pagefile (/ scratch disk / virtual memory) for Grasshopper

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on January 30, 2011 at 1:21pm

Hi Andrei,

 

It is up to Windows to allocate memory when an application demands it. It basically goes like this:

 

Rhino: Oy! I need 12MB more than I already have, pronto.

Windows: Hang on, hang on... scanning. Ok, you're lucky, I've got some space in the RAM standing by for just such an occasion. Here ya go.

Rhino: Thanks! In fact, I think I'll have 43MB more. You know, just in case...

Windows: Sigh... fine. But look, I'm all out of actual RAM memory, here's some space on the hard drive instead. Let's both pretend you don't actually know you're being scammed and I'll do my best to make the drive act in the same way as the RAM.

Rhino: Sheesh! Someone should tell the user (s)he needs to buy more RAM.

Windows: I've tried. Believe me, I've tried.

...

Rhino: Hey buddy, remember when you gave me 43MB a few milliseconds ago?

Windows: No, but I'll take your word for it.

Rhino: Turns out I need room to store the render-meshes as well. Totally forgot, sorry man. Another 50MB please.

Windows: That's it! You've been mooching off me for as long as I can remember, it's always more more more. Well, I've had it up to here (indicates mounted webcam). You just overstepped your 2GB limit for the last time friend. (Strangles Rhino)

 

--

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on January 30, 2011 at 1:29pm

i imagined this as a sock puppet show, hope you don't mind. edgy temper this windows has...

but if i have 2 drives (and i do), am i able to tell windows to use memory from the second drive when using Rhino/Grasshopper, so that it has a dedicated hdd head to do the job?

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on January 30, 2011 at 2:15pm

I remember being into this sort of thing a while back and reading up on best practices for performance.  From what I remember...and this is at least 5 year old information, you do not want windows to decide the size of the pagefile...I think my default xp installations would go between 2048mb - 4096mb (mas o menos)...you want to set that to be one number.  Also, putting the page file on a different partition than the OS was also supposed to boost performance.  But remember, this is information that is supposed to be read from RAM (which is faster, much) not the hdd, so while you can prob get a bit better performance, its not going to be super noticeable. 

 

I just upgraded to win 7 64 bit with 8gb of ram.  But as long as Rhino 4 and GH are 32 bit it will only see 2gb.  Rhino 5 64bit runs quite nicely.

Permalink Reply by Greg J on January 30, 2011 at 3:39pm

I haven't needed to do this, but a Dell Tech Rep, suggested that configuring a flash/USB drive as RAM is pretty easy and fast way of adding RAM. 

 

Don't know the pros/cons. I just have these little flash drives all over the place :)