I have been trying without success to get Virtual memory working on my sam440ep all day without any luck.

It always shows up as having 512MB of virtual ram and it being used up at the same rate as the real ram no mater what I do and it I use any more than 512MB of ram my sam440ep locks up.

I have even tried re-installing OS4.1 update 1 + update 2 & 3to a free partition and reformating the SWAP partition with out any effect.

I have a 2GB SWAP partition at the start of the disk with the block size set to 4K and the file system set as SWAP as instructed but OS4 seems to see as being 512MB and being in use as soon as I boot OS4.1.

If I try to copy an ISO image or any other file larger than about 400MB to ram My sam440ep will always use up al the real ram then lockup.

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Sam440ep 667mhz, 512MB, 120GB 2.5" HD, OS4.1FE
WinUae 3.0.0, OS 3.9, BB3, Catweasel MkIV
Amiga 1200, Blizzard 040/40 (BlizzardPPC 060/200 with SCSI removed at present), mediatorSX pci, Voodoo3, PCI network card os 3.9BB2
4MB Minimig with ARM addon boar

@Dwyloc

First thing to realise is that virtual memory is not 'paged memory' on the SAM the virtual memory will be the same as the 'real mem'. Paged memory or swap space simple doesn't add to the totalas you are expecting it too.



What do you see if you type C:memstat ?
The last line is most relavent in this case it will show something like:

Available pagers:
Pager on device sii3114ide.device/0 Pages: 539984 Free: 539984

which is what is says on mine.

(A SAM-Flex 733Mhz with 1Gb ram)

Dropping a single large file into RAM: is not a good way of checking whether swap is working or not. It's like checking if you tent is waterproof by putting under a waterfall.

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BroadBlues On Blues BroadBlues On Amiga Walker Broad

@broadblues

If C:memstat doesn't show an active pager you may have a problem.

My SWAP partition is as you describe, filesystem set to SWAP block size 4096 and buffers set to 600. It's named SWAP. It's also set to automount (I'm not sure if that's necessary or not, but if yours isn't them try adding that flag )

If C:memstat does show an active pager, then your issues could be for alot of reasons, incuding a bad program that has marked non swapable memory swapable.

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BroadBlues On Blues BroadBlues On Amiga Walker Broad

@broadblues

No it does not show up with c:memstat either.

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Sam440ep 667mhz, 512MB, 120GB 2.5" HD, OS4.1FE
WinUae 3.0.0, OS 3.9, BB3, Catweasel MkIV
Amiga 1200, Blizzard 040/40 (BlizzardPPC 060/200 with SCSI removed at present), mediatorSX pci, Voodoo3, PCI network card os 3.9BB2
4MB Minimig with ARM addon boar

@broadblues

Quote:

broadblues wrote: Dropping a single large file into RAM: is not a good way of checking whether swap is working or not. It's like checking if you tent is waterproof by putting under a waterfall.

lol, but it is a realistic real world test that should get an out of memory error not a system lockup.

The reason I am trying to fix my virtual memory is I am I think when my system is locking up its just run out of real ram using OWB and trying to use VM and failing.

_________________
Sam440ep 667mhz, 512MB, 120GB 2.5" HD, OS4.1FE
WinUae 3.0.0, OS 3.9, BB3, Catweasel MkIV
Amiga 1200, Blizzard 040/40 (BlizzardPPC 060/200 with SCSI removed at present), mediatorSX pci, Voodoo3, PCI network card os 3.9BB2
4MB Minimig with ARM addon boar

@Dwyloc

Quote:

No it does not show up with c:memstat either.

Right so you have no pager.





Does SWAP show in the list of deveices displayed by assign ?

If not try adding the automount flag to the MediaToolBox entry for the partition.

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BroadBlues On Blues BroadBlues On Amiga Walker Broad

@Dwyloc

Quote:

lol, but it is a realistic real world test that should get an out of memory error not a system lockup.

If you have no active swap you should get a "Ram Disk: Full message" however under very low memeory conditions things can go wrong.

A better test of whether your swap is swapping at all is open a few projects in a heavy memory user (blender springs to mind as I know works well with swap) and then run C:memstat and look at the results, it'll show you how much memory is paged etc.
But as C:memstat claims you have no page device you will get any swappping.(see above)


Quote:

The reason I am trying to fix my virtual memory is I am I think when my system is locking up its just run out of real ram using OWB and trying to use VM and failing.

You may be out of RAM but you won't be trying to use the pager if your paging partition is not being recognised. Getting the pager working might help but finding what app is crashing will help more.

A serial log might be the only way here if you can capture one.

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BroadBlues On Blues BroadBlues On Amiga Walker Broad

@broadblues

Hmmm... you really claim that memstat will NOT show active paging devices on other machines than SAM? I tried on my MicroA1, and memstat never states anything regarding active paging devices. The pager is working here, nonetheless. Maybe youre a betatester and you use a memstat version actually not available for ordinary users?

There are better ways to fill up RAM than using the eventually bug-bitten ram-handler, btw. Open several web pages showing many gfx with e.g. MUI-OWB, and RAM will be filled quite fast. As soon as MUI-OWB stops showing the gfx (but shows the rest of the page), RAM is full and things are paged out. If the pager is not active, MUI-OWB stops working or crashes.

Using the RAM Disk for this purpose is dangerous, as there are some bugs which will cause several malfunctions of other system parts, like network drivers etc. Paging works like a charm here, as long as I dont fill up RAM Disk. I posted this on Hyperion forum already.

Besides that, it seems that ram-handler messes things up, if you try to copy a single file larger than the physical memory available to RAM Disk. I read about this and tried myself. I get lockups and heavy crashes on my MicroA1.

Last edited by whose on 02-Oct-2011 at 11:05 PM.
Last edited by whose on 02-Oct-2011 at 10:40 PM.

@broadblues

I have the same options set as you but my SWAP partiton is the first on the disk.

If you use the workbench prefs util to edit your workbench tittle bar can you get it so show your virtual ram as a different size from real ram?

_________________
Sam440ep 667mhz, 512MB, 120GB 2.5" HD, OS4.1FE
WinUae 3.0.0, OS 3.9, BB3, Catweasel MkIV
Amiga 1200, Blizzard 040/40 (BlizzardPPC 060/200 with SCSI removed at present), mediatorSX pci, Voodoo3, PCI network card os 3.9BB2
4MB Minimig with ARM addon boar

@broadblues

Both my SAM and my Pegasos II have the settings you have shown with your screenshots. Neverthless memstat never ever reported anything like you have shown, not on my Peg2 and not on my SAM.

Last edited by cha05e90 on 02-Oct-2011 at 10:54 PM.

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X1000|II/G4|440ep|2000/060|2000/040|1000

@Dwyloc

Im not broadblues, but I tried with Workbench display of VMEM, and I get the same results as you. I dont think that we will get "accurate" VMEM display soon (or ever). If your harddisk is loud enough to be heared under heavy load, you will notice the pager kicking in by the harddisk noise.

You should take into account, that several programs still have problems using the paged memory, I discovered some of them. So there are few ways to check the pager functionality without side effects. MUI-OWB with lots of pages opened works quite good to eat up all physical memory, though.

Last edited by whose on 02-Oct-2011 at 11:09 PM.

@cha05e90

The memstat command showing the available pagers was only distributed with AmigaOS 4.1 Classic. Broadblues is a beta tester and he may have updated to that version or is inadvertantly using the OS4.1 Classic memstat command without knowing it.

Other memstat versions do not list the available pagers.

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AmigaOS 4.x Beta Tester - Classic Amiga enthusiast - http://www.hd-zone.com is my Amiga Blog, check it out!

@HammerD

It's in the current beta release on my A1, so it's "escaped" from the Classic version into the wilds...

However, even the current version from Update 3 shows that the pager is there, because it talks about the number of pages, so:

Page summary:
Swappable pages: 47370
Nonswappable pages: 14909
Locked pages: 31662

Pager statistics
Pages paged out: 0
Pages paged in: 0
Pages freed: 0

The text output by C:MemStat seems to have been expanded in the latest kernel release, but not greatly so.

Last edited by tonyw on 02-Oct-2011 at 11:19 PM.

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cheers
tony

Hyperion Support Forum: http://forum.hyperion-entertainment.biz/index.php

@cha05e90

Quote:

Both my SAM and my Pegasos II have the settings you have shown with your screenshots. Neverthless memstat never ever reported anything like you have shown, not on my Peg2 and not on my SAM.

My apologies, it appears that that is a beta faeture, which I didn't realise, however you can still see pager activity in memstat.

Try nearly filling RAM: with a larger number of smaller files (perhaps photographs) then starting blender or some other large program, and type C:memstat after that. You will see the nuber of pages paged out etc. Note blender is much better with memory than it used to be so you will need to fill ram up to about 50Mb free or so or load a very large blender project.

This doesn't really solve your lock up issues though, as I understand it the pager works but some programs don't play well with it (due bad memory allocation flags etc) working which program is failing is the tricky bit.

[edit]
I'm only suggesting blender in this context because I know it works reasonably well with swapped memory, in fact any large app might do as well[/edit]

Last edited by broadblues on 03-Oct-2011 at 11:23 AM.

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BroadBlues On Blues BroadBlues On Amiga Walker Broad

@whose

Quote:

Hmmm... you really claim that memstat will NOT show active paging devices on other machines than SAM?

I claimed nothing of the sort, how does my (mistakenly) claiming that memstat will show the active pager on one machine imply that it won't on another, you need to go back to logic school I think
Quote:

I tried on my MicroA1, and memstat never states anything regarding active paging devices. The pager is working here, nonetheless. Maybe youre a betatester and you use a memstat version actually not available for ordinary users?

Yes sorry didn't realise it was a beta feature.

Last edited by broadblues on 03-Oct-2011 at 11:30 AM.

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BroadBlues On Blues BroadBlues On Amiga Walker Broad

@HammerD

Ah, thanks for this explanation!

_________________
X1000|II/G4|440ep|2000/060|2000/040|1000

@broadblues
Quote:

If you have no active swap you should get a "Ram Disk: Full message" however under very low memeory conditions things can go wrong.

Never EVER went wrong on my classic amiga system. Always got a out of memory error by the end and cant recall it ever hard locking my system. OS4.1 on the other hand has in my experience always locked up after filling up memory. First it starts swapping, then it start freezing up for seconds at a time before it completely locks up.

I have not yet tested it on update 3 since i need to get a new mouse for my Sam, but judging from this thread it seems like this has not been fixed yet.

It is really odd that a more modern system with swap partition has more issues when you run low on ram.

It would seem swap just does not work on my system as any application that attempts to use it on my system just crashes with a corrupt memory list

See http://www.amigans.net/modules/xforum/viewtopic.php?start=0&topic_id=5038&viewmode=compact&order=ASC&type=&mode=0 for details on my problems with Aquaria under OS4 on my sam44ep (mini-itx).

_________________
Sam440ep 667mhz, 512MB, 120GB 2.5" HD, OS4.1FE
WinUae 3.0.0, OS 3.9, BB3, Catweasel MkIV
Amiga 1200, Blizzard 040/40 (BlizzardPPC 060/200 with SCSI removed at present), mediatorSX pci, Voodoo3, PCI network card os 3.9BB2
4MB Minimig with ARM addon boar

@Dwyloc

But, do you need virtual memory? if we have games and programs that don't need more of 512MB, we need speed and software.

@Dwyloc

Seems as if Update 3 introduced a bug in Virtual Memory.

Link

Quote:

Dwyloc wrote: It would seem swap just does not work on my system as any application that attempts to use it on my system just crashes with a corrupt memory list See http://www.amigans.net/modules/xforum/viewtopic.php?start=0&topic_id=5038&viewmode=compact&order=ASC&type=&mode=0 for details on my problems with Aquaria under OS4 on my sam44ep (mini-itx).

Last edited by Spectre660 on 11-Dec-2011 at 03:58 PM.

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Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card