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Optimizing the virtual memory settings

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by lisav

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I have a client that recently upgraded the RAM in his machine from 128mb to 639mb of RAM. His system locks up now and than depending on what he's doing, such as scanning and emailing his scanned document. Before he upgraded his RAM, I checked his system performance when he would start having issues and it would be at 31%. Well yesterday, even with his upgraded RAM his system performace when he first booted would be at 53% and than after working on the computer a while, it would drop down to 31%. I looked at his Page file and the initial was 192 and the Max was something like 368. His page file hasn't changed since he updated his RAM. I was wondering if this could be the cause and if I should change his page file size. The only thing is I don't really know the formula for virtual memory size on Windows 98 or if it's the same as Windows XP. I know with 512MB of RAM or more on WinXP that the initial size should be half the total of installed RAM and the max should be 3 times RAM. Is this the same, or do you have any other suggestions on increasing his system performance. He has 30GB of free space on his hard drive. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

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by tech_wiz03

to fix go into the system.ini file and under the [396 enh] section you should find [vache] section if it is not there put it in. normally windows starts the file cache at 0 but within seconds of start-up it will grow to with-in 97% of available memory. add the following two lines to stop hogging memory:
MinFileCache=8192
MaxFileCache=8192
This if system stability or performance suffers increase to 16384 or 32768 or 65536 but keep both values the same. This will free resources.

Second problem is the dreded Virtual cache or swap space. Windows loves to start it at 0 and grow it to 90% of disk space. This slows the system, causes bad fragmentation and is known to also cause programs to fail. set the virtual cache pagefile size to min and max of 4 X total memory installed but with absolute max of 512mb. so if you have 128mb ram or above use 512mb.

Third problem is windows 98 cannot handle more than 511mb of onboard ram programs will start to fail for unexplained reasons so you must either reduce memory to 512mb or convert the excess to a ramdrive or something similar to make windows stable again.

hope this helps
rick

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by jardinier

Answer number 1 seems to cover your question pretty thoroughly. But just a couple more ideas: if the swap file can be placed on a separate disc or partition, this could also help.
Also Norton's Speed Disk (part of Norton's Utilities) is a utility that is capable of moving the swap file into one single block, normally at the start of the drive so it can be accessed faster rather than letting it get all over the place and being extremely slow to read from.

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