What should my virtural memory settings be?Follow

First off, assuming you have Windows XP or newer as your OS, there really shouldn't be a need to adjust the virtual memory setting. It should automatically adjust to whatever you're doing. As long as you don't run out of disk space, you shouldn't worry about it. In fact, you can cause problems by setting it since that'll override the sytems automatic adjustment process and potentially end up with you having a non-optimal amount being managed by the system.

With 1.5GB of ram, the amount of virtual memory really shouldn't matter. Virtual memory is an amount of disk space that is allocated as (amazingly enough) "virtual ram". So if you don't have enough actual ram, data will be paged in and out of disk as needed. There's some complex algorithms involved in doing that as efficiently as possible, but with that much ram, it really shouldn't be an issue.

Given the amount of ram you have on that system, I see two probably causes of a zoning slowness:

1. Slow disk. Unlikely, since I assume the disk is "new" as well, and hopefully pretty fast. You have to remember that the zone files (information about the zonelayout itself) are stored on your local disk. When you zone, it copies that data from the files on disk to memory so the program can access them. If you've got a slow disk, or some other operations tying up the disk, then that transfer could take some time.

Honestly, this shouldn't be a problem. Make sure that you don't have any odd programs starting up when you log in. Check your startup directory in your system and make sure it's empty. Aside from maybe a virus scanner, there's no reason to *ever* have stuff starting up automatically when you log in, doubly so if you use this system as a game machine. Unfortunately, many storebuilt systems will come pre-installed with all the windows utilities pre-started. They do that so people don't have to wait 3 seconds after clicking on a document for Word to open for instance. But having a full office suite running in the backround on your system will kill its performance.

Heh. And if you do have a virus scanner running, I'd strongly recommend turning it off when playing the game.

2. Slow network. It's a new computer. Is the network connection new? In addition to loading the base zone info from local disk, your computer will have to retrieve all the "active" zone information from the server when you zone in. That's going to include essentially a complete list of everyone and everything in the zone, where they are, what they're doing etc. If your ISP is slow, it'll show when you zone.

How fast is your comp at other network stuff? Do pages load up in a browser fast the first time you click on them? How much lag do you get when playing EQ in general (some lag is framerate from your video card, but some is network position update slowness)?


I can say with some certainty that changing your virtual memory setting is very unlikely to decrease your zoning times. On a machine with minimal ram, it will (since the sytem has to do less shuffling around of data), but with that much ram, it's not going to be the problem.

The general rule for virtual memory is one and half times yours availible ram. With xp you don't need to do any adjustment. If you have 2 hard drives then best bet is to have the virtual memory on the hard drive which doesn't have the operating system on it.

I like to have 3 partitions.

1 partition for OS and applications.
1 partition for EQ
1 partition for swap file.

I set the swap file partition size to about 2 times the size of my ram.

sbs. I never said that performance couldn't be improved by playing with virtual memory. I *did* say that in the case of playing a single instance of EQ on a computer with that much ram, there is absolutely no reason to need to adjust VM, nor is there any reasonable expectation that he'll see any performance improvement as a result.

I'm well aware of how VM works. However, it is exactly as I said. It pages data to disk when memory is "full". Note, that it doesn't wait until you're actually out of memory. As I stated, there's an algorythm that calculates available real memory, system use, and the age of the data, and makes a determination as to whether to page out that bit of data. The threshold for "full" is therefore based on the age of the data and the remaining real memory available.

If the only thing he's running on his system is the OS itself and EQ, there is absolutely no reason he should *ever* be directly affected by the virtual memory settings. Not with that much ram. His memory threshold in relation to the "age" of whatever zone and game information he's actively using at the time should ensure that every single active component of EQ being used by his processor is in real memory all the time. Old data will be paged out to VM, but it'll never be used (unless he zones in and out of the same locations over and over or something, but that's still going to be a performance improvement over pulling the zone info from block data off the disk anyway).


VM does not get "fragmented" like regular data does. That's because it's not in block format. It's "raw" bytes of data space. And it'll happily overwrite old stuff, just like ram does. While you can tweak VM specifically for some performance applications (like if you run specific enterprise types of applications on a server and carefully control the size and volume of page data, like in a database application), but for a home system playing a game? He's far more likely to reduce the performance on his system by playing around with the VM settings then improve them.

Setting hard min/max values can potentially ***** up the system for other applications. Again. Unless you run only one specific type of application with very specific memory paging requirements, there's really no reason or benefit to playing around with the VM settings on your system.

Your video card could be the problem too, or part of it.

get one with double the memory, I use the e-GeForce FX 5700LE with 256 MB ddr AGP slot, very good value for the buck.

If you dont have a RAID setup, that would help tremendously too, I have two WD 36.7GB sata 10,000rpm Raptors set in a raid 0, they are screaming fast,I am almost always the first of my group to zone hehe, i heard the 74gb raptors are even faster in a raid 0.

A video card has absolutely nothing to do with zone times, which is what he was complaining about. If he's getting some stuttering while playing, then a video card upgrade could be warrented, but the only thing that affects zoning times is the time it takes to replace the current active zone information with the info for the new zone. That's going to come from two places. Your hard drive contains all the static zone information, and the server contains all the dynamic stuff. That's what affects zonetimes. Period. Since he's got more then enough ram to run all of that in ram directly, then the issue is not storage and shuffling of data segments (which VM would affect), but purely transmission times.

That leaves two sources. Disk and network. He might be able to increase the disk performance a tiny bit, but should not be getting 30 second zonetimes no matter how slow and congested his disk is. Thus, the largest single factor for this particular problem is going to be his network.




Eh? Not really. It *really* depends on how your RAID is set up, and how your data gets laid out on the disks. A simple RAID 0 actually does nothing to improve performance. All it's doing is concatenating two or more drives into one big drive. You actually take a small performance hit doing that, and make your system more vulnerable to a single disk failure.

Concatenation with striping (0+1? 2? Can never remember the numbering), can improve performance, since you're basically utlizing two or more times the heads when writing or reading data. The disk(s) writes data across multiple disks at the same time instead of to one disk at a time, allowing for faster writes, and therefore faster reads when retrieving data written across the disks in that manner. Standard RAID 0 still just writes from top to bottom essentially, so if you don't specify stripping, you're not getting any benefit.

There are downsides and some caveats though. You wont gain much if you stripe your partitions across multiple disks, but still keep your system disk the same as your data disk. The OS (as mentioned earlier in the discussion of VM) is somewhat continously performing small read/write operations on the disk (temp files, paged data in VM, etc). This will always interferre with writes to other sections of the same physical disk. A stripped partition on the same disk still suffers from the seek times between those operations. We're getting down to some small differences here, but it is enough that combined with the overhead of the RAID itself, will nullify any gains from RAID in most situations.

For game playing performance, you're actually usually going to be better off buying two disks, but instead of putting them in a single RAID controller, simply use one for your system disk (C drive on Windows systems), and the other for your games and applications that you install. Put them on two different controllers! That's critical. Your system will come with two IDE controllers inside it. Put your two disks on two different ribbon cables from two different controllers. IDE is a pretty brain dead controller standard. It allows only a read cycle or a write cycle, and all devices on the chain have to wait for a turn with a cycle. If you put both your devices on a single controller, then every time you read data from one and write it to the other, you're taking twice as long to do so as if you'd put the disks on separate controllers.

The absolute worst of course is trying to run some sort of software or bios run RAID on two disks on the same IDE chain. You're going to lose performance all the way around. It's one of those things people buy cause it sounds like it's "fancy", but is actually going to hurt you a bit. If you have a dedicated hardware RAID controller, it'll work better (you didn't mention if this was a hardware raid solution, or just two disks running software raid on top of a normal IDE controller configuration). But again, most systems that advertise RAID, actually just have a special bios setup on the MB that allows the two disks to be more easily accessed by software raid in the OS. It's not "true" hardware raid. The controllers are still IDE, and still have the same limitations.


Um... And that's all ignoring the single disk failure problem. With two separate disks, if one fails, the other is still good. I can replace the failed disk and restore it easily. If one disk of my raid 0 setup fails, I've lost all the data and the system. Good luck getting that back unless you're **** about backups. You're going to be restoring from CD and using your backup tapes, cause that's all you can do.


RAID is s solution for a problem you probably don't have on your home PC. There is almost *zero* reason for you to use it.

What a bunch of nonsence!!!.

A raid 0 is a striped array, it takes the data and splits it in half, putting half on one drive and the other have on another, hence doubling the read/write/seek times. Also, more imortantly, if you are using a Serial ata drive, you cant get the most throughput (serial ATA 150Mbps) unless you are using a raid array with the correct (Intel,in my case, depends on chipset) raid drivers, windows does not provide RAID drivers, to obtain the maximum speed potential for these types of Harddrives. The default drivers that windows provide are Non-RAID and only allow you to get Serial ATA 100Mbps(even if your MOBO,HD,etc.. are equipped to support RAID and 150Mps sata).

If you are not using a raid array, as I suspect that you are not, my overall system performance will be 2 to 4 times faster than yours with the same or comparable drives ( only one other SATA drive that I know of that has a 10,000 Rpm, and the raptor is faster in all performance test, using Sandra or HD Tach. An ex. of my current HD Tach test results are as follows:
Random Access: 8.3ms
Average Read: 99.4MB/s
Burst speed: 190.1MB/s

A little more on raids.......:
Gbaji is very confused on what is and is not a striped array, A RAID 0, like I mentioned, IS a Striped array. A Description from my Motherboard's users manual(ABIT IC7)....

" The ......Serial ATA controller supports the RAID Array of both Striped (RAID 0) and Mirrored (RAID 1). For the Striped RAID set, the identical drives can read and write data in parallel to increase performance. The Mirrored RAID set creates a complete backup of your files. Striped and Mirrored set requires 2 hard disks to do so."

And later...."Striping (RAID 0): This item is recommended for HIGH PERFORMANCE usage." ....ETC.
then you get into the combination of both that requires at least 4 hard drives, but I wont go there, hehe.

Even if you use a IDE controller, as opposed to a SATA controller (like my onboard Intel 82801ER SATA RAID Controller), you will still see a sigificant system performance increase using a RAID 0 configuration versus a non-raid config.\

However, if you dont have an onboard SATA controller, I strongly suggest getting a SATA RAID Controller Card to install and go that option rather than the IDE controller, as it will provide a much faster transfer rate and you will be able to obtain the true potential of your SATA drives and a RAID config.


If you dont know what you're talking about , dont correct others, period. Sorry for my tone, but cant stand people, who know a little, pretending they know everything.

Also , you were right about the disk and the network, but seem to have forgot the video card is the hardware that has to take all that data and display it, its video memory will play some role in how fast you display the new zone. Dont forget that some of the zone data is stored in video memory. With that said, it will be a smaller factor, the hard drive(S) are more important, a raid 0 using the drives I mentioned will have a sigificant impact on zoning speed.

I agree the network is equally important, which is why I suggested certain tweaks (above post), to test your network speed, latency and Line quality go here.... http://www.broadbandreports.com/tools


Of course this gets way off base from the VM question, but if you want High perfomance gaming, A RAID 0 is a must have,period.
Also, check out the links I gave on network and internet tests and tweaks, that will help too.








Edited, Fri Aug 12 03:51:47 2005 by erikofsantarosa