Tuesday, May 03, 2005
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Mo' memory!
There are many ways to tweak VPC to get better performance. Putting the vhd file on its own physical (fast) hard drive is key, and Brian Randell has other tips.
 
But the single biggest thing you can do is have so much RAM in the host computer that there's no paging. I just upgraded my desktop so it has 2.5 gigs of RAM. My VPC machine has 768 megs allocated and it is fast. And at the same time on the host I'm able to run Word, Outlook, RSSBandit, Windows Media Player, Trillian, Avant Browser and all the other random stuff in my system tray.
 
The key of course, is to avoid paging, and the only real way to do that is to have about 20% more RAM than you'll ever actually use. 2.5 gigs seems to be a sweet spot for me, since even with everything running at once I still show almost 1 gig of free memory.
 
Prior to this I was at 1.5 gig total RAM, and with a VPC loaded the whole system was super-slow. The VPC was almost unusable, and other apps on the host loaded very slowly and ran with sub-par performance.
 
Now, last night I fired up a game and was happily playing away - then I realized that I'd never shut down the VPC. Here I was playing a memory-hungry modern game and a VPC and I didn't even notice the difference.
 
More memory is happiness!
Tuesday, May 03, 2005 9:25:31 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [6]  | 

Tuesday, May 03, 2005 11:33:43 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I admittedly don't know much about VPC yet. However, do you find it to be a great advantage over swapping HDDs? I've traditionally had my "production" hdd for my laptop, and then extra hdds for different things, mainly for betas.
Leigh Kendall
Tuesday, May 03, 2005 1:22:26 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
For writing it is invaluable, since it allows me to run the beta software in one window, Word in another window and cut-and-paste code and images from my dev workstation directly into Word.

I used to have a physical second machine to do this, but that's pretty expensive given that both my main and secondary machines had to be pretty high-end. This way I can share one machine (with lots of RAM) to get the same effect - only cheaper.
Rockford Lhotka
Tuesday, May 03, 2005 4:23:30 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Good points... didn't think of it that way. RAM certainly is MUCH cheaper, especially these days. Thanks for the tip! As always, keep up the great work!
Leigh Kendall
Thursday, May 05, 2005 1:00:49 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Y'know if you're doing /3GB or /PAE on your desktop - there's something wrong with the entire picture.
Sahil Malik
Thursday, May 05, 2005 5:36:40 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I just remember being so excited when we upgraded the drives on our VAXen in the late 80's and early 90's. And now my desktop has more disk space than the computer than ran our whole company. The disk space in my home is over 1/2 TB at this point (across all machines). That's a number most people never imagined just 15 years ago.

Same with RAM. All my machines combined have around 10 gigs of RAM. My first hard drive (on my Amiga) was just 20 meg and that was HUGE!! I remember upgrading my server a few years back - to a whopping 96 megs of RAM.

So I am not convinced that 3 or 4 GB of RAM on a desktop is out of line. At least it won't be out of line within the next 5 years or so. I have friends who produce and direct amateur movies, and that video editing software does love the RAM!
Rockford Lhotka
Thursday, May 12, 2005 12:22:59 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
mmmm, nice. At my new job we get 1GB standard, and we will be using a LOT of VPC. They are the best for doing demo's to customers. The best thing is they save you a lot of time.

1. Create a VPC of Win2003 and load all the SPs
2. Make a copy of the VPC you just created.
3. Load Visual Studio 2003 on it.
4. Make a copy of it.
5. Load SQL Server 2000 on the new copy, and load all the SPs

So, now you have 3 VPCs, and you did 1 3rd of the work to get them setup. So next time you want to see how Visual Studio runs with SQL Server 2005, just make a copy of the VPC you created in step 3, and load SQL Server 2005.

Sick!
Stephan Human
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