How do I let Ryzom take more memory?

[marct]

OK, I have been playing, and switched out to see some other app, and have checked the Process monitor to see that Ryzom has only consumed about 560 MB of my 1GB of memory. I would like to allow it to use more like 800MB, or even force it to use that much.

If I had 2GB of memory, couldn't it theoretically have almost everyhitng in memory so that My TP, and respawn times were much much lower?

Any help is appreciated. and btw, I did poke around a bit in the configuration files and did not immediately see where I would do this.

[thexdane]

actually having 2gb of mem is actually bad for your systen, a flaw in windows coding.

anyways to answer your question no it can't use more memory and you can't make it use more memory, using more memory is actually a bad thing. too much memory usage can make your system unstable.

when memory usuage goes out of control it's called a memory leak and can crash your system.

a coder can answer this a bit better on why it's a bad idea

[xcomvic]

Originally Posted by thexdane

actually having 2gb of mem is actually bad for your systen, a flaw in windows coding.

anyways to answer your question no it can't use more memory and you can't make it use more memory, using more memory is actually a bad thing. too much memory usage can make your system unstable.

when memory usuage goes out of control it's called a memory leak and can crash your system.

a coder can answer this a bit better on why it's a bad idea

actually, if you have Windows 64, and a 64bit processor, 2gigs is awesome.

Try it I am, it's a bit buggy (still in beta) but awesome!

[leone2nd]

Marct, you can make it to use more memory, just allow your graphics card to handle more system RAM via BIOS, allocate the full capacity of your system RAM mem your card can handle. Other than that you have to overclock your memory settings or even your graphic card RAM modules, but I dont know if this will be of any help except a slight improvement of fps (but I dont recommend it may damage the modules). Loading times in Ryzom IMHO depend on mamory speed and not on memory capacity. Faster 2 way RAM and 64 bit arch. may help. Personally I wont get to use any 64bit components untill after some 5 to 8 months, IMO they will get more attention and improvement by then and onwards.

[dazman76]

Originally Posted by thexdane

actually having 2gb of mem is actually bad for your systen, a flaw in windows coding

Hmm, I did a search on this subject, and couldn't find any notes or documents on an XP problem with 2GB - in that case, I would say it's absolutely fine. People hear about coding flaws in Windows all the time, and to be honest the ones regarding low-level stuff like memory access are usually down to people's specific configurations. 2GB should work perfectly well with 32bit WinXP.

Originally Posted by thexdane

when memory usuage goes out of control it's called a memory leak and can crash your system

Memory leaks are bad, but they are generally only caused by programs crashing, or badly written memory deallocation code. I haven't seen Ryzom eat any memory so far, in fact even when it crashes to the bug report, windows *appears* to clean up correctly after it. Memory leaks were a big thing back with Windows95/98 - the newer versions of Windows are much, much tighter with that kind of thing. In the days of 95/98, you could almost guarantee that a crashed program or process would leave at least some of it's memory still allocated (and essentially unusable) after termination.

Originally Posted by leone2nd

Loading times in Ryzom IMHO depend on memory speed and not on memory capacity

This can vary from program to program, but the main factor is always hard drive speed. To give an example, say you're travelling from Fyros to Matis. You currently have the Fyros zone loaded in memory. For arguments sake, we'll say that you can't force Ryzom to have the Matis zone in memory at this point, so it has to be loaded from the HD when you hit the portal. Memory access speed is far, *far* in excess of hard drive access speed, so the limiting factor is the slowest factor - the hard drive. Because of this, the only way to speed up travelling from one zone to another is to have both zones in memory at the time of hitting the portal. However, since there are quite a few more than 2 zones in Ryzom, I doubt a machine could contain enough memory to hold all the zones, and thus you would always find travelling to zones that aren't loaded in memory would still require hard drive access.

Also, marct is asking about system memory, not AGP or graphics related memory :-) The bulk of information used by Ryzom is system memory, i.e. zone, player, mob, npc, resource information. Setting your AGP memory usage to higher than the actual memory on your graphics card will cause AGP to use system memory for graphics and texture information. Although AGP access to system memory is fast, it's still not as fast as the graphics card accessing it's own onboard memory, and can actually cause slowdown and poor performance if you're not careful. As a rule, I find it best not to allow AGP to use system memory at all - I have a 128MB AGP video card, and that seems to work well with the Ryzom 128MB configuration.

Eeep, /geek

[splatula]

Yeah, waaaaaay back in the windows 95 days there were big problems with ram addressing. Since Win2k it hasn't been a problem. People still proliferate that old info, esp Mac users who think they're running something different.

If you have DDR memory two sticks will run in Dual Channel mode, which is very fast in comparison to the single stick scenario.

There are ways of adjusting how much memory Windows uses and how much it allocates to various processes... in the registry. Of course doing this can be craptastic if something goes wrong.

If you had 2 GB of memory, you COULD fool windows by using a program to make a RAM drive of about 1GB, then put your pagefile on the RAMdrive. Then you would have 1GB of memory and a 1GB pagefile that is insanely fast. Even if windows HAS enough resources to put an entire program into memory it STILL will either reserve or offload a portion to the pagefile. You may have to keep a small pagefile on a hard drive though... it depends on whether or not the ramdrive loads up in the windows start sequence before or after the pagefile.

I think your best bet though is to prolly go with a dual channel setup, and if it's still not fast enough, it's time to look at your CPU/Mobo/Video config.

Oroboroed
Guild Leader
Joes Hotdog n' Bagpipe Emporium

*Just a note*
I came across these lines when scanning an error log for Ryzom...

Memory: 249mB/1023mB
Process Virtual Memory: 813mB
NeL Memory: 0B

Which leads me to beleive it could be using 1262MB of RAM with my current configuration. (I don't have everything enabled or at max, like shadows is turned off)

[tetra]

Originally Posted by dazman76

Hmm, I did a search on this subject, and couldn't find any notes or documents on an XP problem with 2GB - in that case, I would say it's absolutely fine. People hear about coding flaws in Windows all the time, and to be honest the ones regarding low-level stuff like memory access are usually down to people's specific configurations. 2GB should work perfectly well with 32bit WinXP.

I'm guessing he is either talking about something he once heard about "windows" that was in reference to windows 9x, or equally and possibly even more likely... someone didn't understand why you might want to copy stuff to the swap file during idle times and tried to claim it as a flaw. Windows, and most other OS's, will copy things out of memory to your swap file when it isn't too busy. The benefit to this, is if the system actually has the need to dump whatever it was that it copied, then it can just drop it and not need to wait to copy it to the swapfile .