I broke ECM-Fermat...or my PC IDEAS?

[petrw1]

[Apr 26 22:32] Worker starting
[Apr 26 22:32] Setting affinity to run worker on logical CPUs 0,1
[Apr 26 22:32] Setting affinity to run helper thread 1 on logical CPUs 0,1
[Apr 26 22:32] Using all-complex Pentium4 type-3 FFT length 64K, Pass1=256, Pass2=256, 2 threads
[Apr 26 22:32] ECM on F20: curve #1 with s=1426642681332032, B1=11000000, B2=1100000000
[Apr 26 22:32] Using 751MB of memory in stage 2.
[Apr 26 22:34] Stage 2 init complete. 18942 transforms, 2 modular inverses. Time: 94307.063 ms.
[Apr 26 22:34] Out of memory!
[Apr 26 22:34] Worker stopped.

Any suggestions?
Bad memory maybe?
Too much other crap running and taking up too much RAM?
This PC has 1GB of RAM.

This same PC finished another F20 a few weeks ago without issue.
This one was about 85% done Curve 1 Stage 2 when this happened.
I had been using 800MB of memory.
I tried more (up to 860) with the same error.
I watch it in Task Manager and as soon as it is done Stage 2 init complete I watch Physical RAM available almost drop to 0 before this error.

For the last few days Windows was popping up the message "Memory Critically Low ..." and something about changing the size of ... "I don't remember". Maybe I need to change it back...whatever it is...or shutdown crap?

Then I started dropping it ... at 700MB it still failed... all the way down to 600MB before it finally would run again.....but will this NOT slow it down and should I not in theory be able to allocate up to 90% of Physical RAM?

Thanks in advance.

[henryzz]

If windows is coming up with that message then you are running out of pagefile. You have too many programs open. Browsers are a common culprit. If you have google chrome then try going to about:memory and it will tell you have much memory each browser is using. Don't assume that a browser isn't using much memory because you don't have many tabs open. Most of them have memory leaks so you need to restart them every so often.
You either need to increase the size of your pagefile or use less memory.
Assuming windows 7, if you look at the performance tab of task manager in the system section you find Commit (MB/GB). What value do you have there?

[bcp19]

If your PC only has 1GB of RAM, assigning 800MB to it may be too much as part of your RAM is of necessity taken up by the OS. I would recommend dropping it to 500-600 and retrying myself.

[kladner]

Also, as Henry noted, the message you got re: "increase size" surely meant increase the paging file.

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by henryzz

If windows is coming up with that message then you are running out of pagefile. You have too many programs open. Browsers are a common culprit. If you have google chrome then try going to about:memory and it will tell you have much memory each browser is using. Don't assume that a browser isn't using much memory because you don't have many tabs open. Most of them have memory leaks so you need to restart them every so often.
You either need to increase the size of your pagefile or use less memory.
Assuming windows 7, if you look at the performance tab of task manager in the system section you find Commit (MB/GB). What value do you have there?

XP: Commit Charge was about 3500/3550M then the error.
Then I rebooted: 927/2446M
Maybe a memory leak or runaway process

I "almost" never do anything on this PC except GIMPS. The ocassional IE to get/check assignments.

[cheesehead]

I've moved a post I originally made here to a new thread in the Software subforum:

http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=18144

It explains what I recently found on my Windows system about low-memory messages.

[petrw1]

Thx All