Virtual memory usage?

[adegnan]

Hey. I know there has been a thread about it but I didn't find it.

I have 1.8 ghz P4 with 768 megs RDRAM and Win XP home.
My video card is Nvidia GeForest 2 MX 100/200 with 32 megs and hardware accelleration set to full.
My Computer says it has 1152 megs of page file virtual memory.
The task manager says there is 212,728k of memory dedicated to Revit.
My file size is 34 megs.

I can frequently hear my hard drive being used when zooming or changing views, etc in Revit.

So can anyone diagnose what this means? I think I have plenty of ram, the processor is not that fast but not that slow either.

So how can I diagnose whether I am being limited by processor speed or whether it is something else?

Thanks!

[mjfarrell]

Ed,

The best set-up for all Windows based machines is
two physical hard drives. With the OS installed on one
and the other dedicated to the virtual memory (page file).
The sound you hear is the machine paging out to the swap file
on the hard drive.
To prevent this on my system I have 2GB RAM and two
5.2 ms access time SATA drives. One is fully dedicated
as the swap file.

[adegnan]

I have excess space on the 2 hard drives that are currently installed. I use the second drive (Western Digital 55 gig) primarily as a backup of all the data on the primary drive. I just re-directed my virtual memory to the second drive and gave it 2304 megs size (that was listed as the top variable size on the C: drive). I eliminated the virtual memory on the C: drive. It gave me a warning that this could prevent a debugging file from being created but I assume that is not a big deal?

[adegnan]

Michael,

This worked quite well! I think there has been a measurable improvement in speed.

I also found now that it has made my save times much faster as well! By 50% or more!!! I can hardly believe it!!!

Further, does it indicate any symptoms of hard drive failure by hearing the read/write process? The I can hear the drive spinning quietly; the difference is that I do not hear the read/write process equally on the D drive as on the C drive. They are both Western Digital HD's but not identical models.

[mjfarrell]

If I remember correctly there are some diagnostic
applications available on the Western Digital site.
They have them there so that customers run them
prior to asking for a replacement drive. It might not
hurt to go get them and run them against your drives.
Also system performance is improved by having
a large on-board cache for the disk drive and the smallest
access time available. I used to only specify SCSI drives
for CADD stations recently the speed and price of SATA
drives has changed my base configuration recommendation.

[Wes Macaulay]

This is a cool tip, guys. I'll have to try this out on some of our computers. Obviously it wouldn't work if you have two drives which are merely partitions of the same physical drive -- they'd have to be two totally separate drives.

[mjfarrell]

I'd really like to see AutoDesk take advantage of a second CPU
as effectively as adding a second drive.
I shiver at the thought of all that power, oooooooh baby!

[FK]

Tips approved by the resident geek. ;-)

Swap goes to the least used drive. If the drive has multiple partitions, swap goes to the busiest partition. Defragment the drive before the placing the swap on it, so that you don't end up with many little swaplings.

If you encounter too much swapping, don't buy another drive, buy more RAM.

It's normal for the drive to be audible, and it differs drastically from model to model. SCSI drives tend to be extra loud because nowadays they are intended for the server room.