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Are you crashing because of virtual memory?

JonnyRayJonnyRay Posts: 1,744
edited December 1969 in Daz Studio Discussion

I got to thinking about all of the recent posts about DS crashing for folks and realized that an often overlooked part of the discussion is how virtual memory and managing the page file (which is an important component thereof) could affect things. I started to write it up for posting here, but since I can't do in-line screenshots, etc., I posted it to my blog instead.

Managing Virtual Memory

Comments

  • jestmartjestmart Posts: 4,449
    edited December 1969

    I have always set virtual memory to auto and have been able to run Studio pretty much trouble free (memory wise) on some lowly computers. I have never seen the benefit of setting it to a specific size or a percentage of a drives size as was an option with some older OSes.

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,487
    edited December 1969

    This brings back memories of when I first posted to the Daz forum!
    at total noob, wet behind the ears as one user described me.
    I deleted the post after because I felt stupid even though it worked for me!

    my old Dell craptop only had 2GB of RAM was 2Ghz and and abysmal intel graphics chip
    Daz studio crashed everytime I loaded clothes on a figure
    I found carrara 5 on a mag disc handled it better so is actually how I got into carrara!
    I still first tried studio
    I had to MERGE scenes to do stuff, I had not even posted on the forum yet!
    then looking through the Microsoft forum I found out about paging size and readyboost
    I used an external SD card I had, and my D drive and set the page size very high and SD card to maximum readyboost.
    after that I could use Daz studio a lot better but stuck with carrara and later got Poser7 too.

    anyway I posted my findings in my very first post on the Daz forum and was laughed at but it appears now I do know a tad more about computers (was VERY noob then,) I was not so stupid.
    of course NOW I have a considerably better computer!!!

  • XoechZXoechZ Posts: 1,102
    edited December 1969

    Yes, the pagefile is a funny topic. Ask 3 poeople about it and you will hear 3 different opinions, each of them the one and only correct one of course :-)
    I think there is not one setting that fits all needs and all PC configurations. It is always a matter of how much RAM is installed, which OS you use (32 bit vs 64 bit) and how many memory intense operations are running.

    The only thing that is definitely NOT recommended is to turn off the pagefile. Even if you have more than enough RAM, there are always some applications which tend to write data to the pagefile, no matter how much free RAM you have left. And if there is no pagefile, the application crashes.

    For the size, as I said above, there is no "one fits all" setting. On my PC I have 16 GB RAM installed and I have set the pagefile to a fixed value of 4GB. I habe never had any problems with that setting, so I see no reason to make it larger (or smaller).

  • JonnyRayJonnyRay Posts: 1,744
    edited December 1969

    XoechZ said:
    Yes, the pagefile is a funny topic. Ask 3 poeople about it and you will hear 3 different opinions, each of them the one and only correct one of course :-)
    I think there is not one setting that fits all needs and all PC configurations. It is always a matter of how much RAM is installed, which OS you use (32 bit vs 64 bit) and how many memory intense operations are running.Absolutely true. :) My blog entry was intended to discuss how I do things, and where one might go to set your page file settings IF you think you could be having an issue with virtual memory. Not as the definitive way that everyone should setup their computer.

    XoechZ said:
    The only thing that is definitely NOT recommended is to turn off the pagefile. Even if you have more than enough RAM, there are always some applications which tend to write data to the pagefile, no matter how much free RAM you have left. And if there is no pagefile, the application crashes.
    Shoot! I need to add that to the blog. Windows itself automatically puts some things in to the page file when it loads them. Running for long periods of time without any page file at all is a dangerous thing. I'll update the blog with that. Thanks for the reminder.

    For the size, as I said above, there is no "one fits all" setting. On my PC I have 16 GB RAM installed and I have set the pagefile to a fixed value of 4GB. I habe never had any problems with that setting, so I see no reason to make it larger (or smaller).Yes, one thing that I ran into with servers is that our 1.5x RAM guideline always seemed to make sense and worked well. Until we started building servers with 64 Gigabytes (or more) physical RAM in them. All of a sudden a 96 Gigabyte pagefile didn't really make sense.

    I looked back at my graphics machine once I got home. The PC has 12 Gbytes of RAM in it. I have it set to use 12 Gbytes for the pagefile on my D drive. I've done some performance monitoring on it in the past and I rarely use even 25% of that, but I have 3 x 500G data drives in the PC, I don't mind the extra space being used.

  • JonnyRayJonnyRay Posts: 1,744
    edited December 1969

    I've updated the original blog post with information about this being "guidelines" not "rules" and the warning that XoechZ brought up about not running without a page file for any significant length of time.

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    edited December 1969

    JonnyRay said:
    I've updated the original blog post with information about this being "guidelines" not "rules" and the warning that XoechZ brought up about not running without a page file for any significant length of time.

    On that note, there are certain applications (I know Adobe products used to be in this category, but I'm not sure if they still are), that just won't run, without a page file...period.

    And a little food for thought...most of the 'don't let Windows manage it' came from the days of smaller than 10 GB hard drives. When things were starting out and the 1.5x your RAM was the 'rule', you, if you were lucky had a couple of hundred MB hard drive...and 6 or more MB of space on it to a temporary file was a bit outrageous. When drives started to get to the 6 to 10 GB range and RAM dropped to something less than an 'arm and leg', large (drive percentage) page files started to become a concern, again...because you started seeing 32, 64 and if you were lucky, 128 MB of RAM.

    Now, multiple GB of RAM and 1 TB and larger drives...does it matter? My son just picked up a 2 TB drive for under $70...so even that 96 GB file would be 'cheap' (it's less than 5% of the drive...).

    Back when I used to be concerned about it all, I figured that if it was going to be over 10% of the drive space, then I should do something...but if Windows was going to keep it well bellow that, then don't worry about it...

    If you are concerned about drive space...be more worried about 1) system restore (you don't need more than 1 or two good, recent restore points...who cares about the ones from 6 months ago, too many changes/updates to make them worthwhile) and 2) the hibernation file...if your have a desktop, why 'hibernate'? It may be useful on a laptop, but on a desktop it's just a space-eater.

    So, I guess my thoughts are, when drives are cheap and large...let Windows manage it and not worry about it.

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