Virtual Memory Paging File

S

SSI01

Charter Member
I'm running Sim Skunk Works F-84F on my machine and getting excellent performance up to a point where the sim stops dead in its tracks, after perhaps 30 or 35 minutes. I don't lose the screen but it locks in place. After pressing ctrl-alt-del to get to the desktop I find a dialog box mentioning my machine is out of available memory and the system is going into its Virtual Memory Paging File to rewrite it. Do I need to increase memory or is there another fix for this?

PS this is an excellent aircraft recreation.
 
Are you running Windows 32 bit? If yes, there is not much you can do other than lowering the scenery sliders (e.g. level of detail radius and scenery objects). If possible you should use 64bit. Windows 32bit limits the memory which FSX can use to ~2GB, this has nothing to do with the size of the paging file and any RAM you add above 4GB for a 32bit OS is useless for FSX. With 64bit, FSX can use up to ~4GB memory which is enough for normal use.
 
In most cases FSX/P3D out of memory crash happens when 4GB virtual address space becomes full. This has nothing to do with page file or system ram per se and 4GB is just the upper limit of an 32-bit program VAS which can physically reside in system RAM chips or on page file. Now, if you have 4GB or less RAM, then yes, purchasing more RAM is a good choice. If you on the otherhand have nowadays common 8GB or more then no, because FSX cannot address more VAS than 4GB. If you have enough of RAM to "give" FSX all the 4GB (technically in that memory space exists a whole lot of other stuff than FSX, but that is not important here) all you can do is lower the settings to free some VAS: complicated addon airports, several complicated sceneries active in library, large HD textures, air traffic and so on are one of the big VAS consumers.

Edit: and yeah, OS version (32-bit vs 64-bit) is a big factor here too, like hschuit said. Although with large address aware flag enabled in the program, it can use all the remaining RAM from the OS, that is practically somewhere over 3GB with Windows 7. For Win XP there was a need to enable over 3GB ram during boot, but I don't remember anymore if it was fixed with some Service Packs. It is over 8 years since I've used XP in my home computers.
 
SSI01 said:
I'm running Sim Skunk Works F-84F on my machine and getting excellent performance up to a point where the sim stops dead in its tracks, after perhaps 30 or 35 minutes. I don't lose the screen but it locks in place. After pressing ctrl-alt-del to get to the desktop I find a dialog box mentioning my machine is out of available memory and the system is going into its Virtual Memory Paging File to rewrite it. Do I need to increase memory or is there another fix for this?

PS this is an excellent aircraft recreation.
Click to expand...

I think you should. On average, make the pagefile/virtual memory 1.5 times your RAM and put it on a non OS, non FSX partition. Also, make the start en en values exactly the same.

Hope this helps

Dumonceau
 
Dumonceau said:
I think you should. On average, make the pagefile/virtual memory 1.5 times your RAM and put it on a non OS, non FSX partition. Also, make the start en en values exactly the same.

Hope this helps

Dumonceau
Click to expand...
This is really not like this with modern computers equipped with enough RAM. For most cases it is just advisable to leave the whole PF to OS managed because pretty much 100% of modern software doesn't require or use PF at all so there is really no need to fiddle with it. However, one might use some vintage software that require PF and refuses to work without it and that is pretty much the only reason to leave it enabled. Lot's of people run their computers happily with the whole PF turned off nowadays, because your typical 8GB or 16GB ram can pracitcally run two or more really heavy 32-bit software together, something that is almost never done in home environment (like running two heavy games at the same time). Even if you have less than 4GB physical RAM, PF usage is really not wanted as even if PF would be in SSD, it is terribly slow compared to RAM and would kill the performance of FSX, game or some other memory intensive program. It is just advisable to get more physical RAM so you don't need to use the PF.

But all this is moot, if OPs FSX is capping the 4GB VAS and no amount of extra RAM or PF is going to help in that.
 
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