Hi all,

I'm trying to optimize my virtual memory settings in Windows 98 so that I
can get the best performance out of my system but I don't have a complete
understanding of how Windows manages memory and how best to adjust the
settings.  If you know of any on-line documentation that does a good job in
explaining it I would appreciate pointers to it.  However, I'll give you
some information about my system in hopes that you can help me out on some
specifics.

First of all I have over 5 Gigs of free hard drive space that I keep
adequately defragged so that's not a problem (actually I'm not having any
problems, just want to optimize)  I have 128 Megs of physical memory
(PC-100 SDRAM).

Currently Windows is managing my virtual memory and the hard drive
performance optimization settings are set to "Network Server".  I don't
currently have the DMA function of my hard drive set but that's for a later
post.

Using System Monitor I see that I am currently allocating a whopping 105 M
of memory, a disk cache size of 30 M, and the swap file is using 0M.  This
leads me to my questions.

Isn't 105 MB a lot for just having open Eudora Pro, Win98, ICQ, System
Monitor, Motherboard Monitor, and a display control that sits in the system
tray (came with my video card)?

How does the disk cache differ from my swap file?  Does this mean I'm using
30 M of virtual memory or am I way off base?

I also see that my unused physical memory is 47.5 MB.  128 - 47 = 81.  Does
this mean that of 105 allocated MB of memory only 81M is actually physical
memory while 24M is virtual memory (105 - 81)?  Of course none of that is
the swap file it appears.  24M is close to the 30M disk cache, could this
be the same thing?

What would be the best size for the disk cache?  Currently the Max is 120M
while the min is 5M.

Finally, what would be the best settings for swap file size?  The current
size is 44 M (45 if I check the size of Win386.swp).

Thanks for any info you're willing and able to give,

Bill Nussbaumer

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