Weird memory usage, not using RAM / running out of RAM

[doveman 7]

I've got 16GB and I'm running Win7 x64 Ultimate.

I'm using an 8GB RAMDisk and have around 13.5GB free before loading that, so around 5.5GB free after.

I've just alt-tabbed out of a game and Task Manager is showing 5301MB available and 678MB free (4770MB cached) which would mean ArmA's barely using anything. The Processes tab shows that arma2oa.exe is using 183MB Working, 176MB Private Working Set and 1030MB Commit Size.

Prior to this, I tried disabling the pagefile as weird things were happening, such as ArmA taking ages to close and the HDD thrashing for ages after, so it seemed like it was paging stuff to the pagefile despite having plenty of free RAM. With the pagefile disabled, ArmA crashed after a while, with Windows saying it had run out of RAM even though Task Manager showed about 2GB still free.

[Valken 623]

Thanks for posting in my thread. ARMA 2 never crashed on my system due to ram, even when I had a ton of mods running. I too have a 8 GB ramdisk for it now.

I did check my system and it had a 1GB fixed swap file on C.

I just released that and let windows manage it for ARMA 3 so need to determine how large of a swap file I would need.

Try it with a 2 GB fixed swap file and I think you should be good to go.

[doveman 7]

Yeah, I don't think A2 has been a problem for me when I have a swapfile enabled. System Managed it makes a 16GB swapfile, I guess because I have 16GB RAM.

I wanted to disable the swapfile though as it seems it was swapping stuff to it and causing problems when using my RAMDisk, despite there being plenty of actual RAM free but it seems it's not possible to run without one completely.

I'll have to ask around on the technical forums for some advice on how the swapfile works and if there's a way to prevent Windows using it unless absolutely necessary.

I'll probably install a clean Windows just for ArmA and DCS as well and see if that helps.

[brick-4 10]

maybe your ram its to big