What is virtual memory?

[Naeem]

So i have some ram issues and looking trough everything and came across Virtual memory.

now my qeustion: What is it? does it matter if i lower it or increase the amount?

 

i have the option to assign a min and max size to it but does it matter? is it better to turn it off? ( no paging file)?

 

I use windows 8.1 on a laptop with 4gb ram ( 3.9gb to be exact).

 

My goal is to increase performance in games since i had some ram trouble and my games / internet kinda froze or had 0,01 fps.

 

Thanks for helping out:)

 

[EarthboundHero]

-snip-

Virtual memory is where RAM puts stuff it isn't using. It will actually decrease performance in games. Only way to increase performance is to upgrade CPU or add more RAM.

[Tagiau]

So you want to literally download more ram?

[Laputacake]

So you want to literally download more ram?

http://www.downloadmoreram.com/

[Naeem]

Virtual memory is where RAM puts stuff it isn't using. It will actually decrease performance in games. Only way to increase performance is to upgrade CPU or add more RAM.

is it possible to assign things to my ram and other things to my virtual ram?

[EarthboundHero]

is it possible to assign things to my ram and other things to my virtual ram?

Not that I know of, though it might be.

[Naeem]

So you want to literally download more ram?

 

http://www.downloadmoreram.com/

Im not retarded i know you cant download ram i just wanted to know what virtual ram was and if disabling it or whatever increases performance...

[Enderman]

Virtual RAM uses your drive space for caching data. Hard drives are extremely slow compared to RAM, which will make anything cached in virtual RAM perform horribly.

Even with an SSD you will still have severe performance issues with virtual RAM.

 

The only solution to get more performance is to physically increase your RAM, because using virtual RAM will be EXTREMELY SLOW!

100MBps for HDD compared to 7000MBps for RAM.

[Laputacake]

Im not retarded i know you cant download ram i just wanted to know what virtual ram was and if disabling it or whatever increases performance...

it was a joke. But if you feel that you're running out of ram you need to get more ram. Virtual memory is only a short time situation.

[Naeem]

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[han_han08]

it was a joke. But if you feel that you're running out of ram you need to get more ram. Virtual memory is only a short time situation.

wait...virtual memory is different from ramdisk..right? i just wasted the ram I downloaded then

[MattLantis]

http://www.downloadmoreram.com/

I hint I was gonna be the one who had to post that

[typographie]

Im not retarded i know you cant download ram i just wanted to know what virtual ram was and if disabling it or whatever increases performance...

 

Technically yes, but you'd probably only be able to tell the difference if you're running comparative memory benchmarks. It's very unlikely that anything you're doing with this laptop is heavily memory-dependent for performance.

 

But first of all, it's entirely possible that your problem isn't related to virtual memory in the first place (though if it is, it could be indicative of an HDD issue). Secondly, I would not recommend even trying to turn off virtual memory with only 4 GB of physical RAM. With no page file, your applications will instantly crash to desktop the moment they run out of memory.

 

It's usually better, especially in the case of only have 4 GB of RAM, to leave your virtual memory at default.