Virtual Memory too low

“Most optimization articles suggest to use between one and three times of the amount of RAM as virtual memory.”

I don’t know about Windows, but under Linux (where the swap partition is our version of a page file), the general rule /used/ to be “twice the amount of RAM”. That was back when 512MB-1GB was a lot of RAM, and 128MB-256MB was typical. Nowadays, with 2GB+ being the norm, the upper limit is usually 512MB (depending on your needs, of course). Generally, if you have multi-gigs of RAM, you don’t really /need/ swap space. Though I would contend that notebook users should have as much swap as they have RAM, since hibernation saves the RAM contents to the swap space.

Before I switched to Kubuntu on my 2GB RAM machine, I turned off XP’s page file, and noticed that everything seemed a bit snappier. Though I can’t say for sure if it was actually snappier, or just psychological on my part

The partition that the swapfile/pagefile/virtual-memory resides on is irrelevant; it only makes a difference if you tell it to a reside on a separate physical drive — ie if you have C: and D: partitions, but they are both on your single 80GB hard drive, moving the virtual memory to one or the other (or both) won’t make any difference b/c the computer is still doing all writing/reading operations to the same single physical drive causing a bottleneck. In a situation where you have two hard drive — an 80GB drive that had Windows installed on it and a 500GB drive where you stored all your files — telling the virtual memory to reside on the secondary drive (NOT the one with Windows installed; instead, in this example you would tell it to reside on the 500GB drive) would alleviate some of this bottleneck. (80GB and 500GB are just examples; obviously your hard drives could be any combination of sizes)

And as for 6GB of virtual memory allocation; 32-bit versions of XP (every version of XP is 32-bit, except for XP Pro 64-bit, which is very uncommon and wouldn’t be on your computer unless you went out of your way to install it) have trouble allocating RAM. The system can see a max of 4GB, but that factors in (somehow) the amount allocated to virtual memory. Hence the reason why, even if you were to install 4GB of physical RAM into your computer, Windows will only report between 2.75GB and 3.25GB at any given time. So having more than 2GB allocated to virtual memory will basically be reserving hard drive space that will never get used. The best rule of thumb is indeed one and a half to two times the amount of your physical RAM, but to a max of the aforementioned 2GB.

as for 6GB of virtual memory allocation; 32-bit versions of XP (every version of XP is 32-bit, except for XP Pro 64-bit, which is very uncommon and wouldn’t be on your computer unless you went out of your way to install it) have trouble allocating RAM. The system can see a max of 4GB, but that factors in (somehow) the amount allocated to virtual memory. Hence the reason why, even if you were to install 4GB of physical RAM into your computer, Windows will only report between 2.75GB and 3.25GB at any given time. So having more than 2GB allocated to virtual memory will basically be reserving hard drive space that will never get used. The best rule of thumb is indeed one and a half to two times the amount of your physical RAM, but to a max of the aforementioned 2GB.

i accidentally delete Drive C and Drive D and suddenly they combined and when i turn on my com. i have only Drive C…how would separate the two drive? plsss…help me kevincarantes@yahoo.com leave a message….Tnx….

i have 2GB of mem… 1GB of it is reported free in task manager… yet xp sp2 tells me that virtual memory is low… this is absurd. i have enough mem free to be using it as a ramdrive, yet it says it doesn’t have virtual memory? i DON’T NEED virtual memory!