Clayton Macleod wrote:
Been too long I guess, I don't recall. For some reason my memory seems to do better with the meat than with the potatoes.
Yeah know that problem, last time I touched sendmail was nearly 5 years ago now, and I looked at the config the other day in shock. :)
Yeah, I addressed the collateral stuff in my next post there. I'm not saying the executive memory space is unimportant. I only said that applications' memory space isn't the executive's memory space. Because it's not, they're definitely seperate from each other, and handled seperately/differently. I simply stated that this setting doesn't affect applications and the paging of their memory. Perhaps it would've been more accurate to say that this setting doesn't *directly* affect applications and their paging activity. Since the only way it affects it is by the fact that if you disable the executive's paging you are left with a smaller amount of RAM that could be available to applications. And indirectly this could/would change the amount of paging the applications experience. But windows comes with a default setting to allow the executive's memory space to be paged out for a reason, because portions of it can be inactive enough to warrant paging it out. No reason for my scanner driver to be in RAM when the scanner hasn't been used or even looked at since bootup, for instance.
This is actually explicitly controllable by the driver, as you will see in other documentation. As you probably know from the discussions regarding reporting of memory usage, windows pages most of most applications to save time when clearing physical ram, if the applications are using most of the ram, this means that lesser scheduled apps will not recieve any priority in the time based components of paging controls - a problem common to most paging systems. This is also the reason that they recommend that your pagefile size is 1 to 1.5x your physical ram or greater - it prevents excess page dumps from ram to disk in order to clear physical space. This action is important, as I have stated before, for a dynamic environment where the running applications and average memory deltas are high. For systems where the application set will fit in physical ram paging is unnecessary and does use excess time on the processor and the bus. The important notice is page faults and the page fault deltas. It's not uncommon in the near extremes of these scenarios that excess page faults can be reduced by setting non defaults. The specific cases I have dealt with (typically high end machines and very large single process applications, or many many user environments) have benefited from this setting, by side effect or not. Other things, such as IOPageLockLimit can also be important, but are often mis-set by users trying to optimise in these areas.
And allowing the executive to be paged would likely mean that driver would indeed be paged out whenever the OS could use that RAM elsewhere. Even if it's only a few dozen k.
In general server machines should not suffer the problems associated with having excess hardware. Ideally, un-used hardware should be disabled. _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
