Author: Mike Hood
Date: 18:45:18 10/22/05
This is a Windows XP question, not a chess question as such, so please be patient with me. I have a Pentium 4 processor, 2.8 Ghz, 1GB of Ram. I'm using Windows XP, service pack 2. I've been running an engine tournament in the Fritz 9 GUI where the engines have 128 MB hash tables each. According to the Windows Task Manager, during normal operation the process ChessProgram9.exe is using about 295 MB of memory and I have approximately 250 MB of physical memory available. Apart from my system drivers I only have a few processes running, such as Outlook Express and (if necessary) the Task Manager itself. Usually things run smoothly, but every now and then my hard drive starts to rumble. According to the Task Manager ChessProgram9's memory usage has dropped to 50 MB or less, and the free physical memory has risen to over 500 MB. The node speed of the engine currently thinking drops drastically, while CP9's memory usage gradually climbs up to about 200 MB. Then it's the other engine's turn, it also runs slowly while the memory usage slowly climbs back up to 295 MB. Then everything is good again, for a few minutes at least. I assume that the problem is caused by Windows XP deciding to swap out the memory used by CP9. Why? Why should the operating system decide to free up memory when more than 200 MB of physical memory is already free? Is there any way to stop this happening? An operating system setting or a third party utility?
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