physical and virtual memory experiment

[donnie]

I decided to see exactly what the memory constraints were when running gs and cubase in Win98. I turned on the panels that monitor physical ram and virtual ram. First of all my machine has 256 megs of ram however w/NOTHING running Windows98 eats up 126 megs of physical ram! Can this be right? As a former mac user I am used to an OS using between 10-20 megs! Next when I load up a brass choir (trumpet solo, trumpet
section, horn solo, horn section, trombone solo, trombone section, tuba) I am left w/ 6 megs of physical ram. Is this normal or is there a way to tweak things were they will run better. I can only assume that with virtually NO physical ram left that things can not be running as well as they could. By the way I have virtual memory set to 512 min and max incase anyone was wondering.

dc

interested to hear responses to this one!

[Busch]

When Windows initializes it allocates half of the available for the OS and applications, which is what you\'re seeing. On my 128MB system, it allocates 64MB. I assume you\'re monitoring memeory with System Monitor. If so, set it to view allocated mem, unused physical mem, and swapfile in use. Use the bar graphs. Start System Monitor before you start GS. Load GS and watch physical memory shrink and allocated memory grow as you load .gigs.

BTW, allocating memory is not the same as using memory. Windows is just making that memory readily available for the OS and apps, that\'s all that allocating means.