Lost a borg :(

[Imitation]

I lost a 2.8ghz P4 this week, pretty sad I was cruising at over 1k PPD with it going. My buddy here at work only has 512megs of ram on it and at start up due to all the crap IT has running, he's using 260 megs on XP pro. After he gets the apps running that he needs to do work he's always paging off the hard drive and usually between 600 to 700 megs he says. So he was getting fed up with the slow machine and closed down everything except for the services which included F@H. Then he shows me the task manager and he's still using 319 megs of page file. He asks if folding has a memory leak and I said probably not. He stops the service, and drops to 263 megs. He was running a tinker at the time and it dropped 56 megs! Not the 6 megs I expected it to. So he restarts the pc and then kills it again with the same result. So I guess the question is, why the heck does the tinker take up 56 megs of page file when it says its only taking up like 4 megs of actual ram? He's not gonna fold anymore until he gets more ram or I can fix the problem! Anyone know why this happens?

 

[MN Scout]

How do you see how much pagefile memory folding is using? I don't know if this is what you are refering to, but on the current computer I'm on F@H is using 10mb ram and 60mb of virtual memory. It's running a p1152_L939_K12M_ext_from638 with core 65. I don't have the time to check what type of protein that is.

His computer is probably showing only 4 mb if all the other programs are using the ram. On the QMDs I've seen the vm go up to 300mb with the mem up to 300 also.

-MN Scout

 

[SmokeRngs]

I lost a 2.8ghz P4 this week, pretty sad I was cruising at over 1k PPD with it going. My buddy here at work only has 512megs of ram on it and at start up due to all the crap IT has running, he's using 260 megs on XP pro. After he gets the apps running that he needs to do work he's always paging off the hard drive and usually between 600 to 700 megs he says. So he was getting fed up with the slow machine and closed down everything except for the services which included F@H. Then he shows me the task manager and he's still using 319 megs of page file. He asks if folding has a memory leak and I said probably not. He stops the service, and drops to 263 megs. He was running a tinker at the time and it dropped 56 megs! Not the 6 megs I expected it to. So he restarts the pc and then kills it again with the same result. So I guess the question is, why the heck does the tinker take up 56 megs of page file when it says its only taking up like 4 megs of actual ram? He's not gonna fold anymore until he gets more ram or I can fix the problem! Anyone know why this happens?

It's normal for Folding to use that much virtual memory. It doesn't need everything in RAM and pushes what it doesn't need out. It's the amount of physical RAM used that matters. Which in the case of the Tinkers isn't much.

When I've got the stuff running that I need for work plus folding, they system is usually using 700+ meg of RAM. It's usually doing a bit of paging. I could help that out a lot by not running Firefox with a bunch of tabs open, but I don't care. I'll just deal with the sluggishness of the system. It wouldn't happen, though if I wasn't running QMD's. With normal or timeless units, I can't notice a difference. I'd bet that he wouldn't notice a difference between Folding running and not running except for watching the amount of memory including virtual memory that's used.

I'll tell you right now that a Tinker is not going to make a bit of difference on that machine. If running two of them on a dually PII 266 with 256 meg of RAM running WinXP makes no difference on that machine, it's not going to be noticeable on a P4 2.8 with 512 meg of RAM.

 

[Imitation]

It's normal for Folding to use that much virtual memory. It doesn't need everything in RAM and pushes what it doesn't need out. It's the amount of physical RAM used that matters. Which in the case of the Tinkers isn't much.

When I've got the stuff running that I need for work plus folding, they system is usually using 700+ meg of RAM. It's usually doing a bit of paging. I could help that out a lot by not running Firefox with a bunch of tabs open, but I don't care. I'll just deal with the sluggishness of the system. It wouldn't happen, though if I wasn't running QMD's. With normal or timeless units, I can't notice a difference. I'd bet that he wouldn't notice a difference between Folding running and not running except for watching the amount of memory including virtual memory that's used.

I'll tell you right now that a Tinker is not going to make a bit of difference on that machine. If running two of them on a dually PII 266 with 256 meg of RAM running WinXP makes no difference on that machine, it's not going to be noticeable on a P4 2.8 with 512 meg of RAM.

Yeah in the end he's still paging a ton of stuff off the hard drive anyway, so folding shouldn't make a difference, but I don't want to push him too hard about it. His biggest concern is how big his page file is, and he does have a decent point but getting rid of folding isn't the cure, another stick of 512 is the only answer.

 

[gnewbury]

<snip>
I'll tell you right now that a Tinker is not going to make a bit of difference on that machine. If running two of them on a dually PII 266 with 256 meg of RAM running WinXP makes no difference on that machine, it's not going to be noticeable on a P4 2.8 with 512 meg of RAM.

Are you saying that it doesn't make a Tinkers damn?
I'll agree that Firefox is a memory hog - It's so bad that on my dual PIII with 512mb of ram it couldn't fold worth a damn if I did not exit firefox occasionally.
on my X2 right now ff is using 85meg and FAH 105 meg (P1140) and 12 meg (p2101).

 

[Mohonri]

I could help that out a lot by not running Firefox with a bunch of tabs open, but I don't care. I'll just deal with the sluggishness of the system.

Here's how you limit Firefox's RAM usage. It's simple, and it works wonders.
1) Open a new tab, type "about:config" (without quotes, natch) in the address bar, and hit enter
2) find browser.cache.memory.capacity, if it exists. If it does, right-click on it, select "Modify", and enter the amount of memory Firefox can use for cache (in KB). I typically set it to 20000, and it's plenty.
3) if browser.cache.memory.capacity isn't there, right-click anywhere, and select "New"->"Integer". Enter "browser.cache.memory.capacity" (without quotes, natch), and then modify it to have the right amount.

Voila, Firefox plays much nicer with RAM.

 

[[H]ugh_Freak]

First off I'd asked your friend if he knows why systems need virtual memory. If he knows the difference between VM usage and the size of the pagefile? Does he know what the Min and Max size settings of the page file are? or even if they are set? Does the system manage the size? If the system manages the size of the page file, it usually allocates between about 1.5 and 2 times the amount of RAM in the machine. The size of the page file has nothing to do with how often the system accesses it or how much is actually being used. Task Manager does not give the number or frequency of page file hits.

Lets take the laptop I'm using right now. Its a P3-800 with a measily 256MB ram. Its using Windows 2000. Task Manager reports I have 261616K of physical RAM. The Commit Charge(aka Page File) says 385304K as the Total (size) the Limit(what the current Max size is) is 435612K while the Peak(not usage - the size) was 433552K.... Now anyone that passed 2nd grade can see the Total size of the page file is way higher then the amount of physical RAM.. however.. it still reports that there is 79072K available of physical RAM. This is all with Task Manager, Firefox, Trillian, AntiVir, UD and about another 23 processes running.

Now Win2Ks and WinXPs memory footprint are a little different. But not all that much. If your friend really thinks the performance issues are page file related, tell him to get a disk access program that lets him see when and what files are being accessed off the hard drive. Some process monitors will even show page file hits. Check majorgeeks.com or your favorite download site for hard drive tools or process monitors. Task Manager should only be used to see what is running and current physical memory usage. And it does a very basic job of that.

In my experience, F@H hits the page file, depending on the core used (Tinker, Gromac, etc) and how often your checkpoints are set, once every 5-20 minutes