"Windows has run out of Memory" Issue

[MegaPixel]

Before I begin, here are my System Spec.s:

 

WIN2K Pro. - SP4

Dual AMD 1.8 Athlon

1.5 Gig. of Registered ECC DDR Memory

60 Gig. HD - 3 Partitions (10gig, 20gig & 30gig)

Running 3DS MAX 6.

 

Recently, I've been hitting a Memory wall while using MAX on a fairly large poly project (Not unusual for me however). My taskbar is telling me that only half of my Physical Memory is available and this is after I turn the computer on (Nothing else Running). Here iswhat my taskbar reads out:

 

Physical Memory:

Total - 1,572,332

Available - 883,312

Sys. Cache - 465,440

 

As I watch my memory usage go up real time while working in MAX, it almost always gives me the error when it reaches 850,000 or somewhere there about. My OS is on the 10gig Partition with over 3 gigs free and MAX is on the 30gig Partition with over 20 gigs free for paging.

So my question is, Why am I not able to use all of my available Memory? Do I have a Paging issue andif so, what should my Windows Performance Settings be set to with regards to paging size?

Currently, only my 10gig Partition is set to 2024MB to 4096MB and neither ofthe others have asetting yet.

 

I would love any help you can offer me, thanks guys - Megapixel

[tcorbett]

MP -

 

Are you rendering a single frame, or an animation?

[Fermi Bertran]

Mega,

 

You say you have 1,5 Gigs but when using 850 Mb you crash?

 

Check your memory:

 

http://www.memtest86.com/

 

Make a floppy with memtest, boot with it and allow the test to run ONE FULL cile.

 

One single error mean a Bad memory DIM, locate it running the test with only one DIM at the time in the system and to the trash it goes (or to the hardware store for a replacement if it has guarantee... Brand name memory should be life time guaranteed)

 

Later, to optimize your memory/swap file size settings for large files/intenese memory usage you can:

 

-With 1,5 Gigs of RAM and Win 2K Pro:

Set your file swap to soemthing 0,5 to 1 gig ( You don't want it too big, OS will only allocate a maximum of 2 gigs per process so having a biger swap file won't help and may allow to swap more)

Set initial to be equal to final size (you want your swap file to be made at once in continouous HD space at boot time, not to make a small one at boot and have the OS to resize it in the middle of some streesful (for the system) rendering).

 

If you have huge scenes that use huge amount of memeory at render time (1,5+ Gb) consider seriously upgrading to XP Pro and made it to use up to 3Gb per process. ( I am so happy I upgraded 12 days ago :ebiggrin: )

 

tell us if you solve it.

 

BTW, it can be a scene dependant problem; corrupt object, non finfite reflection situation... or others...

[MegaPixel]

First of all, thank you for replying Fermi.

 

Here is what I discovered on my own. It turns out that the particular Max file I was working on, had something wrong with it which hammered my machine while modeling. So I merged my Objects into another clean scene and the hammering went away. I have scenes 4 times larger that I can open just fine so that threw up a red flag.

 

However,I also discovered that I was filling up my C Drive and was at less then 1 gig. So I cleaned up the C Drive the best I could and Defragged. Suddenly most of my available memory came back. I'm not really sure though, why I have to page to acheive my total Physical Memory. Could someone explain this a little? Thanks guys