Apache OpenOffice 4.1.7 hangs whole system when 'Save as'

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

If you have only 2 GB recognized (here as well, but a different reason), then it makes no sense to set VAL to that or a higher value. You probably run out of shared lower memory first.

I have tested here 1536 and 1728. My current value is 1728, but I'm not happy with it. 2 GB is just too little for recent apps.

[Mike Kölling]

I have tested here 1536 and 1728. My current value is 1728, but I'm not happy with it. 2 GB is just too little for recent apps.

I totally agree that 2GB is to less. I have at least 4GB and 8GB in my laptops and set the address limit to 3072, which works well for me.

Greetings from Potsdam / Germany
Mike

[Dave Yeo]

You can set VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT higher then your RAM. With 2GBs, I had it set to 3072, then had a DIMM die giving me 1.5 GBs of real ram. Still needed VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=3072 to link XUL.DLL and as long as I was careful to not have SeaMonkey running, it worked fine, if slow. I did overflow the swap file once or twice with SeaMonkey running, seems the swap file has a 2GB limit.
Virtual memory is what VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT adjusts and with 2GBs of ram and 2GB of swap, there shouldn't be any problem besides swapping and in my experience, generally things that aren't used much gets swapped out and I found running with 1.5GBs wasn't bad.
@Pete, try doing

Code: [Select]

dir  J:\PROGRAMS\AOO4\PROGRAM\..\program\swoo.dll
to test.

[Doug Bissett]

VAL has nothing, at all, to do with real memory size. I use VAL set to 2560 on my antique IBM ThinkPad A22e, and it has max memory of 256MB. I can run Firefox (probably v17.0, or so, last time I tried it), but it takes about 30 minutes to get the blank home page loaded. As long s most of the stuff gets paged out, and isn't used much, it works fine. Paging absolutely kills it. Things like Firefox, and AOO, are not written to use paging efficiently (if that was even considered, which is unlikely). My IBM ThinkPad T43 with 1.5 GB, and my antique Asus, with 1 GB, work okay with VAL set to 2560. As Dave suggests, set the swap size plus the real memory size to a total of about 4 GB (which is not necessary, but then it won't spend time trying to shrink it back to the defined size).

VAL is part of the OS/2 addressable space (something less than 4 GB, no matter how much real memory you have), and if you exceed the real memory, it uses the swap file. In fact, it takes an exceptional program to push memory into the swap file, if you have 2 GB of real memory.

[Lars]

You can set VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT higher then your RAM. With 2GBs, I had it set to 3072, then had a DIMM die giving me 1.5 GBs of real ram. Still needed VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=3072 to link XUL.DLL and as long as I was careful to not have SeaMonkey running, it worked fine, if slow. I did overflow the swap file once or twice with SeaMonkey running, seems the swap file has a 2GB limit.
Virtual memory is what VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT adjusts and with 2GBs of ram and 2GB of swap, there shouldn't be any problem besides swapping and in my experience, generally things that aren't used much gets swapped out and I found running with 1.5GBs wasn't bad.
@Pete, try doing

Code: [Select]

dir  J:\PROGRAMS\AOO4\PROGRAM\..\program\swoo.dll
to test.

Looks like the swap file has a 1 GB limit. I just specified 2 GB for initial size on SWAPPATH and it only creates a 1 GB file.
I now set it to 1 GB. Since I have 16 GB of RAM and 3 GB are visible to OS/2, it's never actually used but I have the impression that it increases system stability (before, I had set it to as low as 2 MB). I suspect that the memory management somehow tests if the in-use RAM would fit into the swap file without actually moving memory pages to the swap file or some such.

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

Thanks, makes sense. I've set now my VAL to 2560.

[Pete]

Hi Dave

@Pete, try doing

Code: [Select]

dir  J:\PROGRAMS\AOO4\PROGRAM\..\program\swoo.dll
to test.

Yes,that works fine - just looks wrong.


Regards

Pete

[Dave Yeo]

@Lars, the 2 (2.1?) GB limit is how big it can grow to before crashing the system with a swap file full error. Never tried that large of an initial value, I think I was using 512MBs but it has been a while. The problem with letting it expand as needed is possible fragmentation but at the time I had lots of disk space so didn't worry about it.
With 1.5GBs of real ram, the swap file would be used a bit but never seemed to thrash.
Now back when I first used Warp V3 with 4MBs of ram, couldn't even load the WPS without the system becoming unusable.