thexdane wrote:actually having 2gb of mem is actually bad for your systen, a flaw in windows coding
Hmm, I did a search on this subject, and couldn't find any notes or documents on an XP problem with 2GB - in that case, I would say it's absolutely fine. People hear about coding flaws in Windows all the time, and to be honest the ones regarding low-level stuff like memory access are usually down to people's specific configurations. 2GB should work perfectly well with 32bit WinXP.
thexdane wrote:when memory usuage goes out of control it's called a memory leak and can crash your system
Memory leaks are bad, but they are generally only caused by programs crashing, or badly written memory deallocation code. I haven't seen Ryzom eat any memory so far, in fact even when it crashes to the bug report, windows *appears* to clean up correctly after it. Memory leaks were a big thing back with Windows95/98 - the newer versions of Windows are much, much tighter with that kind of thing. In the days of 95/98, you could almost guarantee that a crashed program or process would leave at least some of it's memory still allocated (and essentially unusable) after termination.
leone2nd wrote:Loading times in Ryzom IMHO depend on memory speed and not on memory capacity
This can vary from program to program, but the main factor is always hard drive speed. To give an example, say you're travelling from Fyros to Matis. You currently have the Fyros zone loaded in memory. For arguments sake, we'll say that you can't force Ryzom to have the Matis zone in memory at this point, so it has to be loaded from the HD when you hit the portal. Memory access speed is far, *far* in excess of hard drive access speed, so the limiting factor is the slowest factor - the hard drive. Because of this, the only way to speed up travelling from one zone to another is to have both zones in memory at the time of hitting the portal. However, since there are quite a few more than 2 zones in Ryzom, I doubt a machine could contain enough memory to hold all the zones, and thus you would always find travelling to zones that aren't loaded in memory would still require hard drive access.
Also, marct is asking about system memory, not AGP or graphics related memory

The bulk of information used by Ryzom is system memory, i.e. zone, player, mob, npc, resource information. Setting your AGP memory usage to higher than the actual memory on your graphics card will cause AGP to use system memory for graphics and texture information. Although AGP access to system memory is fast, it's still not as fast as the graphics card accessing it's own onboard memory, and can actually cause slowdown and poor performance if you're not careful. As a rule, I find it best not to allow AGP to use system memory at all - I have a 128MB AGP video card, and that seems to work well with the Ryzom 128MB configuration.
Eeep, /geek
