Cache being dumped to pagefile

[herringbone]

I keep my cache settings quite high in uTorrent to give my disks a bit of a rest, I have 4Gb of RAM in my system as i do a lot of photoshop work, so inbetween this I want to set the maximum cache very high. However, i've just noticed that if i minimize uTorrent, all the data in the cache is dumped to the pagefile!?

You can see it happen in Task Manager, let the cache build up to say 128Mb and organise processes by Mem Usage, which will read around 140Mb or so for uTorrent. Minimize uTorrent and it shoots to the bottom of the list. You can hear it dump everything to the pagefile, upon which it slowly starts to build the cache back up again. Organise the list by VM size and uTorrent is at the top.

Obviously this doesnt show in the uTorrent Cache statistics, which remains at 128Mb, the cache still exists but its just been paged out. So what is the point of using a large cache to give my disks less of a thrashing, when everytime i check my torrent status and minimize again, its all dumped back to the pagefile??

Confused.

[Greg Hazel]

You're right, windows will page memory when an application is minimized, or when other applications need it. Unfortunately there's no way to lock an application in memory (even VirtualLock does not, despite indications that it might) - they were affraid of the case where a malicious or broken application locked all the memory and no applications could run.

I've been experimenting with ways around this, but haven't found a silver bullet. Mapped files have the benefit of swapping to the -actual- file instead of to the page file, but that still isn't quite the desired behaviour.

[Lord Alderaan]

With that much memory you could disable the pagefile altogether.

Or you could try this:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/3d3b3c16-c901-46de-8485-166a819af3ad1033.mspx?mfr=true

But I don't think it'll help.

I did a bit in depth googling about memory and pagefile stuff a year ago. I warn you I'm not a pro

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=210986#p210986

[hermanm]

Even though you have 4GB, not all of it will be usable RAM if you are using a 32-bit version of Windows. The above suggestion by L.A. does work. Just don't be surprised if you start seeing strange "out of memory" errors at some point while you are using your computer...