> GIMPS has always had a good reputation for not interfering with
> your normal work. To preserve GIMPS' reputation, I'm thinking of
implementing
> the following. In the Options/CPU dialog, prime95 will let you select the
> maximum
> amount of memory the program can use and the hours of the day it can use
it.
> The default would be 80% of RAM (divided by the number of CPUs) during
> nighttime hours only.
>
> Finally, the questions:
>
> Would we be better off disabling P-1 factoring unless the user explicitly
> activates it (knowing that most users won't read enough to turn it on)?
>
Should we? I don't think so... or at least P-1 factoring should be a new
type of work on PimeNet.
> Are there better solutions? It would be nice if prime95 could detect that
> memory thrashing was happening and pause itself until more memory
> was available. Can Windows programs do this?
>
Yes it can, but I don't think this is the best way to go. The system will
from time to time put infrequently used page file on the hard drive when he
approach is total phisical memory limit. But if you leave the system with a
healty amount (lets say 20-25%of total) of phisical memory to work with,
hard page fault (swapping) are going to be nearly non-existant.
Start a timer (each second?), and call
GlobalMemoryStatus
This will give you the current memory state of the machine (Total phisical,
Available phisical, Total PageFile, Available PageFile, Total Virtual,
Available Virtual)
>From there you adjust your memory usage (lower it) according to the
available memory. When you write a file to disk, it should be a good place
to reclaim memory (if available and needed).
> Are the defaults too aggressive (especially the 80% of RAM)?
>
If you always leave 20% of ram to the system to work with, there should not
be a problem.
This is a nice problem, it's going to be interesting to see what you come up
with.
Regards,
David Campeau,
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