Hi!

I was wondering about something:

I have a 320Gb hardisk. It is partitionned (don't know if it's the right word...) in 2 drives. One of 50Go (called C drive) and one of 250Go (called E drive).
On the 50Go one, all my Program Files are (as Poser and else), on the 250Go, it's My Documents.
I have 4Gb RAM (3,37 as the system window says).

When i do a render in Poser with many items and textures, what does Poser use to manage textures and memory? Does it use the available space on the hard drive also? If so, does it use only the space on the partition it is installed in, or all the harddisk?

If you're running Windows (and I guess if your hard drives are called C and E then you are), it's Windows itself rather than Poser that uses disk space to supplement existing physical memory. It sets up a special file called a swapfile or paging file. To quote the 'Performance Options' window; 'A paging file is an area on the hard disk that Windows uses as if it were RAM'.

If you haven't configured it yourself, the paging file will almost certainly be on your C drive.

So how could i configure it so this paging file will be on my E drive (so could use much more space)?

OK: here goes for the Win XP or Win 2000 procedure - if you have Vista the advice might be different. Go carefully with this - it's a pretty fundamental system setting. I'm not being patronising, but don't change it unless you're confident of doing so.

Right-click on My Computer and choose 'Properties' from the popup menu. In the window that appears, click on the 'Advanced' tab; click on the 'Settings' button in the 'Performance' box.

Click on the 'Advanced' tab in the window that appears. Click on the 'Change' button in the 'Virtual memory' box.

The window that now appears shows your current and recommended settings (see mine in the picture). You'll need to select drive C and click on 'No Paging File', then select drive E in your case, click on 'Custom Size' and select the minimum and maximum sizes you want.

If you make the min and max sizes the same, the paging file will be permanent and won't change as the demand on RAM changes - this is reckoned to be a more efficient use of the paging file. In my case I just took the size that Windows recommended and made it my fixed size.

Bear in mind though that huge amounts of virtual memory aren't necessarily an advantage. From what I've read you don't need more virtual memory than you have physical RAM - and if you have 4Gb RAM you might not even need that much. I have 1Gb of RAM backed by a 1Gb swapfile.

You'll need to reboot your computer for this to take effect, and Windows will prompt you to do this.

Which Windows version do you have?
Where you do that is different on different windows versions. It is in 'System Properties' -> Advanced -> Performance -> 'Settings' button ; but there are different ways to get to that on different windows versions.
You could search your help for 'virtual memory'. That will tell you how to change the page file(s) settings on your system (each drive volume can have a page file).

Unless you are encountering memory problems, it is probably best to allow windows to manage the page file (default); Windows will increase the page file size automatically if it is needed.

Is there many thread for this subject ... WinXP allocate only 2 Go each process ... 

Load taskmngr by Ctrl+Alt+Del and Tab "process" you will see all process with the size of memory allocated .

When i have a big scene under poser, it use 600 - 700 Mo of Ram and ~1300 - 1400 Mo of virtual memory = 2000 Mo just for poser !!!!!

You can, at your own risk, use the /3GB switch in your boot.ini for allocate 3 Go by process .

I have Vista with 2Gig physical RAM - I've adjusted my pagefile to twice that amount - it does help a lot when using memory intensive programs

Sheila

If you setup a large pagefile then (especially on the main drive) make sure you keep the drive defragmented or you could significantly shorten its lifespan..  

not sure for sure, but I think Win 2k can't address more than 4G of memory. I do know that you'll see a performance 'hit' once you go from speedy RAM to actual hard drive memory..;)

The paging file is not the thing to change in this case. Thats set according to the available RAM... 2GB RAM use 1GB paging file (or whatever is right for your setup). In fact setting it too big can be either just a waste disk space or even worse, 'encourage' the OS to do more disk reads (slow) instead of holding data in RAM (quick) What you want to do is change the location of the 'scratch disk'. For example Photoshop has its own settings for location and order of scratch disks, nothing to do with your paging file! If a program doesn't have that setting it may be using the built in 'temp' locations provided by the OS. You'll find four of them in the system settings/environment variables. Set them to point to drive E: or wherever the space/speed is.

Quote - What you want to do is change the location of the 'scratch disk'. For example Photoshop has its own settings for location and order of scratch disks, nothing to do with your paging file! If a program doesn't have that setting it may be using the built in 'temp' locations provided by the OS. You'll find four of them in the system settings/environment variables. Set them to point to drive E: or wherever the space/speed is.

That's a good point. Poser 6 upwards uses your TEMP folder as its render cache; I'd forgotten that.

Unless you really know what and why you're doing, I suggest to leave the page file settings alone. Odds are that the engineers at Microsoft who set the defaults know more about Windows' memory management than we all together. Poser 7 is using the user temp folder also for its texture cache to store MipMaps for FireFly rendering. For scenes with many large textures, this can easily be a couple hundred MBs or more. If you want this to be in a different location you can change it in the misc tab of the Poser prefs.

Quote - Unless you really know what and why you're doing, I suggest to leave the page file settings alone. Odds are that the engineers at Microsoft who set the defaults know more about Windows' memory management than we all together.

That's not entirely true. The default is to just grow as things need it. The result is a whole bunch of highly fragmented pieces of virtual memory. Since Virtual Memory is supposed to act like extra memory, it needs to be really fast....and hunting down pieces all over a disk is terribly inefficient.

The best solution would be to use the mandatory 512 on C, and then allocate the rest on the fastest disk. Make sure both disks (if it's not all on C) are completely defragmented, because setting it at once won't guarantee it will not be fragmented:(

You can defragment your system by turning off VM, defragging, then turning it back on. Things might have changed with Vista. I have never seen it.

*"...I suggest to leave the page file settings alone."

*Stewer - Is your 3GB switch still working?

For Poser 6 it works just as it used to, Poser 7 is already compiled as large address aware.

Stewer - Thank you, that's just what I wanted to hear!  THe Hardware Technical forum lead me to your site, some time ago.  I'm was/am too much of a scaredy cat to risk needing to bug you about this, so I've thought time would tell.

What does Large Address Aware imply, 3GBs?

Thanks again!

An application marked as "large address aware" is telling Windows "it's OK to give me more than 2GB of (virtual or real) memory, I know how to deal with it". A modified Windows XP (the /3GB flag) will hand out up to 3GB of memory to such applications, 64 bit versions of Windows will hand out up to 4GB.

Aha, thanks again stewer!

Do Large Address Aware applications haev a limit to the amount of memory it can ask for, and if so why?