how to keep programs in memory?

[her34]

edit: it seems DisablePagingExecutive is not the answer

i got a gig of ram. after opening a lot of programs, i notice that after time if i open a window that's been minimized it takes longer. when i first had all the programs opened, everything is snappy and comes up immediately. is there a fix for my problem?

winxp sp2

 

[KoolDrew]

DisablePagingExecutive will do nothing for performance. It only works for ntoskrnl.exe which is such a small size it won't make any dfference.

 

[Nothinman]

It's not supposed to prevent that, please try and do some research before changing settings that you don't understand.

DisablePagingExcutive just tells NT not to page out parts of the kernel that haven't been used in a long time, all you gain by setting that is locking parts of the kernel into memory that you haven't used thus wasting that memory.

 

[bsobel]

This is why, don't know how to disable it however...

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: bsobel
This is why, don't know how to disable it however...

From that link:

This does not mean that the memory pages used by the process are immediately discarded from RAM. In fact, these pages may remain resident for quite a while. They are simply flagged so that the system can use them for other processes as necessary. This is significantly faster than waiting on the system's standard trimming algorithm.

It shouldn't kick the program's pages out of memory until something else requests the RAM. Unfortunately, I don't think there is an easy way to lock a program's pages in physical RAM and tell Windows not to page it out. Plus, if you switch away to do other things and your other programs need the RAM (which evidently they do if the one you minimized is getting paged out), then you'd just be shortchanging the other programs and forcing them to use the swapfile.

Check out your Peak Commit Charge in Task Manager after you've been running for a while. If it's more than 1GB, then you just don't have enough RAM to keep all those programs in memory at once. In that case, something has to get swapped out to disk, and Windows will choose the pages that haven'e been accessed in the longest amount of time.

 

[Woody419]

Right click on any shortcut you want to speed up and select properties. Look in the Target. At the very end of this add /prefetch:1 to it. This will load the application into your ram for faster startup times. Note: may not work for all programs.

 

[Nothinman]

Right click on any shortcut you want to speed up and select properties. Look in the Target. At the very end of this add /prefetch:1 to it. This will load the application into your ram for faster startup times. Note: may not work for all programs.

As I understand it that only affects startup times and causes Windows to use prefetch data from %WINDIR%\Prefetch instead of loading directly from the executable like normal. This will have no affect on the apps working set size after it's loaded and certainly will not disable shrinking of the working set on minimization.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Woody419
Right click on any shortcut you want to speed up and select properties. Look in the Target. At the very end of this add /prefetch:1 to it. This will load the application into your ram for faster startup times. Note: may not work for all programs.

This is complete BS postulated by the folks at tweakxp. It's based on them noticing that windows media player has a prefetch command line swtich and then surmizing (completely incorrectly) that the OS somehow parses off this 'special' command line switch from all applications and uses it to seed the prefetch cache.

Btw, prefetching does not load pre-load the app into memory, it layouts the app on disk so when it is loaded it loads faster.

Bill

 

[Woody419]

Another idea that probably won't work is to use the Task Manager to set the process priority. Right click on the Process to change the priority.

Read more here: Set program priority inside Windows

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Woody419
Another idea that probably won't work is to use the Task Manager to set the process priority. Right click on the Process to change the priority.
Read more here: Set program priority inside Windows

Ugh. Seriously, you don't understand the problem, so kindly stop posting made up and irrelevant solutions.

Bill

 

[her34]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: bsobel
This is why, don't know how to disable it however...

From that link:

This does not mean that the memory pages used by the process are immediately discarded from RAM. In fact, these pages may remain resident for quite a while. They are simply flagged so that the system can use them for other processes as necessary. This is significantly faster than waiting on the system's standard trimming algorithm.

It shouldn't kick the program's pages out of memory until something else requests the RAM. Unfortunately, I don't think there is an easy way to lock a program's pages in physical RAM and tell Windows not to page it out. Plus, if you switch away to do other things and your other programs need the RAM (which evidently they do if the one you minimized is getting paged out), then you'd just be shortchanging the other programs and forcing them to use the swapfile.

Check out your Peak Commit Charge in Task Manager after you've been running for a while. If it's more than 1GB, then you just don't have enough RAM to keep all those programs in memory at once. In that case, something has to get swapped out to disk, and Windows will choose the pages that haven'e been accessed in the longest amount of time.

Peak Commit Charge reaches ~650mb max for me. after running a while bringing up windows is delayed and i can hear hdd activity.



i thought getting a gig would mean never having to deal with delays again if i stayed under