Memory Usage XP Pro.

[pitcrewbear]

Running XP Prof. on a dual Pentium cpu. There is 1.5 GB of ram on board.
I have noticed while monitoring performance that when using 3D animation software (Maya) that it only seems to use 400 - 500 mb of the ram.
I would think that with so much ram, visits to the paging file would be rare.
Is there some tweak or preference that might control the amount of memory a program uses or is it simply an issue of programming?

 

[Rick]

As far as I know, that's just the way it is. I know that after looking through some of the tweaks etc... The default settings for XP seem to favor allocating memory for programs rather than the system itself. So there really isn't a whole lot of tweaking to be had in this area.

One thing you could try is to totally eliminate or reduce the size of the pagefile.. Right click My Computer/ Properties/ System/ Advanced/ Performance/ Advanced/ Change/

Once there, you can control the size of your swapfile.. There's no telling what it is by default, but you have enough memory where the swapfile is no longer useful... You should try turning it off completely by selecting the drive where your pagefile resides and clicking "No pagefile".

Once you restart, you can fully benefit from your lage amount of memory... Be aware that not all programs like having "No Pagefile" set... Maya may be one of these programs.

 

[StormBringer]

I wouldn't recommend getting rid of the pagefile if you do much image and graphics work. Most of these programs use the pagefile and do not like it when it is not there. I'm unsure about Maya but many others will have a fit about it.

I also have 1.5GB RAM and I keep a 335MB pagefile(the setting from my older system and it seemed to work best) on a separate partition that is just for that. I tested getting rid of the pagefile and saw a little speed increase but many apps didn't like it so I put it back. I also have changed the registry settings so the Kernel is not paged.