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More => Old Versions => Media Center 12 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: JetBlack on November 24, 2007, 11:42:18 am

Title: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: JetBlack on November 24, 2007, 11:42:18 am
I was taging some pictures and music and I am now getting as error saying "Out Of Memory". Is that possible?
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: KingSparta on November 24, 2007, 11:57:57 am
Yes
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: JetBlack on November 24, 2007, 12:17:56 pm
so what does that mean? what do I need to do to fix it?
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: Doof on November 24, 2007, 12:26:11 pm
Buy more memory.

But seriously, though, can you post your system specs? If you go to MCs help menu, there's a System Information item that will compile your system specs and then you can post them here. It's possible you have another app running the background that's leaking memory. Also, I imagine if you're doing a lot of tagging to a lot of files and your PC isn't able to keep up with the disk writes that MC's asking it to do, you might run into problems. There's a lot of reasons this could happen.

I would reboot your PC, then get a System Info from MC. Then you can get an idea of how much free memory you generally start with. Enabling logging (available from the help menu) may also help shed some light on this.
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: JetBlack on November 24, 2007, 02:29:56 pm
So MC does not have a memory limitation, it would be my PC, correct?
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: Mr ChriZ on November 24, 2007, 02:51:52 pm
Correct
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: KingSparta on November 24, 2007, 03:07:41 pm
It could be you have too many programs running, closing unneeded programs like yahoo messenger, anti-virus, firewalls, mail programs, defraggers, auto maintenance programs, weather type widgets etc, will allow for increased memory.

Sometimes making Sure windows is using A paging file, or increase the paging memory will help.

when was the last time you re-booted, sometimes this will allow you to recover some memory that has leaked by programs that did not release memory properly.

a memory defragger may help recover lost memory.

what is also good is buy more memory, windows XP should have 1 Gig, Windows Vista Should Have 2 Gigs, No matter what Microsoft tells you.
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: Listener on November 24, 2007, 03:29:12 pm
Your web browser may be contributing.  Recent versions of Firefox grab lots of virtual memory.  I don't know how much memory IE 7 uses.

You might try looking at what's happening in your system.  If you are running Win XP, Press Control-Alt-Delete and click on the performance tab to see your PC's overall state.  Then click on the processes tab to look at individual processes.  Click on the Mem Usage column to get the processes sorted in order of increasing memory use.

Bill
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: glynor on November 24, 2007, 04:44:20 pm
windows XP should have 1 Gig, Windows Vista Should Have 2 Gigs, No matter what Microsoft tells you.

Change that to 2GB and 4GB.  Vista 64 likes 6-8GB, but I don't like Vista 64 (not yet anyway).
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: Matt on November 24, 2007, 05:28:14 pm
It could also be a bug.  MC should not be very memory hungry.

Can you reproduce it?
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: JetBlack on November 24, 2007, 06:24:31 pm
I shut down MC and restarted and the problem has not re-occured
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: KingSparta on November 25, 2007, 08:18:56 am
When Import Is Running In MC, Avail Memory Will Fall

And MC will keep this memory until the user click on the info box that pops up telling the user what was and was not imported.

if allot of files were imported then MC seems to hang for a few Min's as it puts things in order or what ever it is doing.

I have always found this weird why MC would wait for a user to click OK on that info box
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: glynor on November 25, 2007, 03:26:19 pm
I've never had this happen.  Of course... All of my machines have at least 2GB.
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: KingSparta on November 25, 2007, 03:30:19 pm
import 300,000 files, and see what happens.

it is less noticeable with smaller libraries.

I Have 1 Gig Of Memory, BTW.
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: JONCAT on November 29, 2007, 08:23:44 am
Search the forums for OUT OF MEMORY, I have a few posts; hope they help.

I observed it when MC was open overnight, nothing intense running on either PC:

XP SP2
XP x64

It was impossible to reproduce, it just cropped up on its own; there is more log info in my threads.

DC
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: edbro on November 29, 2007, 08:54:18 am
I noticed last night while transferring already cached files to an iPod that MC memory usage was 300MB and climbing. Virtual size was over 1 Gigabyte. I minimized MC to release memory and it went down to using only 35MB. I restored the window and watched it and it didn't go above 70MB for the rest of the session.

I didn't get any out of memory messages but then again I have 4GB installed, even though XP can only use 3.5 of it.
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: glynor on November 29, 2007, 09:46:30 am
I didn't get any out of memory messages but then again I have 4GB installed, even though XP can only use 3.5 of it.

Windows XP can use the full 4GB of your RAM.  You just need to enable PAE mode by adding a switch to the boot.ini file.  Read:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/08/14/699521.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

Microsoft doesn't enable this by default because not all motherboard implementations are done "properly" which can prevent devices on the PCI bus (ATA drives and sound cards for example) from accessing the memory addressed in the "extended" space.  You can check with your motherboard vendor to ensure that this is not an issue on your board, and then enable PAE mode to get back that last 512MB of RAM.

More info here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888137

There are also some performance impacts from the double-buffering required to support PAE.  These are relatively minor, but for memory bandwidth limited applications (database queries for example) they can have a large impact.  Most "desktop" applications are NOT memory bandwidth limited (other than high-end 3D games, but that is a limit on the bandwidth of the Video RAM, not System RAM).
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: hit_ny on November 29, 2007, 10:02:46 am
I've never had this happen.  Of course... All of my machines have at least 2GB.
Neither have i and i only got 256MB !!

..unless the parent posts his specs, we will never know.
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: JONCAT on November 29, 2007, 10:09:19 am
From http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm:

"I should add a note about the /3GB, /4GT and /PAE Windows boot.ini switches, too, because they often come up when people are talking about 4Gb-plus Windows PCs.

They are all useless to you. You do not want them.

/3GB and /4GT are config settings for different versions of Windows that tell the operating system to change the partitioning of the 4Gb 32-bit address space so that applications can use 3Gb and the OS kernel only 1Gb, as opposed to the standard 2Gb-each arrangement. They don't help at all with the 3Gb barrier, and most applications don't even notice them, so desktop users lose kernel memory space (and system performance) for no actual gain at all.

The /PAE boot.ini switch, on NT-descended Windows flavours, activates the Physical Address Extension mode that's existed in every PC CPU since the Pentium Pro. That mode cranks the address space up to 64 gigabytes (two to the power of 36), and the computer can then give a 4Gb addressing block within that space - or even more, with extra tricks - to each of several applications.

PAE's no good to the everyday 3Gb-problem-afflicted user, though, for two reasons.

First, it presents 64-bit addresses to drivers, and thus causes exactly the same compatibility problems as a proper 64-bit operating system, except worse, because now you need PAE-aware drivers for 32-bit Windows, instead of just plain 64-bit drivers for a 64-bit OS. From a normal user's point of view, PAE gives you the incompatibility of a 64-bit operating system when you're still running a 32-bit OS.

For this reason, Microsoft changed the behaviour of the /PAE option in all versions of WinXP as of Service Pack 2. They fixed the endless driver problems by, essentially, making /PAE in XP not do anything. All versions of WinXP except for the x64 Edition now have a hard 4Gb addressing limit, no matter what hardware you use them on and what configuration you choose.

This isn't a big problem, of course, since XP is not meant to be a server operating system. But it's still mystifying to people who try the /PAE flag and can't figure out why it doesn't work.

Oh, and just in case you for some reason still wanted to try PAE: It eats CPU time, too.

(You can read more about boot.ini switches as they pertain to memory and driver breakage on Microsoft's page for driver developers here.)"
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: glynor on November 29, 2007, 10:33:11 am
From everything I've read, the PAE switch wasn't changed to not do anything in XP SP2, but was changed to do a lot less.  It should (in theory) let you go from 3.5GB RAM available to the full 4GB RAM available if your motherboard drivers support it.

I haven't really messed with it on my own MacPro system (which is my only "windows" machine that has more than 2GB RAM) though, so I can't speak to it for sure.

One big change, in the documentation that I see, was that XP SP2 was changed so that using the /PAE and the /3GB switches at the same time is not allowed, and using the /3GB switch automatically disables PAE mode.

Dr. C has a LOT more experience with this stuff (in trying to run XP64 for a long while) though, so I'd defer in general to his greater wisdom.   ;)  ;D
Title: Re: MC says I am out of Memory
Post by: Uwe on November 30, 2007, 05:28:52 am

I Have 1 Gig Of Memory, BTW.

King, that is not important.
For MC it's important how much memory you stick in your computer!