RAM Not Released

[Fixturedesign]

I have been working ona project and with everything opened my laptop reports that SolidWorks 2008 is using approx. 800MB of RAM (system has 2GB). I close out all my files, leaving SolidWorks open, and my RAM for SolidWorks is still up around 800MB. After closing SolidWorks, the task manager drops the SolidWorks application off the list (of course). I open SolidWorks and the task manager now reports that SolidWorks is using 150 MB of RAM.

Why is SolidWorks holding on to the RAM when I close my files?

 

[Theophilus]

Windows is most likely the culprit--are you using XP? My system does that--SolidWorks, Firefox, whatever program. If I don't close it, the RAM is hung up.

I use the /3GB switch with 4GB of RAM and yesterday had my RAM usage shoot up to 2GB of usage--nice! Stable, no crashes in that high-usage zone. If you're not hitting the ceiling currently, you're probably just fine and don't need to worry about it (right?). If you are, enable the /3GB switch (and check with your graphics card specs when doing this--just in case you need to also add USERVA=2900 or some strange noise to the boot file as well). This switch works on systems with well-less than 4GB of RAM and will extend how much RAM you can use to your own desires (such as for SolidWorks) regardless of how much you actually have.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

What did you dream? It's all right--we told you what to dream.
--Pink Floyd, Welcome to the Machine

 

[Fixturedesign]

Theophilus,

How do you add this switch?

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

thread559-155411

 

[Theophilus]

Lots of the links I had saved (going back to 2004) now lead nowhere. Here are some updated ones:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/08/05/208908.aspx

http://thatworks.blogspot.com/2007/07/3gb-switch.html

http://www.solidsmack.com/how-to-suck-all-the-memory-you-can-out-of-windows-xp/2007-08-23/

Good luck, and don't hose your system (be careful).



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

What did you dream? It's all right--we told you what to dream.
--Pink Floyd, Welcome to the Machine

 

[Theophilus]

Follow the link in that last article to get the PDF file by Ed Eaton and Wayne Tiffany. This is the file to which my old links are now dead.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

What did you dream? It's all right--we told you what to dream.
--Pink Floyd, Welcome to the Machine

 

[JMarv]

Ed and Wayne's article is also at the Kansas City User Group's site.

Joe
SW Office 2006 SP5.1
P4 3.0Ghz 1GB
ATI FireGL X1