All this sounds great but are you sure the apps are being rolled out to virtual memory when not in use??? When I do a task manager display for processes they seem to still be in memory. Is there some other tool I should be using to determine where the app is really residing when preempted??? BTW, I'm running Win XP Home SP2.

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All this sounds great but are you sure the apps are being rolled out to virtual memory when not in use??? When I do a task manager display for processes they seem to still be in memory. Is there some other tool I should be using to determine where the app is really residing when preempted??? BTW, I'm running Win XP Home SP2.

They will not roll out till the physical mem is actually needed by another task, which may confuse the issue. Fire up some memory intensive taks *then* look in task manager to get a better idea. Then, once rolled out they should stay out till that app next runs.

edit: also any dll file (.so in linux) that is needed by another task will not roll out at all - this is fine as the same physical mem is allocated to each program that needs it, but once again it can confuse the issue as taskmanage still shows you haveing some mem allocated. It should be dropped (not rolled out) as soon as no other task needs it.

Despite my general tendency to prefer Linux, I have to say that the VM system is one of the strong points of windows - and has been since w95. Of all the components of Windows it is the one I'd trust to do the sensible thing

R~~

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Thanks for the explanation....I'll give things another try.

Rich

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All this sounds great but are you sure the apps are being rolled out to virtual memory when not in use??? When I do a task manager display for processes they seem to still be in memory. Is there some other tool I should be using to determine where the app is really residing when preempted??? BTW, I'm running Win XP Home SP2.

Generally, unless the RAM is _needed_ for something, inactive apps will still take memory, but will be swapped out as soon as another process asks for more RAM. If you are _very_ low on RAM, and your computer is slow, this _can_ cause a "lag time" as the inactive app gets written to disk before the RAM is available; that's why the 512MB minimum, since Rosetta sometimes needs just over 200MB (last stages on a large protein, 257.32MB right now on my Mac). On a 256MB box, that means it has to swap parts in and out in competition with the OS itself, causing a slowdown. It will _run_ with 256, it's just slower. Looking at my Windows box, Rosetta has been inactive for a while as CPDN catches up (I had it suspended due to their site being down for 3 days), and is only taking 9MB of "real" RAM. If I launch something memory-intensive, I would expect that to drop even further.

I'm always surprised at the fact that with only 512MB, my Mac _always_ has "free RAM" according to the pie charts, even when eight or nine large apps are running. Easily gets up to 4GB of VM though... I wouldn't expect Windows XP to be any worse at it.

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