xuan
I have 512mb of ram, after booting 128mb is in use, after 3 hours of play my memory rockects to 640mb in use, which will make it use hd temp space, which in turn makes VDJ jerk when touching any basss/mid/high sliders. Didn't happen with previous version.
Posted Sat 10 Jan 04 @ 3:37 pm
dj_ricochet
erm... no replies to this? seems like a pretty major flaw to me! anyone else able to verify whether this is the case?
Posted Mon 19 Jan 04 @ 8:33 am
DJCannonball
Xuan, here are all the tuning-tips i can find:
Here you have a small list of some tweaks you can try to get the best performance of VirtualDJ in Win XP.
If you are using VirtualDJ and you don´t have any problem, so i suggest you to do not do anything of this.
But if you are having the skipping problem, you could try this list of suggestions:
* Make sure you have Win XP drivers for ALL your hardware and software
Install the last DirectX version (from microsoft website)
update your video and sound card(s) drivers
* Just like Win2K, XP likes RAM. We recommend a minimum of 256 for XP, and with RAM so cheap, get 512!!!
* Try using smaller files (in kb).
* Make sure Visual Effects are set to "Best Performance":
VisuaL Effects are the fancy new animations XP uses for opening and closing windows and dialog boxes on your VGA screen. These effects waste valuable system resources and they can conflict with the XDV GUI. Here is how to turn them off.
Right-click on the My Computer icon, select Advances, click the Performance "Settings" button, you'll see a new tab Visual Effects and then An Advanced tab.
Click the Visual Effects tab. Once there select adjust for best performance. This will allow the best format for processing performance of your video desktop display.
Once completed hit Apply and proceed to close out and reboot (select yes) if prompted to.
* Enable Clear Type:
This makes a noticeable impact on 2D performance and the view is great. Contrary to some reports it is not designed just for LCD screens. To turn this on
Right click on a blank area of the Desktop and choose Properties -Click on the Appearance Tab; Click Effects - Check the box: Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts. In the drop down box select: Clear Type.
* Don't upgrade over your old OS, install fresh.
* Hard Drive Mode Settings:
Most should know this but we will note this one for those that are new . DMA (Direct Memory Access) allows your Hard Drives or CDROMs to access memory directly, thereby freeing up CPU resources. The drive transfer rates will be much faster. You can enable DMA on a per channel basis, and all devices on that channel have to be DMA capable, but most drives these days are (although some CDROMs may not be). To enable DMA, right-click My Computer, choose Properties, Device Manager, click on Devices such as "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers." Double-click on the controller you want to enable, and in the properties window that appears, click the Advanced Settings tab. Each device has a "Transfer Mode" that you can change to "DMA if available." Choose that setting to enable DMA. PIO Only is much slower than DMA transfer rates & the Page File (discussed later) benefits from a faster data transfer rate, assuming the hard drive(s) support it. Go back to devices and change any other ones available and then Click Ok & reboot your system for the changes to take effect
* Processor and Memory Usage:
Right-click on the My Computer icon, select Advances, click the Performance "Settings" button, you'll see anew tab Visual Effects and then An Advanced tab. Click Advanced tab and you will notice A section that says Processor Scheduling and Memory usage. In the Processor scheduling select Programs (for Best Performance). This gives priority for running programs. NOTE: At this point, many users has reported that selecting Best performance for background task they got a better performance. So you can try both and see the results. Now on Memory usage select Programs. Again this gives programs priority to run programs from you memory. Now hit Apply and go to the next item before closing out and re-booting.
* Visual Effects Setting:
Right-click on the My Computer icon, select Advances, click the Performance "Settings" button, you'll see a new tab Visual Effects and then An Advanced tab. Click the Visual Effects tab. Once there select adjust for best performance. This will allow the best format for processing performance of your video desktop display. Once completed hit Apply and proceed to close out and reboot (select yes) if prompted to.
* Disable automatic updating:
To save memory and CPU time turn off the automatic update system in windows. You can always check manually for updates. Open control panel. Click on performance and maintenance. Click on System. Then click on the automatic updates tab and select Turn off automatic updating. Click Ok.
* Turn Off System Restore:
Although System restore can be somewhat beneficial it takes a lot of space, XP allocates 10% of your partition to System Restore by default, and if you have a large drive, you can be losing lots of space can tie-up HD. It will also affect access time (turning off it will increase Window Performance). You can change a variety of options for System Restore. To get to it go Right-click on My Computer, click Properties, and choose the System Restore tab. In this window you can completely disable system restore (which I recommend)
*Clean Your Prefetch Folder Out:
This is unique for WinXP. All of us know that it is necessary to periodically clean the registry and TEMP files in WinXP. After using XP for some time, the “prefetch” directory can get full of junk and hold obsolete links. Refer to Section V to learn more of what “prefetch” is. Too much junk can slow down your computer noticeably. I suggest: open C (system drive) go to the Windows folder and click on the “Prefetch” folder. Set the explorer view for details (to see all file information). Delete those junk and obsolete files and reboot. It is a good idea that you at least check this every month.
* Disabling Background APPS from Startup:
Background applications can destroy performance in several ways. The only applications you want open are your music application, your sound cards driver application (if any), System Tray, and Explorer. To get a glance at programs running in the background you can press Ctrl + Alt + Del. Then you will have to select Task Manager and then select the Application tab after pressing Crtl + Alt + Del. You can also use a utility called msconfig.exe. Click on the START button and select RUN. Type in msconfig.exe. When the msconfig utility opens, select the Startup tab. Here you can deselect all programs that start-up automatically when you power on the computer.
* IRQ sharing conflicts:
IRQ sharing conflicts can cause numerous problems with digital audio playback such as Pops, Clicks, Stutters, Freezes, and Error Messages. IRQ stands for Interupt Request. For each CPU in a computer, there are 15 IRQs. Each device is assigned an IRQ by the Motherboard and/or Windows. In Windows XP there is a utility called msinfo32.exe that is used to identify if your computer has an IRQ sharing conflict. Click on the START button and select RUN. Type in the word msinfo32.exe (You can also access msinfo32.exe by clicking on the START > PROGRAMS > ACCESSORIES > SYSTEM TOOLS > SYSTEM INFORMATION). In the left side of the msinfo32.exe window, Click on the + sign next to Hardware Resources. Below Hardware Resources, select IRQs. In the left side of the screen find your Sound Card in the list. Just to the left of the Sound Card is the IRQ number. Your computer has an IRQ sharing conflict If the same number appears with another device such as the Graphics Card, Network Card, or SCSI controller card. If there is IRQ sharing with something called 'ACPI holder for PCI steering', this is not considered a conflict. A way to fix an IRQ sharing conflict is:
Turn off the computer and unplug the power cable. Open up the computer case and physically remove the card from the motherboard and place it into a different PCI slot. Check msinfo32.exe for changes.
* Reduce the Hardware Acceleration:
Some Graphic cards require that you reduce the Hardware Acceleration in order for Digital Audio to playback smoothly while the graphics change on screen. Technically speaking, the graphics card can 'hog' the bandwidth from the Audio card while trying to stream digital audio.
In Windows XP, you would select START > SETTINGS > CONTRL PANEL > DISPLAY. Select the 'SETTINGS' tab, click on the advanced button. Select the tab labeled 'TROUBLESHOOT'. Move the slider all the way to None, click on OK or CLOSE, and restart the computer. If everything sounds good, try increasing the slider one-by-one until there is a workable balance between graphics and audio performance.
* Turning off Windows XP services:
Windows XP uses services that run in the background as well. Services are different than programs, however, in that they provide services to programs. There are some services that most DAW do not need active and we can turn them off to free up memory and make the boot-up time faster. You can do so going to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services. Look for any unneeded service with automatic startup type, and change it to manual. With this setting, the service will not start automatically at Windows startup, but can be started if needed.
===>Typical services that might not be necessary:
-Distributed Link Tracking Client (networking, tracks file transfers across NTFS volumes for computers in NT domains)
-DNS Client
-IPSEC Policy Agent (networking, to manage IP security)
-Remote Registry Service
-Task Scheduler
===> Additionally, if you aren't using a LAN (local area network), you should be able to disable:
-Computer Browser (networking, to list computers in a LAN)
-DHCP client (networking, to get automatically the IP address and DNS from a DHCP server)
-TCP/IP NetBios helper (LAN)
*When you load a new song in one of each decks, let VirtualDJ scans the whole track before playing it.
* Disable firewalls or antivirus you may have installed.
* Use the easy (basic) skin instead of using the advanced one.
* Do a defrag of your HD frequenlty
* Do not use bigger files if you don´t have enough RAM
* Update DirectX from microsoft website
* Check that your using your sound card drivers: Maybe your default DirectX driver might be an emulated driver instead of your realsoundcard driver. Go in the option window of Virtual DJ and in the sound cardoption, select the correct driver.
* Record in MP3 instead of WAV !
* Try to understand that the problem comes from your PC, not from VirtualDJ !
I´ll try to post more tweaks soon... Besides, i´ll try to adapt it for Win 2K users.
Bye,
DJ Coco
Support Team
Note: I´ve tested all this tweaks and all of them works great on my pc. I can´t assure you that it will work on every pc so i suggest you to do a backup before changing anything. Just in case.
One more tip: press CTRL+ALT+DEL and in the services tab go to "virtualdj.exe" and (for Hercules djconsole usres) djconsoleCPL.exe, rightclick and set priority to high to make sure resources go there first (you can even set it to realtime, but upgrading your hardware seems a better thing to do in that case).
Try all of them, if you still have the memory leak.. send a message to the developers-team to correct it. I haven't encountered your issue yet (using 1.08)
good luck!
Here you have a small list of some tweaks you can try to get the best performance of VirtualDJ in Win XP.
If you are using VirtualDJ and you don´t have any problem, so i suggest you to do not do anything of this.
But if you are having the skipping problem, you could try this list of suggestions:
* Make sure you have Win XP drivers for ALL your hardware and software
Install the last DirectX version (from microsoft website)
update your video and sound card(s) drivers
* Just like Win2K, XP likes RAM. We recommend a minimum of 256 for XP, and with RAM so cheap, get 512!!!
* Try using smaller files (in kb).
* Make sure Visual Effects are set to "Best Performance":
VisuaL Effects are the fancy new animations XP uses for opening and closing windows and dialog boxes on your VGA screen. These effects waste valuable system resources and they can conflict with the XDV GUI. Here is how to turn them off.
Right-click on the My Computer icon, select Advances, click the Performance "Settings" button, you'll see a new tab Visual Effects and then An Advanced tab.
Click the Visual Effects tab. Once there select adjust for best performance. This will allow the best format for processing performance of your video desktop display.
Once completed hit Apply and proceed to close out and reboot (select yes) if prompted to.
* Enable Clear Type:
This makes a noticeable impact on 2D performance and the view is great. Contrary to some reports it is not designed just for LCD screens. To turn this on
Right click on a blank area of the Desktop and choose Properties -Click on the Appearance Tab; Click Effects - Check the box: Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts. In the drop down box select: Clear Type.
* Don't upgrade over your old OS, install fresh.
* Hard Drive Mode Settings:
Most should know this but we will note this one for those that are new . DMA (Direct Memory Access) allows your Hard Drives or CDROMs to access memory directly, thereby freeing up CPU resources. The drive transfer rates will be much faster. You can enable DMA on a per channel basis, and all devices on that channel have to be DMA capable, but most drives these days are (although some CDROMs may not be). To enable DMA, right-click My Computer, choose Properties, Device Manager, click on Devices such as "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers." Double-click on the controller you want to enable, and in the properties window that appears, click the Advanced Settings tab. Each device has a "Transfer Mode" that you can change to "DMA if available." Choose that setting to enable DMA. PIO Only is much slower than DMA transfer rates & the Page File (discussed later) benefits from a faster data transfer rate, assuming the hard drive(s) support it. Go back to devices and change any other ones available and then Click Ok & reboot your system for the changes to take effect
* Processor and Memory Usage:
Right-click on the My Computer icon, select Advances, click the Performance "Settings" button, you'll see anew tab Visual Effects and then An Advanced tab. Click Advanced tab and you will notice A section that says Processor Scheduling and Memory usage. In the Processor scheduling select Programs (for Best Performance). This gives priority for running programs. NOTE: At this point, many users has reported that selecting Best performance for background task they got a better performance. So you can try both and see the results. Now on Memory usage select Programs. Again this gives programs priority to run programs from you memory. Now hit Apply and go to the next item before closing out and re-booting.
* Visual Effects Setting:
Right-click on the My Computer icon, select Advances, click the Performance "Settings" button, you'll see a new tab Visual Effects and then An Advanced tab. Click the Visual Effects tab. Once there select adjust for best performance. This will allow the best format for processing performance of your video desktop display. Once completed hit Apply and proceed to close out and reboot (select yes) if prompted to.
* Disable automatic updating:
To save memory and CPU time turn off the automatic update system in windows. You can always check manually for updates. Open control panel. Click on performance and maintenance. Click on System. Then click on the automatic updates tab and select Turn off automatic updating. Click Ok.
* Turn Off System Restore:
Although System restore can be somewhat beneficial it takes a lot of space, XP allocates 10% of your partition to System Restore by default, and if you have a large drive, you can be losing lots of space can tie-up HD. It will also affect access time (turning off it will increase Window Performance). You can change a variety of options for System Restore. To get to it go Right-click on My Computer, click Properties, and choose the System Restore tab. In this window you can completely disable system restore (which I recommend)
*Clean Your Prefetch Folder Out:
This is unique for WinXP. All of us know that it is necessary to periodically clean the registry and TEMP files in WinXP. After using XP for some time, the “prefetch” directory can get full of junk and hold obsolete links. Refer to Section V to learn more of what “prefetch” is. Too much junk can slow down your computer noticeably. I suggest: open C (system drive) go to the Windows folder and click on the “Prefetch” folder. Set the explorer view for details (to see all file information). Delete those junk and obsolete files and reboot. It is a good idea that you at least check this every month.
* Disabling Background APPS from Startup:
Background applications can destroy performance in several ways. The only applications you want open are your music application, your sound cards driver application (if any), System Tray, and Explorer. To get a glance at programs running in the background you can press Ctrl + Alt + Del. Then you will have to select Task Manager and then select the Application tab after pressing Crtl + Alt + Del. You can also use a utility called msconfig.exe. Click on the START button and select RUN. Type in msconfig.exe. When the msconfig utility opens, select the Startup tab. Here you can deselect all programs that start-up automatically when you power on the computer.
* IRQ sharing conflicts:
IRQ sharing conflicts can cause numerous problems with digital audio playback such as Pops, Clicks, Stutters, Freezes, and Error Messages. IRQ stands for Interupt Request. For each CPU in a computer, there are 15 IRQs. Each device is assigned an IRQ by the Motherboard and/or Windows. In Windows XP there is a utility called msinfo32.exe that is used to identify if your computer has an IRQ sharing conflict. Click on the START button and select RUN. Type in the word msinfo32.exe (You can also access msinfo32.exe by clicking on the START > PROGRAMS > ACCESSORIES > SYSTEM TOOLS > SYSTEM INFORMATION). In the left side of the msinfo32.exe window, Click on the + sign next to Hardware Resources. Below Hardware Resources, select IRQs. In the left side of the screen find your Sound Card in the list. Just to the left of the Sound Card is the IRQ number. Your computer has an IRQ sharing conflict If the same number appears with another device such as the Graphics Card, Network Card, or SCSI controller card. If there is IRQ sharing with something called 'ACPI holder for PCI steering', this is not considered a conflict. A way to fix an IRQ sharing conflict is:
Turn off the computer and unplug the power cable. Open up the computer case and physically remove the card from the motherboard and place it into a different PCI slot. Check msinfo32.exe for changes.
* Reduce the Hardware Acceleration:
Some Graphic cards require that you reduce the Hardware Acceleration in order for Digital Audio to playback smoothly while the graphics change on screen. Technically speaking, the graphics card can 'hog' the bandwidth from the Audio card while trying to stream digital audio.
In Windows XP, you would select START > SETTINGS > CONTRL PANEL > DISPLAY. Select the 'SETTINGS' tab, click on the advanced button. Select the tab labeled 'TROUBLESHOOT'. Move the slider all the way to None, click on OK or CLOSE, and restart the computer. If everything sounds good, try increasing the slider one-by-one until there is a workable balance between graphics and audio performance.
* Turning off Windows XP services:
Windows XP uses services that run in the background as well. Services are different than programs, however, in that they provide services to programs. There are some services that most DAW do not need active and we can turn them off to free up memory and make the boot-up time faster. You can do so going to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services. Look for any unneeded service with automatic startup type, and change it to manual. With this setting, the service will not start automatically at Windows startup, but can be started if needed.
===>Typical services that might not be necessary:
-Distributed Link Tracking Client (networking, tracks file transfers across NTFS volumes for computers in NT domains)
-DNS Client
-IPSEC Policy Agent (networking, to manage IP security)
-Remote Registry Service
-Task Scheduler
===> Additionally, if you aren't using a LAN (local area network), you should be able to disable:
-Computer Browser (networking, to list computers in a LAN)
-DHCP client (networking, to get automatically the IP address and DNS from a DHCP server)
-TCP/IP NetBios helper (LAN)
*When you load a new song in one of each decks, let VirtualDJ scans the whole track before playing it.
* Disable firewalls or antivirus you may have installed.
* Use the easy (basic) skin instead of using the advanced one.
* Do a defrag of your HD frequenlty
* Do not use bigger files if you don´t have enough RAM
* Update DirectX from microsoft website
* Check that your using your sound card drivers: Maybe your default DirectX driver might be an emulated driver instead of your realsoundcard driver. Go in the option window of Virtual DJ and in the sound cardoption, select the correct driver.
* Record in MP3 instead of WAV !
* Try to understand that the problem comes from your PC, not from VirtualDJ !
I´ll try to post more tweaks soon... Besides, i´ll try to adapt it for Win 2K users.
Bye,
DJ Coco
Support Team
Note: I´ve tested all this tweaks and all of them works great on my pc. I can´t assure you that it will work on every pc so i suggest you to do a backup before changing anything. Just in case.
One more tip: press CTRL+ALT+DEL and in the services tab go to "virtualdj.exe" and (for Hercules djconsole usres) djconsoleCPL.exe, rightclick and set priority to high to make sure resources go there first (you can even set it to realtime, but upgrading your hardware seems a better thing to do in that case).
Try all of them, if you still have the memory leak.. send a message to the developers-team to correct it. I haven't encountered your issue yet (using 1.08)
good luck!
Posted Mon 19 Jan 04 @ 2:44 pm
xuan
Hmm, thank you for all your views, but, is it possible that if you load 74min mp3 it kills the memory.
Posted Sun 22 Feb 04 @ 6:49 pm
DJ Rick
yes! loading a 73 minute file will take up an incredible amount of memory.
Posted Mon 23 Feb 04 @ 2:25 pm
kaleo
on one file... about 650MB?
:)
:)
Posted Mon 23 Feb 04 @ 7:30 pm
i think, that's the main problem...
IT'S IMPORTANT TO BE STABLE !!!
i'm not a DJ, but all want this...
save system resources...
i've AMD2600+/256RAM and it freezes...
SO I DON'T KNOW TO BUY IT...
(sorry for mistakes / czech republic)
IT'S IMPORTANT TO BE STABLE !!!
i'm not a DJ, but all want this...
save system resources...
i've AMD2600+/256RAM and it freezes...
SO I DON'T KNOW TO BUY IT...
(sorry for mistakes / czech republic)
Posted Thu 26 Feb 04 @ 9:11 pm
DJ Rick
you need more ram! at least 512 meg.
Posted Thu 26 Feb 04 @ 10:44 pm
Fruit
I have a AMD Athlon 1800+ 256Mo RAM, Antivirus, firewall, msn, and other stuffs running. I have NO problems (I set the charge limit to 15 min).
FRUiT94
FRUiT94
Posted Fri 27 Feb 04 @ 11:01 am