrag and close some things that take up resources. Thanks again.

Sard

[emprworm]

Derfrag first! Otherwise you will fragemnt the pagefile itself, which slows it down even more.

I thought that when you changed VM size, a brand new page file is created at next reboot. Is this wrong?

If it is right, then it would seem to me that a defrag after a VM change and reboot would be more appropriate then before doing the VM change.

But maybe a third opinion would be helpful.

[Andrew]

What I do is make my virtual memory small(64mb I have 512 mb ram), thus the file is small, then reboot, then change VM back to what I want it to be, reboot, and most of the VM is in one file(or section) the other is the 64 mb. and defragging is good.(but formatting is better....need to do soon to get max speed.)

[mechadragon]

Derfrag first! Otherwise you will fragemnt the pagefile itself, which slows it down even more.

I thought that when you changed VM size, a brand new page file is created at next reboot. Is this wrong?

If it is right, then it would seem to me that a defrag after a VM change and reboot would be more appropriate then before doing the VM change.

But maybe a third opinion would be helpful.

Short answer, even if it does write a new (I don't "think" it makes a new one unless you set a registry key to make it do so) it will simply occupy the same space it had before, fragmenting more when it enlarges if the encompassing file system around it is itself fragmented. In fact, unless you keep the swap on a seperate partition, swap file fragmentation is near unavoidable, but by taking steps to make it less fragmented, you can keep this from impacting performance. By defragemnting first, the new swap file will occupy its old disk space, plus a linear space ater the defragemneted files. The difference in the derag first/defrag last methods are that if you defrag first, your swap file will most likely be two big chunks to access. If you defrag after, your swap file may be one big chunck followed by lots of little pieces that are fit between other fragmented files chucnks. Two big chucnks reads faster than ten little chunks.

Hope this suffeciently answers your question, because it only gets technical from here.