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  4. process RAM usage, any Windows experts?

  • process RAM usage, any Windows experts?

    M
    M

     I'm really confused about the RAM usage display in the process display of the Task manager.
    I have some serious Ram hogs running, Sequoia taking about 1.6GB Ram and parallel a Kontakt standalon instance which consumes 680MB. All is fine and actually it stays fine, but...
    after a while the RAM usage diminishes. I suddenly have only some 400-500MB of RAM usage for each program.
    Of course I immediately suspected some virtual memory going on which is of course not what I want. So I disabled all virtual memory but this behaviour remains.
    But when I look now at the avilable RAM in the system usage it is reasonable to say that the process actually do use the RAM it needs. There is no more RAM available than before.

    So what's going on with the process RAM usage display? Any inside knowledge anyone?
  • J
    J
    Hey Mathis. I have a similar thing going on with my x64 machine. But playback seems okay, so I'm assuming it's just a display thing. Perhaps the Task Manager isn't smart enough to figure out that a swap size of 0 means everything stays in RAM, so it just pretends that virtual memory is actually doing something(??) Not sure, but it is slightly disconcerting... ---J.
  • cmC
    VSL Team
    cmC

    i'm almost sure you are talking about memory rather than RAM, because if RAM would diminish this would be really scary ;-)

    so see the menu *columns* when the tab *processes* is active and select eg. the *virtual memory* column to be displayed too. and see MS KB about the definition of virtual memory.

    set a computer to not use a pagefile means not to allow the system or applications to page out memory (memory pages - that's where the term originates from), but be aware there are applications, which think they can't live without virtual memory ... some applications actually use their own paging system.

     

    fortunately on windows one can tell anapplication to keep all data in the physical part of memory and it really does so ... and i'd assume all samplers are programmed that way ... btw: hasn't sequ a dedicated temp-space which can be set in preferences?

    christian

    and remember: only a CRAY can run an endless loop in just three seconds.
  • M
    M

    Thank you for your answers.

    I boiled it down to some weird behaviour, which I can work around though. I have to disable my ethernet connection to establish the teleported VSTi through through Firewire network. Usually after I loaded this Sequoia session I can enable it again. But things changed after I use this Kontakt standalone instance in addition. When I have both the Sequoia 1.6GB and the Kontakt 600MB Ram consumption running the ethernet network won't activate again, it gives an error message and the RAM consumptions of said processes diminishes as described.

    Just for the record... 
  • F
    F

    cm wrote 

    'set a computer to not use a pagefile means not to allow the system or applications to page out memory (memory pages - that's where the term originates from), but be aware there are applications, which think they can't live without virtual memory ... some applications actually use their own paging system'

    Windows has an API 'memory mapped files'. This API enables a programmer to address a file like memory and maybe speeding up IO. It can be used two way: Mapping an existing file, or mapping without a file. Last option can be used for inter-process-communication. When this option is being used, as far as I know,  a portion of the page-file is used for memory mapping. This means that applications using this API 'without' a file do not work properly when ther is no page-file.

    Not that all this is helpful for the question, but it may clarify some cloudy details.