Recording Software RAM Usage

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KingstonRock

PC load letter?
In trying to decide how much more RAM I need, I'm trying to figure out exactly how its used when mixing or tracking in recording software. Right now I have 512 MB or pc2100 ddr RAM, which seems to be a minimum based on the slightly unscientific poll i posted here :D. I know that many of my projects are too big to fit on a cd-r, so they are over 700mb. If i have say 1.5gb of RAM, and disabled the windows xp swap file (i dont really know what this does either) and stuff like the scratch disk in adobe photoshop, would this force everything to be run off the RAM? 1.5 GB should be plenty for whatever I'm working on at the given moment. am I totally confused about RAM and the windows swap file (if that's even what's it's called)?

Also, im using a Dual AMD 2400+ system on a tyan k7 motherboard. It uses registered ECC ram and supports 4gb of it.

Thanks,
Eric
 
Try it. I haven't done it with XP yet but I did this once with NT4. I almost had to reinstall. Windows seems to need a pagefile regardless of how much memory you have.
 
page file is what its called!

Well i don't have the 1gb stick of ram yet, I'm just thinking about it right now, but i think I've heard of not using a page file with large amounts of ram somewhere on this board, maybe whoever said it will chime in
 
Your tracking software reads direct off the disk. That means even if you have a terrabyte of RAM, it's still only going to read enough of each file to fill its buffer each time, and that's it. It doesn't read the files into memory.

The only time when you'll run into large files in memory is when using giant samples and soundfonts.

Hence, most people with a gig of memory who use their machines primarily for tracking and mixing without excessive sampling (etc) are generally wasting memory. Might feel good or something though :)

Disabling the swapfile is completely unnecessary and will hinder performance in most cases even when you have memory to spare.

Slackmaster 2000
 
slack: that seems obvious now being there's a disk performance meter in sonar. Anyway, other than a generally smoother performance, would more ram make any difference as far as recording? Does 512 seem like enough?

drstawl: its pretty ironic that you say that, I just got threw in a Pool!

this board has saved me so much money :D
thanks
 
Yes, 512 is generally enough RAM for most audio recording work. Once you start getting up that high adding more doesn't really do much of anything but cost you money. But again, if you're loading up giant soundfonts and such, you might want more.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Slackmaster2K said:
Disabling the swapfile is completely unnecessary and will hinder performance in most cases even when you have memory to spare.
Click to expand...

Care to explain ?

I 'feel' a difference in performance on my music computer when enabling/disabling the page file. With a minimal windows setup and running only the sequencer and several samplers I reallky do feel the diff...

I wouldn't know why it would hinder performance ? If I have an amount of real memory and I don't use it all, why would I have a need to create more (virtual) memory ?


Herwig :confused: (running cubase and halion with a +980Mb piano sample and other samples without virtual memory on a 1Gb RAM comp without problems)
 
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