Run more programs under XP

[WPWoodJr]

On my new T60p with 2gb memory I could not run any more programs than I was able to on my 1.5gb T42p. At a certain point programs would not load, menus would not show, etc. I think many people experience this and think there is nothing to do about it or that its the page file or something. I did some research and this thread has the very obscure solution to this very common problem:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=37143

Look for the post which references "desktop heap".

[tomh009]

Hmmm ... interesting! Does the error message in the KB match what you see on your T60? And how many processes do you have running when you start seeing this message? Are they mostly services or desktop apps?

So did this resolve the problems you were seeing? And, if it did, what values did you use for the SharedSection?

[WPWoodJr]

Hmmm ... interesting! Does the error message in the KB match what you see on your T60? And how many processes do you have running when you start seeing this message? Are they mostly services or desktop apps?

So did this resolve the problems you were seeing? And, if it did, what values did you use for the SharedSection?

No, I never got any error messages. I would go to start a program and it wouldn't start, or it would be visible in Task Manager but never put up a UI window. Or, some programs stopped displaying menus.

Generally this was happening when I got up around 95 processes, some 40 or so of them were services. Note that services have a different heap than the interactive desktop heap (see http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archi ... rview.aspx for a good explanation of all this).

I have modified my "interactive" window station desktop heap upwards from 3072kb to 4096kb. I can now run over 100 programs with 2.3GB or more of Total Commit Charge and I still don't have any problems (whereas before problems would start at around 1.6GB Total Commit Charge (as viewed in Task Manager)).

For a quick test of your system's limits, you can do what I did while debugging this. Run this command to create as many Notepad sessions as possible:

Code: Select all

for /l %i in (1,1,300) do notepad %i

The loop runs to 300 but you will probably only get to about 150 before it starts failing. Then update your desktop heap to 4096 and you should get upwards of 200 Notepads going before it fails.

It was not easy finding this info. Most articles about XP memory management focus obessively on page file space. Interestingly during my testing I used the "consume" utility from Windows Resource Kit to test extreme out of memory conditions and found that XP worked pretty well in that regard. I also found that my 2GB page file was never over about 25% full, so I reduced it to 1GB and saved some disk space!