How much virtual memory is optimal

Hi,

I have the 64-bit version of Windows 7 installed with 4GB of RAM. I run virtualisation applications like virtualbox as well as IDEs like Netbeans (a bit heavy on memory) and Visual Studio 2010. I frequently find the memory consumption shooting above 3500 MB. Is it normal?

Also my virtual memory (min & max) is manually set to 8 GB. Since I have never seen the commit charge going beyond 4GB, I assume that the virtual memory remains unused. So, I wish to know how much virtual memory is actually required by my system and whether I should leave it to be managed by the system or set it manually.

"How much virtual memory is optimal?"

In my opinion, with modern operating systems like Windows 7, you'll get the best virtual memory performance by letting the OS manage it. On the three Win 7 x64 systems that I own I've noticed that by default Win 7 sets the VM to roughly 2x installed ram and everything runs quick and snappy, with very little disk thrashing.

I don't use the memory-intensive applications that you do, so perhaps yours is a special case, but I think even then Win 7 will handle it better than setting it manually.

Just my opinion of course

logicearth said:

Mark Russinovich has a different take on what you should set virtual memory to: Mysteries of Windows Memory Management Revealed Watch part one, towards the end. I'll take Mark's advice over anyone else.

I read that article and I think that he has a good point. But since I have about 155 GB of free disk space, it really does not matter if I 4 to 8 GB are used up by virtual memory. Correct me if I am wrong, I assume that excess of virtual memory will not have a negative impact on the performance. Besides, can any one of you tell me how much the OS would allocate by default?