No page file

[Brook]

 I know they fixed a bunch of the raid lag issues on the last update, and from what I have seen it was a great job.This is something I noticed last night in EH while on a raid. We finished CMF and went to EH and started, after about 15 mins in the zone I started getting casting lag which got progressively worse and within the span of about 6 mins I was up to 6 secs of cast lag, then I started seeing lag issues with the other chars/warping is what it looked like.I had just installed a third gig of ram in the system and I had shut off the paging file, when it became unplayable I decided to reboot and turn the page file back on. It made a world of difference and I was even able turn run the graphics at a much higher setting.I am not complaining, I was just wondering why the paging file made such a huge difference in gameplay when I had more than ample ram? I always thought that ram would refresh itself as needed.

[kjfett4]

with 2GB of RAM, your PC was using more than 1GB in the page file. When you added a gig of RAM and removed the page file, you had less virtual memory to play with than you did before you put the RAM in. Sure, the VM over 2GB was running faster than before, but you had less of it to go around since you capped it at 3GB.

[Brook]

Thanks for the response.Little confused.. so your saying that even with pagefile I am limited to 3gb and both physical ram and vm combined on a 32 bit system?My pagefile is on a separate drive in a small partition and is the only thing in that partition. My pagefile size is set at 1576 min/max . Only other thing on that drive is storage in its own partition.It did seem a little strange that even when running around town without the pagefile the game still had to access the hd every few seconds. It actually seems to access it less with the pagefile on. I just figured it had to load textures for scene changing, and uses the pagefile  for certain things that dont change as often.

[kjfett4]

<cite>Brook wrote:</cite><blockquote>Thanks for the response.Little confused.. so your saying that even with pagefile I am limited to 3gb and both physical ram and vm combined on a 32 bit system?My pagefile is on a separate drive in a small partition and is the only thing in that partition. My pagefile size is set at 1576 min/max . Only other thing on that drive is storage in its own partition.It did seem a little strange that even when running around town without the pagefile the game still had to access the hd every few seconds. It actually seems to access it less with the pagefile on. I just figured it had to load textures for scene changing, and uses the pagefile  for certain things that dont change as often.</blockquote><p>RAM on a mobo and VM (virtual memory) are not apples and apples.  VM is a composite of RAM and the page file.  When you turned off the page file, you forced the VM to only use the RAM on your mobo...thus you capped it at 3GB.  Vista32 can allow a game to use up to 2GB of VM.  It also can allow the OS to use up to 2GB of VM.  If you have less than 4GB of VM available (RAM+Page file) these 2 sides jocky for position.   32 Bit OS can use a lot more than 4GB of VM, but it can never assign more than 2GB to the OS and no more than 2GB to any one game (in other words, 2 games running are each capped at 2GB, but the 2 can use up to a total of 4GB of VM combined...add in the 2GB for the OS and that is 6GB VM....but with 3GB of RAM, you will need a 3GB page file to do that or something will not be using its full 2GB.  </p><p>There is a way to switch that and make 3GB available to the game and 1GB to the OS, but as that is useless unless the game is desgned to make use of the higher VM space (EQ2 is not that I am aware of), it's not worth the hassle and ends up perma cutting your OS short for the sake of a program that might use that extra 1GB of VM over the normal 2GB given every once in a while.</p><p>My point is, you are fine with the 3GB of RAM, any more than that is a waste with a 32bit OS and unless you are going for 5GB of RAM or more, its a waste with a 64bit OS as well thanks to the MMIO issue in the 4GB of RAM.  Vista is doing a much better job handling the page file so you can release these contraints on it that we got used to with Win98 and XP and let it do its thing as it needs it.  You'll run smoother and enjoy the game. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p><p>check this article out for more info....</p><p> <a href="http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm</a>  thanks to <b>Dark_Grue </b>for the link. <img src="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/images/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" width="15" height="15" /></p>

[Brook]

<div align="left">Thanks for the link Kjfett4, was a very nice read and easy to understand. It answered multiple questions.</div>

[Dark_Grue]

<p>There are a lot of things that influence EQ2 performance. Even what appear to be identical hardware configurations can differ in performanced solely on driver or or software discrepancies. Some performance issues are just the result of design choices in the EQ2 application, or bugs.</p><p> <cite>Brook wrote:</cite></p><blockquote>I had just installed a third gig of ram in the system and I had shut off the paging file, when it became unplayable I decided to reboot and turn the page file back on. It made a world of difference and I was even able turn run the graphics at a much higher setting.</blockquote><p>Don't turn off the page file. That was bad advice back in the days, and despite it being worse advice now, those old anecdotal tech articles are still being circulated as "performance tuning". You need that Virtual Memory, as you saw. Turningoff the page file would waste a lot of the RAM. The reason is that when programs ask for an allocation of VM space, they may ask for a great deal more than they ever actually bring into use - the total may easily run to hundreds of megabytes. These addresses have to be assigned to somewhere by the system. If there is a page file available, the system can assign them to it - if there is not (because you turned it off), they have to be assigned to RAM, locking it out from any actual use.</p><p>There was also a technique where you would set a fixed-size pagefile, as easlier versions of Windows would tend to badly frament the page file on disk as it grew and shrank. Setting a fixed-size pagefile would (supposedly) keep the page file contiguous. This trick only works if you can ensure that the new page file actually gets created as a contiguous block (which can require a lot of contortions in some circumstances, otherwise you've undone the whole point of the exercise). Some third-party defragmentation utilities (such as Diskeeper) can defragment and relocate the paging file, making this task trivial. There's nothing wrong with setting a fixed-size page file though - as long as you choose a sane size. Too small, out of memory, too large and it's largely harmless, but wastes disk space. Putting the swap on a separate partition or a separate disk can have similiar benefits, but there are trade-offs that make make the effort and performance gains moot, or actually degrade performance in some cases (there's seek time and latency involved that can actually be more significant than just moving the swap to a contiguous hunk of disk).</p><p>For the most part, XP tended to work just fine managing the paging file itself, and Vista is generally even better at it. Just leaving it at the default "let Windows decide", is the most conservative choice.</p><p>Keep in mind though that applications don't access the page file directly - that's a function of the VMM contained in the operating system. If you're seeing a lot of page file activity, it's symptomatic of the application working memory very, very hard. If you're observing a lot of paging file access while running EQ2, you're probably correct in assuming the memory usage is related to heavy texture swapping (which means you probably ought to bump down your texture sizes), but it's not EQ2 managing the swap, it's the OS... all EQ2 sees is the virutal memory space that the OS hands it. It doesn't know where any of that memory actually physically resides.</p><p><cite>kjfett4 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>My point is, you are fine with the 3GB of RAM, any more than that is a waste with a 32bit OS and unless you are going for 5GB of RAM or more, its a waste with a 64bit OS as well thanks to the MMIO issue in the 4GB of RAM.  Vista is doing a much better job handling the page file so you can release these contraints on it that we got used to with Win98 and XP and let it do its thing as it needs it.  You'll run smoother and enjoy the game. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY<img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />" width="15" height="15" /></p><p>check this article out for more info....</p><p> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm" target="_blank">http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm</a>  thanks to <b>Dark_Grue </b>for the link. <img src="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/images/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" width="15" height="15" /></p></blockquote><p>RAM and page file size aren't linked by this issue. Generally-speaking, your page file size is going to be much larger than your physical RAM size (generally, it's around 1.5 times the amount of physical memory). It doesn't change or relieve the 2GB application address-space issue. The sum of physical and virtual memory doesn't count against this limit, nor does the size of virtual memory alone by itself. However, because VM is very slow comparatively speaking, extremely large swap files can increase <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrash_%28computer_science%29" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">thrash</a> and just plain waste disk space.</p><p>The letter "Swap begone!" in <a href="http://www.dansdata.com/io072.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.dansdata.com/io072.htm</a>, is probably more relevant, although a little outdadted, as it doesn't discuss the Vista VMM improvents.</p>

[Brook]

Thanks for the input Dark..I will set the page file to system managed and play with performance on the main drive and other drive to see which suits my needs the best.That Dan guy is pretty smart <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" width="15" height="15" />