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Netherlands10341 Posts
If you use Windows XP and have a lot of applications open, you may run into Paged Pool limits when running SC2. The Paged Pool is a chunk of memory set aside for the Windows kernel and device drivers to use as memory. The more programs you have open, the more kernel services (anti virus, firewalls, etc) and the more devices you make use of, the more memory will be allocated from the paged pool. If it gets full, drivers and Windows will no longer be able to allocate memory and very bad things happen. In SC2 this might manifest itself as sluggish performance, graphical artifacting or outright crashing / blue screen.
Note! You only need to do this if you are currently getting warnings when playing SC2 that your paged pool is running low. Doing this unnecessarily will take memory from other kernel needs. This is a fairly complex and involved process because you're dealing with the internals of Windows memory management. This should not be necessary on Vista or later OSes.
Before you start, make sure your Paging File is set to System Managed size. Forcing a small paging file can cause numerous issues including a small paged pool. This is found under System Properties, Advanced, Performance, Advanced, Virtual Memory.
1. Install Windows debugging tools:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/Devtools/Debugging/default.mspx
2. Open a CMD prompt, Start, Run, cmd
3. Type the following commands, replacing M: with the appropriate drive letter (I imagine this will be C: for the majority of you).
cd "\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows"
symchk.exe /om m:\symlist /if m:\windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
symchk.exe /om m:\symlist /if m:\windows\system32\ntkrnlpa.exe
symchk.exe /im m:\symlist /s SRV*m:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
4. Download Process Explorer:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
5. Run Process Explorer, and go Options / Configure Symbols and fill in the appropriate paths:
Browse to your Debugging tools for Windows folder to find DBGHELP.DLL.
Browse to your X:\symbols folder to find the symbols.
6. Go View / System Information
If all has gone well, you should now see your Paged Pool values:
The "Paged Limit" is your maximum paged pool size. In my case, it's about 368MB.
7. Download http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/R1CH/PagedPoolRegFiles.zip
Open one of the .reg files corresponding to how big you want your paged pool to be. I recommend starting with the next highest size, eg if you paged pool is currently 140MB, use the PagedPool-192MB.reg file.
8. Reboot.
9. Run Process Explorer again and verify the Paged Limit has increased. If it hasn't changed or has decreased, the value was not valid for your system. This happened to me when I tried to use the 384MB size. Try the next size down, or if that is too small, go back to the defaults. If all else fails, you can try PagedPool-Max.reg which will force allocation of the largest paged pool possible.
In my case, the defaults worked best since I have 4 GB of RAM, so Windows allocated a fairly large paged pool by itself. The reason I was having trouble was some years ago, TF2 also had this paged pool issue and I'd used a .reg file for 384MB, not realizing this was too high so Windows was ignoring it and only using 260MB. You can use the PagedPool-Default.reg to restore Windows defaults.
Hopefully this is useful to someone  .
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Nice guide man!
I'm taking a class at my university at the moment where i will finally learn to understand all of these principles of operating systems, perhaps then i can be of more assistance in explaining exactly what is going on here xD
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Ahh, it will be interesting to play SC2 on my MacBook provided the graphics card is compatible. Haven't played a 'real' game on it yet.
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Good guide, but this is a common issue with other games as well.
Guys, know your anti-virus'. AVG (even the free version), Norton, and some others take up A LOT of this memory, even when not even running. Uninstalling AVG was the only way I could play one game.
If you run into this problem you may want to seriously consider uninstalling anti-virus (even if you want to just try and reinstall later).
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Hmm, i dont get it, i increased it a lot, and still get the error! when i go check, limit is like 4 times the paged virtual and physical o_O dont get how it works have 2gb ram and i tried that 260 or what is it, but it shows only 229... but still, paged physical and virtual are at like 60
and when that error pops up... i start getting gfx glitches and lines and crap(between zealots for example)... and suggested quality for my pc is ultra lol
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On February 28 2010 13:25 genai wrote:
Hmm, i dont get it, i increased it a lot, and still get the error! when i go check, limit is like 4 times the paged virtual and physical o_O dont get how it works have 2gb ram and i tried that 260 or what is it, but it shows only 229... but still, paged physical and virtual are at like 60
and when that error pops up... i start getting gfx glitches and lines and crap(between zealots for example)... and suggested quality for my pc is ultra lol
Same thing is happening to me. Glitches between zealots, some wierd lines. I have 2gb of ram and suggested quality set to medium.
Any suggestinos maybe case this error is really anoying..
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Iraq1230 Posts
this is rlly nice, ive been having this problem ever since the beta started and have been forced to play at low settings, now i can play at high. thx alot
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Anyway, I made it, and so far its looking good and working smoothly.. :D
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is the message : "your paged pool is running low." ? In starcraft 2 game ?
cuz it seems to me i experience some issues like this, but not sure this one.
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I get this message all the time, 100% of the time, and it's annoying me like hell.
It does not cause any slowdown or degradation in performance, it just sits there on the left side taking up screen space.
My current pagedpool limit sits at 260MB. I tried increasing it to 380, but the value was still 260MB after entering the registry file and rebooting.
I have no idea what to do to solve this.
I've almost given up, and think I need to buy some new hardware or something.
My pc is not even half bad :
Intel E8400
8800 GTS 512mb.
4 GB ram.
(Rest is unimportant).
PS: I've sent you this as a PM Rich, incase you pickup that faster.
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Windows kernel and device drivers to use as memory.
I often get this warning, with 2gb of ram so I was confused what was wrong because there was plenty of ram left but now I see the problem is very different. Still I don't really understand, from what you say the paged pool is an allocated spaced in the memory for exclusive use for drivers and windows, so why is Starcraft 2 taking space in it? Are processes like vmware and sqlserver included? I noticed I have alot of them running.
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Isn't a better solution to just, you know, close some other programs? such as the 10million tray icons that most people have seem to have?
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Just a note, I had this problem with L4D2 on XP. Turned out it was because I had the /3gb switch on. Something to look into!
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What are the graphic settings that use page pool memory? I'd rather reduce the settings than start messing around with windows.
Also, is there a way to see which program is taking how much page pool memory? I have avira antivirus and a couple of other software running in background... and I want to see whats taking all the memory so I can get another antivirus or something if necessary.
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Netherlands10341 Posts
On April 22 2010 20:21 Shade692003 wrote:I often get this warning, with 2gb of ram so I was confused what was wrong because there was plenty of ram left but now I see the problem is very different. Still I don't really understand, from what you say the paged pool is an allocated spaced in the memory for exclusive use for drivers and windows, so why is Starcraft 2 taking space in it? Are processes like vmware and sqlserver included? I noticed I have alot of them running.
Starcraft 2 makes heavy use of video and sound, so your video and sound drivers will be allocating paged pool memory. Most applications should use very little, VMware I suspect would use a bit, SQL server I'm not sure about - I can't imagine why it would use much if it does.
On April 23 2010 06:12 Voideka wrote:
Just a note, I had this problem with L4D2 on XP. Turned out it was because I had the /3gb switch on. Something to look into!
Yeah the /3GB switch is not something you should use without fully understanding how it works, it only gives your programs more memory if they were actually compiled with large address aware settings, and it reduces the amount of memory available to the kernel so you have lower paged pool sizes amongst other things.
On May 04 2010 01:07 Draken wrote:
What are the graphic settings that use page pool memory? I'd rather reduce the settings than start messing around with windows.
Also, is there a way to see which program is taking how much page pool memory? I have avira antivirus and a couple of other software running in background... and I want to see whats taking all the memory so I can get another antivirus or something if necessary.
Unfortunately you can't tell which programs are using it since it's allocated by the kernel. The best way to tell is simply to watch the numbers while closing programs or disabling anti-virus etc.
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I *strongly* suggest updating your system drivers before playing around with the Paged Pool Limits. This is just a last resort thing.
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Never had this problem myself but thanks for posting this, I know many members of the community are struggling with this issue.
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I found a cvar called pagedPoolLimitEnforced in the Variables.txt (C:\Users\sztanpet\Documents\StarCraft II Beta\Variables.txt), setting it to 1 also might help. I messaged Artosis about this too, he doesn't have it in his Variables.txt so I have no idea if it works or not, I don't get these errors.
It just seems like a lot less invasive thing to try before fiddling with anything else, who knows.
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never have this pop up on w7u 64bit
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EPT![[image loading]](/staff/R1CH/ppfix1.png)
![[image loading]](/staff/R1CH/ppfix2.png)
![[image loading]](/staff/R1CH/ppfix3.png)
