Quick Sign In:  

Forum: Old versions

Topic: VirtualDJ hogging my RAM!

This topic is old and might contain outdated or incorrect information.

deejayHHome userMember since 2003
Does anybody else ever look at their System Resources window while using this program? It's using up 283 megs of RAM right now, with both decks playing. Any suggestions?

Windows XP
P4 - 2.4 GHz
512 Megs of DDR Ram
 

Posted Sun 13 Jul 03 @ 6:15 pm
VDJ has a very demanding sound-engine. Its pretty advanced so its gonna be hogging up your memory. The only thing i can recommend is installing a dedicated Windows 2000 partition for VDJ with no other programs running in the background.
 

Posted Sun 13 Jul 03 @ 7:09 pm
it doesn't matter at all where your windows is, only thing that really matters when windows decides to swap to disk is of course a) that your swap file is continuous (not fragmented) b) swap file is located where you have fastest sequential disk access, this is usually beginning of the drive. With a 120 GB drive, the first 15 GB are perfectly suitable. Naturally it helps a bit to have the swap file on different HDD than windows or other programs.

This util should make your swap file continuous, but it may also end up positioning it to end of disk, not beginning if your disk is full. I also suggest to lock the swap to some big size initially, say 1000 MB by setting min and max as 1000 in system properties.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/contig.shtml

For most optimal swap file operation (VDJ will likely use swap file after loading two decent lenght songs with 512 MB mem) get a empty second HDD, make a 2 GB partition to the beginning of drive and put nothing else to that partition than the swap file..

If you wonder where the swap file is currently located, it should be seen visually in defrag program as unmovable or otherwise coloured area.
 

Posted Sun 13 Jul 03 @ 8:14 pm
 

Posted Sun 13 Jul 03 @ 8:32 pm
To be honest, i doubt it's worth very much effort to optimize the swap file location, unless you have either: less than 512 MB memory or you play songs which are long (say around 10+ minutes)
 

Posted Sun 13 Jul 03 @ 8:35 pm
deejayHHome userMember since 2003
Okay, I just popped in a 20 GB hard drive (F:), freshly formatted. So say I wanted to dedicate this hard drive to VDJ, how would I go about doing that. Keep in mind I'm not too technically inclined when it comes to hard drives, but I can do just about anything else on a computer.
 

Posted Mon 14 Jul 03 @ 12:32 am
deejayHHome userMember since 2003
I just copied my VDJ program to my new (F:), so it's the only application on that hard drive. Will it be writing to the local disk (F:)?
 

Posted Mon 14 Jul 03 @ 12:45 am
No ... having VDJ on that drive is redundant. All its doing is is that its telling the operating system that is in on different locatoin.

Tthe best thing to do is to have f: completely formatted, and then install a clean copy of 2000 or XP. In the setup process, it will ask you where you want the OS installation ... make sure its set to drive f:.

After everything is installed, disable all networking devices .... anything you can think of that might utilize a processing thread. Make sure to have ALL updated drivers for sound card, video, etc. Then install VDJ and you're on your way. I have it set up exactly like this and I know 100% it makes a difference. VDJ requires ALOT of resources.
 

Posted Mon 14 Jul 03 @ 5:01 am
Problem with installing it over to freshly formatted harddrive is that the swapfile (which is only thing that affects VDJ performance here, DLLs that VDJ use aren't likely swapped out of memory after you load VDJ, meaning that you can have Windows on a CD if you like, performance will be same after it's loaded on memory) isn't necessarily very large to begin with (if you have 128-256 memory). If you already have a lot of memory (say 512+) then reinstalling windows may only help you your windows was messed up, or it was not installed to empty drive, or your old drive is Old (slow).

Anyway my point is, if your windows is not messed, you could try first just assigning the swap to newly formatted drive with dedicated swap partition. This way you can be sure that when your HDD gets loaded with mp3's, performance won't degrade in the process.
 

Posted Tue 15 Jul 03 @ 12:04 am
If you don't get what i'm talking about, then just think this: You have a Big file after you install windows, and small files (like mp3) later. Now if the size of the big file changes, it may eventually be like this: (begin of disk)big file part 1, small files, big file part 2(end of disk).. What happens when VDJ run out of memory? It will use the Big file, and may have to use both parts of it, one in begin and one in end of your harddrive. In reality it may be in many more than just 2 parts, especially if you didn't have 512+ memory when you installed windows. Having this file in many parts is one of the things that can make VDJ slow. If you have this big file in one small partition dedicated to it, there will be no problem when it's size changes.

And if you have money! Get 1 GB of memory, helps more than messing around with the swap settings :)
 

Posted Tue 15 Jul 03 @ 12:23 am


(Old topics and forums are automatically closed)