Virtual Memory drastically improving runtime?

[Pixelthief]

So heres my odd situation. I just reformatted my hard drive and have been reinstalling everything. To my dismay, when my MMF2 was up and running, I found my Platformer engine to be skipping inbetween 35ish to 50 FPS rather erratically. I have worked very hard to get it up to a constant 50 FPS on most systems. But on a suspicion, I took the simple step of increasing my computers virtual memory on the hard drive from 2046 to 4092. Thats a normal step for running more taxing programs like TF2, and it speeds them up. But just doing that alone made my game run at a constant 50 FPS.

So this makes me wonder WHY. Why the heck would increasing the virtual memory from 2000 to 4000 mb make a difference for an application that only uses up 1 mb at runtime? The slowdown would occur whether I used the HWA mode or not, on directx or standard. So it troubles me WHY it could make a difference. After all, many people won't have their computers virtual memory maxed out like this, and they might experience a much slower game.

There must be something I'm missing

[SEELE]

Trust me your app isn't using 1 mb of ram.

Rendering a 640x480 white screen takes at minimum 6 mb

Your app may only be using a small amount of ram but your computer may not have that ram to spare if it's cluttered with other junk like viruses or more likely virus protection.

I find the best way to know when your over pushing your ram is when your page files in changing erratically.

[Rockdude]

If the game is running slow you can go into the task manager and delete the uneeded proccesses running at that time.

[Pixelthief]

The computer can't possibly be using 2 gigabytes of RAM on other processes, because its a completely vanilla windows reinstall with nothing but MMF2 on it. I was saying I just reformated the computer, so theres no extraneous processes eating up ram

[SEELE]

Actually your ram is as fast as its slowest piece.. if your mixing 1BG slots with 512mg slots your waisting ram.

[DJFuego]

4gig is excessive. you shouldn't need more than a gig paging file EVER. How much ram have you got?
There are "simple" system tweaks you can run or a page file defrag to speed up the computers performance.

[Jacob]

The computer can't possibly be using 2 gigabytes of RAM on other processes, because its a completely vanilla windows reinstall with nothing but MMF2 on it. I was saying I just reformated the computer, so theres no extraneous processes eating up ram

This is something I get very angry about. Vanilla is not equal to plain. Just because vanilla ice cream is white, doesn't make it plain. Vanilla is as much a flavor as any other. Stop using vanilla as synonymous language to plain. Now.

[Pixelthief]

no thanks! I use vanilla as the base for all the flavors when I am making. I add strawberries to make strawberry ice cream, I add chocolate to make chocolate ice cream. I really don't make much where I don't use vanilla as the base.

[Pkeod]

This is something I get very angry about. Vanilla is not equal to plain. Just because vanilla ice cream is white, doesn't make it plain. Vanilla is as much a flavor as any other. Stop using vanilla as synonymous language to plain. Now.

It means unmodified, not plain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_software

[MechatheSlag]

TF2