using extra ram

Printable View

12-26-2003, 08:34 AM
matitaccia

using extra ram

Hello,

I have a question about the "use extra ram" feature. I know that in order to speeding up things with folding I should activate the "use extra ram" feature. And I'm doing this.

My computer uses after being "fresh" startet 90mb of ram. And it's okay, I know that the extra ram feature is functioning. Good.

After a while the size of ram used by FC falls to 25, 20, 19mb.
At the beginnig I thought it was because of kazaa which was running at the same time. That's why I let the client run without doing anything. Just started up, client is installed as a service... and how described before, it works with 90mn occupied ram and then it falls. Why? I wasn't doing anything!

I have also seen that in the task manager I have this voice:
commit charge: 222134/634028 k
What does it mean? How is it with the ram correlated?Is it the same as the paging file? Or is it a part of my hard disk that is used as ram? (I don't have 634028k of ram!)...and why when the first number (that varies quite often!) get bigger and bigger ---> at a certain point the client uses only 20mb of ram! How can I indagate if there is something that is eating my ram?

System configuration
AMD 1333 mhz
256mb ram (I know I should update to 512, but this isn't the explication of my problem. If I'm not doing anything the commit charge should be the same! And as this 256 mb of ram are enough at the beginning they also should be enough after an hour...)
Windows Xp
You need anything else?

Now I have another question. I'let run with the client also outlook express that keeps my connetction alive. I mean... my connection is truncated by the ISP every 20hours. I let outlook check the mail so that I'm sure that it restarts the connection, when it is down. Is there a better manner in order to keep this connection online?
I'm not sure if the client will suceed in calling out the dial-up window like outlook does
(Referred to question of before... when I run outlook at the beginning together with the client the ram used by the client is 90mb... only after it falls to 20mb).

Thanks!
matitaccia
12-26-2003, 09:21 AM
bwkaz

The "extra RAM" is used to store the current protein (or the current + the native, I don't remember for sure). When you're at the end of a generation, that extra memory gets released because it isn't needed while the client is sending results to the master server.

When the next generation starts, it should get reallocated.

As for the commit charge, I'm not sure what it is either. But I bet it's explained in Microsoft's knowledge base... Yep:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000...b_mon_oyjs.asp

Right at the bottom. ;) Apparently the "commit charge (total)" is the total amount of virtual memory in use by all processes.
12-28-2003, 03:33 PM
Welnic

Re: using extra ram

Quote:

Originally posted by matitaccia

snip...

My computer uses after being "fresh" startet 90mb of ram. And it's okay, I know that the extra ram feature is functioning. Good.

After a while the size of ram used by FC falls to 25, 20, 19mb.
At the beginnig I thought it was because of kazaa which was running at the same time. That's why I let the client run without doing anything. Just started up, client is installed as a service... and how described before, it works with 90mn occupied ram and then it falls. Why? I wasn't doing anything!

...snip

With this protein the main folding process uses about 95MBs of ram. But at the end of every generation it calculates the trajectory of the generation that it just did. While it is doing this it only uses about 30MBs of ram. As soon as this is through it should go back up to 95MBs.