"your computer is low on memory" Win 7 x64 8GB RAM

snedie

snedie

snedie

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Can't fathom this one at all.

When I launch games I keep hitting the error "your computer is low on memory", which also causes my screens to go black (note, windows is still completely responsive, and if I hit the power button the display comes back and the pc shuts down as normal).

RAM usage generally doesn't get above 6GB in most games, and very rarely over 7: E.g, just happened prior to this post when playing DCS A10c, RAM didn't get over 5.5GB.

It first started when I disabled my paging file (don't see the need in one given the speeds of SSD's and sizes of RAM modules vs price), so the obvious first choice was to enable it again (Initial Size 400MB, Max Size 2048MB), but still have the same problem.

Any insights as to what can cause this?

[edit] System Spec:

MB: Asus P55-GD80
RAM: Corsair 8GB Kit (1600Mhz)
CPU: Intel i5 @ 4Ghz (Water)
PSU: Corsair 950Watt
GPU's: Dual Radeon 5970 2GB (XFire)
Storage: 2x Corsair F40 SSd's, 2x WD Caviar Green 2TB (Don't ever buy these!), 3x WD Caviar Black 1TB (Raid 5)
 
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snedie said:
It first started when I disabled my paging file (don't see the need in one given the speeds of SSD's and sizes of RAM modules vs price), so the obvious first choice was to enable it again (Initial Size 400MB, Max Size 2048MB), but still have the same problem.
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Have you set it to Windows Managed?
 
snedie said:
Nope, would that make a difference to having it manually set to the same settings?
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Well the settings you specified (Initial Size 400MB, Max Size 2048MB) aren't anywhere near what Windows will allocate. Try setting it to Windows managed and report back :)
 
For diagnostic purposes, you could put the pagefile on another drive with more space, but it'll have to be much bigger than 2GB. Set it 12GB -16GB.
 
Windows usually puts it at 1.5 times the ram installed!
If you are having a SSD it is not a wise choice!
But I would say put 4096MB constant size for the page file and see if that helps.
 
Could this thread finally debunk the silly belief of "I don't need a pagefile because I know better than Windows" that so many seem to have around here?

No, probably not.
 
I have a 2048 MB page file on my SSD, but forgot to set a page file on my other drives.

This has just reminded me. Now I have a page file set to "System managed" on my other 3 drives.
 
TheVoice said:
Could this thread finally debunk the silly belief of "I don't need a pagefile because I know better than Windows" that so many seem to have around here?

No, probably not.
Click to expand...

The whole concept of a page file is flawed if it isn't on a dedicated drive with high IOPS (So RAID or SSD), especially considering I can grab 32GB of ram for the same price as two 250GB (or even 2TB) drives, and achieve much greater speeds, and keep everything in RAM: Most enterprise webservers do this to some degree, I even owned an HP server with 128GB of ram installed last year and used the hard drives alone to run a swap partition for linux (If your curious it was used to host network simulation software, now I run it all off my i5 rig seen as it's just me using the software now rather than 15 other guys).

Anyway back to the topic at hand, setting the page file to 12GB has solved the issue. Something to note is that for the period of time that the games did run, they did so with considerably less stuttering than with the page file.
 
Why do you have a pagefile set on all your drives? That's completely unneeded. Windows Managed will set a very high pagefile regardless of whether you need it or not. So if you have 16GB RAM then Windows will set aside up to 24GB of disk space.....quite bonkers.

Besides, Windows will decide on what pagefile to use depending on the drive that's fastest for the task at hand.

Use the resource centre in Windows 7 to monitor PF usage over normal usage over several days and then manually set your pagefile accordingly. This saves space on your SSD. Your PF should really be on the fastest drive possible as well.

I have 16GB RAM and rarely does my actual PF usage go above 1GB so my min/max is set to 1024MB, after this I monitored via Performance Monitor over normal usage and the PF usage peak never exceeds 11.8% of that 1GB allocation even with VMs/Lightroom/PS running which is what I'd expect. I am a heavy photo editor and do edit videos on a weekly basis as well as being a gamer - To give you an idea of the kind of tasks my PC does and the actual Pagefile usage.

Do the same, manually set then monitor but above all things, sort the memory low issue out first as I don't think it's pagefile related, you should always have a pagefile though, for Win7 a minimum size of 800MB is recommended.
 
mrk said:
Do the same, manually set then monitor but above all things, sort the memory low issue out first as I don't think it's pagefile related
Click to expand...

Before we go through all the PF recommendations, lets check it's the actual issue and not totally unrelated :)
 
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