Windows Memory Management

[Gregg Bolinger]

At work I have a pretty good machine. 2.0 GHz with 1G of ram. Unfortunately, it has Windoze installed on it. The nightmare of a project I am working on has a build file that will run out of memory unless I set -Xmx1024m. Needless to say, during the build, my machine can't really do anything else. Well, it can, but it's just now performing well. That I can live with. What bothers me the most is that for a long time after the build has completed it seems like Windoze is not recovering the memory allocated for the vm very well. When it finally does, the machine is fine.

I have never had a problem like that in Linux. So I assume it has to be something with Windoze memory management capabilities. Does anyone have any recommendations for tweaks that I can do to get Windoze to recover memory quicker, besides installing Linux.

Am I even correct in my thinking that this is the problem?

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Sounds like maybe your page file is too small?

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:
Sounds like maybe your page file is too small?

How would I go about making it bigger?

[Lewin Chan]

Fixed pagefile size might be an option. (i.e. force the pagefile size to be in the range 2Gb to 2Gb rather than letting Windows manage it for you).

ControlPanel->System->Advanced->PerforamceSettings (VirtualMemomry)

Is the build pure java (i.e. no JNI builds going on, or usage of windows dlls). If that's the case then you could try closing the command prompt immediately after success.

There are a few programs that can force the reclamation of memory from windows, whether they'll actually help you in this instance I don't know. You could try www.outertech.com and their cacheman product (not cachemanXP) which can do this.
[ October 03, 2006: Message edited by: Lewin Chan ]

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

Check your harddrive space/fragmentation.

You might have a highly fragmented drive, and the page file is making those drive spindles jump around all over the place.

-Cameron McKenzie

[Gregg Bolinger]

I changed the paging and played around with it a bit. I even tried putting it on my secondary harddrive. Everything got painfully slower. So I have switched back. Defragging didn't help either.