"Ran Out Of Virtual Memory" Question

[hexagram23]

I was playing "Mass Effect" earlier and the game froze. I got a message saying something about "ran out of virtual memory, need to free up more memory"....something like that.

What exactly does that mean? I'll give you any info you want for my computer, but I'm not sure what would be relevant in this case. When I open Task Manager there is generally about 15-16 Processes running at all times, no idea what half of these do. Not even sure if that's relevant to the problem but I figured I'd mention it.

My system has 3 Gigs of RAM, and I'm using Windows Vista, if that's any help.

[altwight]

think this means restart your computer

[theo]

Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> [Performance] Settings -> Advanced -> [Virtual Memory] Change.

What size is your virtual memory set to? Typically it is best to leave it at System Managed Size and then Windows will increase the size as needed.

[hexagram23]

Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> [Performance] Settings -> Advanced -> [Virtual Memory] Change.

What size is your virtual memory set to? Typically it is best to leave it at System Managed Size and then Windows will increase the size as needed.

Here is a picture of my info:

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f4...mFFXI/Info.png

I changed it to System Manage Size since you said to try it out. Before it was on "Automatically Manage Paging File Sized For All Drives". Dunno what that even means.

[Norellicus]

Set it to a custom size and just use 4096 minimum/maximum, it's the highest you can use and is minimum of what you should have it set to based on your RAM.

And I don't know what those other drive letters are, but if they're HDD(s) and are internal to the computer, put that 4096 on one of the drives that's NOT your boot drive.

(If they're just partitions on the same physical HDD then you can leave it on C or wherever you want, physical disk difference is the only way to get a performance boost out of it)

[Day]

Norellicus, could you explain how you came up with that number based off the amount of RAM? Just curious how you come up with the number if you don't set it to system managed size.

[Norellicus]

Best practice says your pagefile should be at minimum 1.5x your physical RAM, up to maximum 2-3x (depending on HDD availability and other factors); with 3GB of RAM, you're not even going to technically make the 1.5x at 4096 but it's the highest virtual swap amount windows will handle. With 3GB physical RAM you shouldn't need a lot of paging anyway.

Point being windows is always really slow to update swapfiles when they reach capacity, so you end up with overflow issues like the OP described. Setting it to a custom size ensures the maximum amount is pre-blocked on the HDD sectors instead of consuming read/write cycles later while windows tries to sort it out itself.

It also ensures continuity of the file on the physical sectors, since swapfiles can't be moved/reorganized (easily) in the event fragmentation occurs.

[hexagram23]

Set it to a custom size and just use 4096 minimum/maximum, it's the highest you can use and is minimum of what you should have it set to based on your RAM.

And I don't know what those other drive letters are, but if they're HDD(s) and are internal to the computer, put that 4096 on one of the drives that's NOT your boot drive.

(If they're just partitions on the same physical HDD then you can leave it on C or wherever you want, physical disk difference is the only way to get a performance boost out of it)

What should the initial size be? I'll set max at 4096 but I don't know what the initial size should be.

Also what does the last three lines mean?

Minimum Allowed 16 MB
Recommended 4605 MB
Currently Allocated 3370 MB

I dunno if this has to do with anything but I only have 3 Gigs of RAM, and my system will only recognize 4 Gigs total. Is that related to the "recommended 4605 MB" or something totally different?

Thanks for the info.

[Day]

I think he meant to use 4096 as both the min and max?

[Norellicus]

It's related but MS was dumb and just used some basic math to come up with that 'recommended' figure. It still won't let you use more than 4096 for a single page file.

And yeah you want to set 4096 as the minimum and maximum both, since you can't go any higher might as well block out the entirety of what you can get.

[hexagram23]

Ok now it says this:

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f4...XI/problem.png

Fred.

[Norellicus]

Set it to 4095.

Sorry, forgot it has to be absolute less than 4096.

I hate Windows.

[hexagram23]

Set it to 4095.

Sorry, forgot it has to be absolute less than 4096.

I hate Windows.

Windows seems pretty damn stupid man.

Thanks for the info.

[Reality]

is there a point of having a page file if you're running a 64-bit operating system with 8GB of system memory?

[Norellicus]

Yes.

Most systems should still use the page file for prefetching information beyond the limit of your physical memory addressing. Even if your physical memory can handle all of it, unless you're hurting for HDD space there's no real reason not to have one.

[Kohan]

Plus a lot of applications, especially older ones, will not work if you don't have a page file.

[Casey_]

Also... mass effect is based off the unreal engine, and that error is classic, it dates back to Unreal 1.. it could just be bad coding causing a memory leak. Usually the only way to "fix" it was to increase the "cachesizemegs" option in unreal.ini, but i dont even know if you can do that at all in mass effect. Or if you can use the console use "obj garbage" and "flush" every 10 or so minutes

[hexagram23]

Also... mass effect is based off the unreal engine, and that error is classic, it dates back to Unreal 1.. it could just be bad coding causing a memory leak. Usually the only way to "fix" it was to increase the "cachesizemegs" option in unreal.ini, but i dont even know if you can do that at all in mass effect. Or if you can use the console use "obj garbage" and "flush" every 10 or so minutes

*doesn't really understand anything you just said*

*nods and smiles*

Seriously though, yeah I use the console if you mean the cheat thingy....and yeah I can look in the "Mass Effect" ini, I know where it is, but what exactly would cachesizemegs be under and what would I increase it to if I find it?

[Casey_]

[Engine.GameEngine]
CacheSizeMegs


just double it, the original unreals was set to 4 mb lol