I got a message while playing Civ IV today (which is going very slowly...) that there was too little virtual memory and Windows was increasing the size of the paging file. This reminded me of the talk about the paging file on these forums. It was supposed to make the game run smoother I believe... so where was it again that I have to go in XP to change the size of the paging file? And is there quite a noticable difference? And what size should it be?
So this paging file...
- Thread starter Seanirl
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widdowmaker
Maker of Widdows
- Joined
- Feb 22, 2003
- Messages
- 441
the page file is just a blank part of your hard drive, windows uses it as fake RAM. It is slower than real ram, but what it does is if ram is all used up, and it needs more memory, it writes onto the HD, then recalls from there if needed. But its slow. And you need a big hard drive to have a big file.
Civ 4 is a memory hog, it takes me 1gb ram and my 15gb page file and fills both up. I usualy make the file 20-30gb if i am going to play, just because it takes so much god damned memory.
Civ 4 is a memory hog, it takes me 1gb ram and my 15gb page file and fills both up. I usualy make the file 20-30gb if i am going to play, just because it takes so much god damned memory.
DemonDeLuxe
Warlord
Wolfwood said:
Actually, I think widdowmaker had a typo there and really meant 1.5 GB instead of 15. 15GB page file would be total nonsense.The rule of thumb is to have a page file roughly 1 - 2 times as large as real memory. Windows can't handle more efficiently, anyway.
oldStatesman
Cybernaut
Some people on other forums have also reported this. Making a ludicrously large page file(s) seems to slow down the CTD's. Even though Windows will never use them...the game seems to like that the size is bigger. One person reported making two 4GB page files on different partitions (total 8GB); everytime he bumped up the size of the page file he would get another 10-20 turns out of the game before the inevitable late game crashes.DemonDeLuxe said:
Doesn't make sense, but hey, the hoggish memory usage by the game code doesn't make sense either...
Vaiks
Chieftain
On my machine, a Huge-sized game with 12 civs uses 850MB of my ram. before I upgraded to 2GB ram (had 1 GB) the game used the swapfile and got very slowly, but now, with 2 GB, I disabled the swapfile and it takes the same 850MB.
Runs very smooth.
Another thing you should check is the process priority. I don't know why but 4 out 5 times the game goes to "below normal" priority is the taskmanager. After changing the priority to "High" it runs a lot better!
After loading Civ4 go to the taskmanager, right-click the civ process and set it's priority to the one bellow "realtime".
Runs very smooth.
Another thing you should check is the process priority. I don't know why but 4 out 5 times the game goes to "below normal" priority is the taskmanager. After changing the priority to "High" it runs a lot better!
After loading Civ4 go to the taskmanager, right-click the civ process and set it's priority to the one bellow "realtime".
Ray Patterson
the dude is not in
you change the size of your virtual memory under system>advanced>performance options
I have a question about it as well: I have two harddisks, and currently have a paging file on both. Is that a good idea? Or should I have windows swap on one disk and civ on the other, because as far as I understand it has its own cache?
I have a question about it as well: I have two harddisks, and currently have a paging file on both. Is that a good idea? Or should I have windows swap on one disk and civ on the other, because as far as I understand it has its own cache?
Rodatam
Chieftain
try DISKEEPER
defrag (its a lot better than the windows one) and it does chance the pagefile and defrag it too, if you ask.... (boot time defrag)
defrag (its a lot better than the windows one) and it does chance the pagefile and defrag it too, if you ask.... (boot time defrag)
rbstansbury
Chieftain
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2005
- Messages
- 16
As stated earlier in this thread, a 20-30gb swap file is crazy, the rule of thumb is 1.5x your physical ram. I would think that a swap file as large as 20-30gb would slow Windows down rather than help the situation. I also do not let Windows manage this, I set the min and max to the same, which will help with overall performance. Some people even disable the swap file, this forces windows to use all physical ram, I do not recommend this as it may increase the ctd's
DemonDeLuxe
Warlord
oldStatesman said:
Hehe, using an overly large swap file is a one-way-approach: Yes, you WILL be able to do any actions for a couple of turns more - but afterwards it's getting even harder, since Windows has to fetch something from disk with increasing probability.
One can trust Windows to a certain degree here: By default, the page file has no fixed size at all but increases and shrinks as necessary - and it will never, ever grow to 15 GB (unless you have 10 GB of real memory which presumably nobody among us does).
@Ray Patterson
The ideal combination would be to have three disks and hving the system (Windows), the applications/games and the swap file seperated on those three (data like images and music could be stored on the 3rd, too). That way, you reduce the probability that windows needs to access different files on the same drive at the same time, forcing the read/write head to move around and wasting time for seeking.
With two drives, it depends where you have CIV installed. If you use the default path, it shares the same partition with Windows, so putting a page file (with a fixed size resulting in a slight performance improvement) ONLY on the other drive would be an excellent idea.
Inhowfar the CIV cache and it's position plays a role here, I cannot really judge, sorry.
Ray Patterson
the dude is not in
okay thanks, I'll try that.
