Since making the change I referred to earlier, my machine has been humming along quite happily, despite the screens looking like this most of the time.
Hadn’t even had a Firefox crash all day; until I was writing this post in Scribefire, and I suspect that wasn’t a memory-related crash.
I have been having a lot of problems with my computers, particularly the one at work, behaving strangely in past months. I’ve never been able to grasp why I have trouble compiling and debugging our solution when others don’t; or why Firefox 3 is so unstable. Last night I was on my machine at home and got a popup telling me that my virtual memory setting was too low and I might want to increase it. I’ve been ignoring similar popups for a week or two but decided that I might as well increase the size. So I open the memory settings and what do I see? Total paging file size for all drives: 0 MB; ZERO? WTF!!
Then it crawled up from the depths of my repressed memories; I had once seen an article suggesting that in most cases disabling the paging file will improve performance. I tried it and found that it worked. Clearly the memory requirements of the software I run has now grown to the point where this is no longer viable, so I turned on my paging file again. Just found the same thing here at work and have enabled paging. Let’s hope this delivers the more stable, if slightly slower, experience I’ve been missing.
craniac's place 