Workstation RAM usage

T

toykilla

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Jun 10, 2007
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I am struggling to understand what is going on with my new CAD workstation. I am trying to tweak it for optimal performance, so the first thing I did was disable the pagefile in order to try and force everything to RAM (it has 12GB). Before doing this I was using 6-8GB in the pagefile, and less than 1GB of RAM.

Apparently it is still using a pagefile after this change, but if I am reading everything correctly, the pagefile is being forced into RAM rather than hard disk. Is my interpretation correct?

Performance seems a bit slow still, and there is a lot of lag when turning models on and off within large assemblies. Graphics performance is fine, so my guess is there are some hard disk access issues to overcome.

Thoughts?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging
read what paging and a "page file" is used for, then think about what happens if you put a page file in a portion of the RAM. having a page file and not using it (not running out of RAM) doesnt take anything away from the performance of the computer. its when you run out of RAM and start paging that you slow down. ensure that doesnt happen, and you dont have to worry about messing with the page file..

it looks like you still have a 132mb page file, probably the initial, system managed size.
this is how you disable it completely...
http://www.overclock.net/faqs/28041-how-disable-page-file.html

doing so however, can cause programs, windows or the whole computer to crash when you run out of room in RAM, as there is no place left to fit everything in memory and the computer doesnt know how to handle it gracefully.
 
The PF label is just a mislead. It says nothing about data in the page file.
 
Here to make the ever famous let Windows manage Windows comment.

Seriously though, trying to tweak Windows too much it can do more harm than good. As you said yourself, the performance isn't that good. It does not matter how much RAM you have, PF and other services are there for a reason. Some things require them. My main work horse also has 12GB of RAM (see sig) I haven't done any 'tweaking' or anything to it; runs like a dream. Even running maxed out (all 12 GB being used) it is still snappy.
 
Performance seems a bit slow still, and there is a lot of lag when turning models on and off within large assemblies. Graphics performance is fine, so my guess is there are some hard disk access issues to overcome.

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

I believe the slowness does not have anything to do with the PF usage especially because the system says you have over 6GB free ram. My first guess for slowness is you have a system with a lot of slow cores.
 
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What is the speed in gHz?

Also, the likely problem is your disk system is very slow (just a single disk?). If you are turning the models on and off, can I assume that they are being read from the disk at that time?

Behind a system of that nature I would go for at least a 5 disk RAID 5. If the funds allow SSDs would be ideal.
 
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