I'd use Processor Scheduling to Programs (you're not running any ASIO drivers) and Memory Usage to System Cache. I'm surprised that turning up virtual mem to 11gb sovled the issue - I always turn it off. Also I'm using the Beta version 2 of Fusion.

Tim

I wish I could find the exact reason. I remember a bunch of audio tweaks that suggested raising it to 2 - 2.5 times your physical memory. I also remember reading "Inside XP" which talked about the need of XP to have a 1:1 between physical memory and virtual memory, even on large memory machines. The system also utilizes it regardless. Whatever the exact reason, I don't recall, setting this high had some affect.

There were also a couple of registry tweaks that I used to use that "seemed" to do something, but this was with GigaStudio and I don't think important right now - LargeSystemCache and IOPageLockLimit. This is supposed to also help but I didn't try it NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreationDisableLastAccessUpdate.

Turning off services - none really here in VM I could see to turn off..

@composer22 said:

I remember a bunch of audio tweaks that suggested raising it to 2 - 2.5 times your physical memory

i can't agree on this at all ... i'm considering this to be a workaround for heavily underpowered homecomputers ... actually under NT4 i've limited virtual memory to 2MB *) (this was the minimum allowed) to speed up applications. machines beyond 1 or 2 GB should be treated individually, especially since i can't see something even trying to fill 16 GB virtual memory on an 8 GB machine ...

 

the other point: windows (2000, XP, 32bit) takes 50% of available memory equally for kernel space and user space - kernel space on machines with more than 2 GB RAM could be limited to use only 1 GB (not the other way around) - changing the (more or less) well-known registry key values had always to be done very carefully to not limit other ressources and often had different effects on different computers.

 

basically VI / VE is intended to run best with the default registry settings, but this doesn't mean you need to keep designs, uPnP, DHCP, ect running and virtual memory at a useless value.

 

rules for VISTA are slightly different since there is a sheer plethora of services running and a few things have been already optimized by default ... unfortunately not the virtual memory (or can someone tell me what to do with a 32 GB pagefile on a 32 GB machine?)

christian

 

*) i should have added that the NT4 workstation i'm referring to here already had 1 GB RAM ...

For the time being, I'll leave it at the system recommended 11gig and see how it affects performance and stability. It seemed to have done something positive. We can always roll back allocation to something more fine tuned as we work with it.

Unfortunately, VMWare doesn't seem to allow you to resize the VM file, so I cannot test larger sizes. I have a 20gig VM. I looked for a disk manager and tried to follow VMwares instructions on command line changes, but could not make my VM larger.

EDIT: Turning OFF graphics acceleration failed to improve on a large utilization of a single core when viewing the directory tree under Matrix in VE3. Perhaps a thread there is having a party.

Well, last evening some more testing.

The graphic fix regressed, and now I am still getting the same problem.

I tried turning off the paging file and testing, and also with the full 11 G. I also tried a 512M paging file I hardly notice any performance differences in the meters. I "believe" that the 11G version has some performance improvement, but I am not sure it is wishful thinking. I do notice it gets a little bit more RAM but hardly anything significant. I believe this is because the system swaps out a bit of itself.

I've also tried the usual performance improvement adjustments with XP and the System Panel, and services.

My belief now is that XP tuning tricks make little if any difference in helping get more out of XP and VE3, at least with VMWare.