How can one use the physical memory of our system rather than virtual memory while running Labview?

[emalkiel]

We have a Windows NT system with 2 Gb of physical memory and would like to utilize the RAM fully using Labview. What usually occurs is that Labview uses a tremendous amount of page file space while a majority of the physical memory is unused. Is there a way to configure Labview (or our system) to overcome this problem? It seems that our processes would be much faster if they were mainly using the physical memory. Is it possible to trick the system, by creating a RAM disk and allocating this as virtual memory space?

[Doug (CapeFl)]

You may want to look at the VIs for System Configuration, including memory VIs: Functions > Instrument I/O > I/O Compatibility > VXI > Shared Memory Access palette.
Also, there is an example VI (Sharing System RAM.vi - check your Help for a link)) which shows an example of doing what you stated.
I only know these VIs are there, but have not had to use them yet, but perhaps this moves you along in the right direction.
Good Luck with it, Doug

[Greg_McKaskle2]

> We have a Windows NT system with 2 Gb of physical memory and would
> like to utilize the RAM fully using Labview. What usually occurs is
> that Labview uses a tremendous amount of page file space while a
> majority of the physical memory is unused. Is there a way to
> configure Labview (or our system) to overcome this problem? It seems
> that our processes would be much faster if they were mainly using the
> physical memory. Is it possible to trick the system, by creating a
> RAM disk and allocating this as virtual memory space?

LabVIEW the application doesn't know anything about physical versus
virtual memory. LV asks the OS for general purpose memory and goes
from there.

Drivers like DAQ and IMAQ will have a combination of general user
memory and page lo
cked physical buffers.

I'm not up on the details, but this is something that the OS is in
control of, so that is where you need to look for the solution. One
of the things to look at is the disk cache. By default, I think that
NT takes a percentage of the RAM to use for disk cache. With that
much RAM, this is probably unnecessary and is using too much.
Similarly, the OS may be attempting to keep the working set size
to a fraction of the total RAM to reserve space for other things.
It doesn't make sense to me, but then I don't work for MS.

Greg McKaskle