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Thread: Problem Running Under Win 98 SE |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 14
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Viktors
Former World Community Grid Tech Joined: Sep 20, 2004 Post Count: 653 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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This kind of behavior is almost certainly due to a paging/swap file that is too small or not having virtual memory enabled. You need to increase the maximum so that the software can allocate about 300 MB, provided you have the disk space available. Look at Control Panel->System->Advanced->Performance Options. In Windows 98 go to Control Panel->System->Performance->Virtual Memory. The paging file size should be 2 or 3 times your real memory size. It typically touches only around 70 MB most of the time, so your system should not page a lot unless you are running other memory hungry applications along with it. That is why we require machines to have 128MB at a minimum and virtual memory enabled. The amount of memory used can be a factor in machines with less than 512 MB of memory. You might notice some delays due to paging when the agent is preempted by any other work. The agent runs at lowest CPU priority so that it immediately yields to other work to be done on your PC. However, paging does create some delays. If the low memory is a significant problem for your system, consider running the agent only as a screen saver. On the agent, go to the preferences window (the one with the check icon) and select "Run only as Screen Saver" and then click on "Apply". Over the next weeks, we will be trying to see if there are ways to more intelligently allocate memory according to the particular protein being processed. This might reduce the 300 MB allocation and might reduce the working set size too.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
The paging file size should be 2 or 3 times your real memory size. I think the paging file size should be inversely related to the real memory size. If you only have 128 MB of memory, you'll need a bigger paging file so that your combined real memory plus virtual memory is at least 300 MB+... ex: If you have 1 gig of memory, you do NOT need a 2 gig paging file. You probably don't need any paging file. :) |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Rick Alther points out that Windows prefers to swap out unused pages just to keep some available free space in RAM here:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=941#4316 If these pages really are not needed then the only loss is the time required to write them once to disk, which seems minimal. I agree that giganttic RAM memories probably do not require a lot of virtual memory, but why not allow them some? |
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Alther
Former World Community Grid Tech United States of America Joined: Sep 30, 2004 Post Count: 414 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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The paging file size should be 2 or 3 times your real memory size. I think the paging file size should be inversely related to the real memory size. If you only have 128 MB of memory, you'll need a bigger paging file so that your combined real memory plus virtual memory is at least 300 MB+... ex: If you have 1 gig of memory, you do NOT need a 2 gig paging file. You probably don't need any paging file. :) You should always have a paging file. Only in rare circumstances (and a LOT of extra RAM) does turning off the paging file improve performance. You are correct in that a blanket "rule" for a paging file size is wrong. The paging file size you should select depends primarily on how much RAM you have and what your typical and highest memory loads are. Really, only experience will tell you what is optimal for your machine. It's not a bad idea to start with a paging file size of at least 1 or 1.5 times your RAM size. Over time as you gain experience with your memory loads, you can adjust this if you like. For the current Rosetta project, I would recommend you have a minium paging file size of 512MB, regardless of the amount of RAM you are using. This is so Windows can permanently page out the "untouched" portions of RAM that Rosetta allocates, but never touches. Remember, Windows pages lots of stuff out even if you have "plenty of RAM left". It does this for performance reasons. If the paging file size is, say .5 of your RAM you could be hurting your performance even if you aren't "running out of virtual memory". One thing most people should do is to set the initial and maximum page file sizes the same. This will prevent Windows from fragmenting the paging file and causing it to be even slower than it is.
Rick Alther
----------------------------------------Former World Community Grid Developer [Edit 1 times, last edit by Alther at Dec 25, 2004 3:01:01 PM] |
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