RAM

[wissx]

Can someone explain RAM in terms that are simple

What does it mean when you run out of RAM

[Kobymaru]

6 minutes ago, wissx said:

Can someone explain RAM in terms that are simple

What does it mean when you run out of RAM

Your computer deals with numbers. It can do calculations on them, and can store the result for other calculations.

Those numbers need to be stored somewhere. There are several levels where it can store them, starting at the slowest but biggest ending in the fastest but smallest.

Your hard drive is very big, but very slow. SSD's are a bit faster, but smaller.

Next is the RAM (Random Access Memory).  It is very fast, but limited in size. All of the game data must fit in the RAM.

(there are other levels further up, but that doesn't concern you).

 

All stuff that you store, such as the pictures (textures) inside the game take up space. If those don't fit inside the RAM, you're out of luck. Running out of RAM means that your game wants to retain more data that your RAM can hold.

Edited March 10, 2016 by Kobymaru

[StrandedonEarth]

Also note that RAM is volatile; if there's no power to RAM, it loses the data being stored. Unlike ROM (Read-only memory), flash memory (USB sticks) or your hard-drive.

[Nikolai]

1 hour ago, wissx said:

Can someone explain RAM in terms that are simple

What does it mean when you run out of RAM

RAM is, in a sense, how many balls your computer can juggle at once.  Different tasks require different numbers of balls.  If it has to juggle more balls than it can handle at once, it has to dump some of the balls onto the hard drive.  If the task it's trying to perform require it to juggle more balls at once than it possibly can, then you run out of RAM.

[wissx]

Just now, Nikolai said:

RAM is, in a sense, how many balls your computer can juggle at once.  Different tasks require different numbers of balls.  If it has to juggle more balls than it can handle at once, it has to dump some of the balls onto the hard drive.  If the task it's trying to perform require it to juggle more balls at once than it possibly can, then you run out of RAM.

If you have 4 Gig Ram and you have like 5 games that run 2 Gig ram each. Would that be possible ? 

So you only take up ram when you use?

[Markush100]

all background applications use RAM. The computer can try and allocate the ram if it doesnt have enough. You can run KSP with 4 gigabytes, but i recommend 8.

[wissx]

To clarify I only use RAM in a game when I am playing it

[pincushionman]

5 minutes ago, wissx said:

If you have 4 Gig Ram and you have like 5 games that run 2 Gig ram each. Would that be possible ? 

So you only take up ram when you use?

Now you're getting into "virtual memory" and paging, which starts to get way more complicated.

Imagine your desk. You can have sheets of paper on it, which you write things on, erase from, or crumple up and toss in the circular file when you are done. Your desk is big enough that you can only work with ten sheets of paper at once. This represents your physical RAM.

Now, how do you deal with more things going on at once? Here's where paging comes in. You also have wire baskets on the desk. You split your work up into "processes" like your math homework, your history, and your doodling. These represent processes like your game, your Excel, your Chrome browser.

Don't have enough room for another page of math work? Take something you think you won't come back to for a while, like your history paper, and take one page and put it in one of the baskets. Now you have space on the desk for another sheet of math. The wire basket represents a file on your hard drive called a "pagefile" or "swap space," depending on your OS.

But you set some rules for yourself. Not only can you only have up to ten pages of work on the desk at once, each homework (math, history, etc.) can only have up to ten pages each. Otherwise you'll never find what you already did. But as long as you follow those rules, you can swap pages between the basket and the desk as much as you need to.

That's how virtual memory systems work. Except your desk is a lot bigger and you can dedicate a lot more pages to each task.

When us Windows KSP players complain about memory, it's actually the second rule that's giving us problems. Even though we can have a lot of sheets on the desk, KSP has to fit on three pages, period.

[wissx]

Got it now thanks

[Tex Mechs Robot]

4 minutes ago, pincushionman said:

Now you're getting into "virtual memory" and paging, which starts to get way more complicated.

Imagine your desk. You can have sheets of paper on it, which you write things on, erase from, or crumple up and toss in the circular file when you are done. Your desk is big enough that you can only work with ten sheets of paper at once. This represents your physical RAM.

Now, how do you deal with more things going on at once? Here's where paging comes in. You also have wire baskets on the desk. You split your work up into "processes" like your math homework, your history, and your doodling. These represent processes like your game, your Excel, your Chrome browser.

Don't have enough room for another page of math work? Take something you think you won't come back to for a while, like your history paper, and take one page and put it in one of the baskets. Now you have space on the desk for another sheet of math. The wire basket represents a file on your hard drive called a "pagefile" or "swap space," depending on your OS.

But you set some rules for yourself. Not only can you only have up to ten pages of work on the desk at once, each homework (math, history, etc.) can only have up to ten pages each. Otherwise you'll never find what you already did. But as long as you follow those rules, you can swap pages between the basket and the desk as much as you need to.

That's how virtual memory systems work. Except your desk is a lot bigger and you can dedicate a lot more pages to each task.

When us Windows KSP players complain about memory, it's actually the second rule that's giving us problems. Even though we can have a lot of sheets on the desk, KSP has to fit on three pages, period.

::CLAP CLAP CLAP::

[0111narwhalz]

What pincushion said.

You could also think of it this way.

You have a desk, as in pincusion's analogy. This desk is fairly large, so you need to know where to look for the pages that you need to do things with. That role is filled by a table of contents. Each "subject" (or process) has a certain number of entries in the table of contents. Certain subjects have more entries in the contents than others. KSP, for instance, has enough entries to map about 3.8 gigabytes of the desk. Any more, and you start to lose pages. Usually, however, the table of contents for a given subject allows for many orders of magnitude more pages on the desk than the desk can hold.

Basically, if you have more pages than the desk can hold, it's no big deal; you just put them in a stack or a drawer "over there." It's just a bit slower to pull things out of the drawers/stack than it is when they're laid out before you. But if you have more pages than the table of contents can point to, you lose pages. And that causes big problems. Like crashes or corruption of data.

Edited March 10, 2016 by 0111narwhalz

[problemecium]

Yes, RAM for a game is only consumed while the game is running. Also, many games do not load all of their files in at once (for example, they may only load the level on which you're playing, then unload it when you go back to the menu).
So you can stuff as many games on your hard drive as will fit, and as long as you don't run them all at once you'll be fine on RAM.

[Nikolai]

4 hours ago, wissx said:

If you have 4 Gig Ram and you have like 5 games that run 2 Gig ram each. Would that be possible ? 

So you only take up ram when you use?

Chances are that you aren't playing them all at once.  The computer can put some balls on a shelf that it's using for a game you switch from, and picking up new balls for a game you're switching to.  Whether or not this goes over its maximum ball capacity depends on how many balls it has to keep juggling even if you're not playing the game at the moment -- just to keep track of stuff that it can't (or doesn't want to) put on a shelf easily.  (For example, KSP requires that a relatively large number of balls always remain in play if it's going to be used at all.)

So it kind of depends on the games and the demands they each make on the system.  I'm sorry that it's not an absolute answer.

[Nuke]

i havent ran out of ram since the 90s, lol.