RAM Allocation. How to set up my RAM

[Ryan Silva]

I just got a 1gb strip of kingston and I was wondering the best settings(i.e. Page File size, virtual mem, ect.) for my DAW?


Nuendo 2x
P4 2.66
1.25GB Ram 333mhz
Seprate Hard drive for audio data.
Lots of VSTi

[drliebs]

Well, you can try fixing your page file to a set size, of double your RAM. Or you can try disabeling the Page File all together (Proceed at your own risk, I have done it with no problem, but I make no warranty .

Fixing the page file was a Win 9x trick that keeps the hard drive from constantly re-sizing the page file. This would speed things up in the old days. I have read that this is not as necessary with Win XP/Win 2000 as it was in the old days, because these OS's handle the job much more efficiently. One benefit I have found though, is that by fixing the page file size, you will never have to worry about running out of virtual memory as the space is set and no programs or user activity can take it away.

Killing the page file all together forces Windows to store everything in RAM which obviously works much faster. With 1 gig of RAM you may have success doing this. I believe the audio app will create it's own hard drive file for the audio it is recording. Without a swap (page) file the OS will keep as much of the other data in RAM and this is faster.

I have done this with success and I only have 512 megs of RAM. Oddly enough, my audio apps didn't seem any faster, but video games ran great. Your mileage may vary, if you notice any strange behavior, re-enable the page file.

Anohter possibility is to create a RAM drive, where the computer sees a portion of RAM as a physical drive and you can use this drive for your swap and or temp directory. Haven't tried this myself, but with 1 gig of RAM, you might want to search on Google for this and give it a shot.

Tascam has a great PC optimization guide on their site.