However, the situation gets worse when I opened mspaint and took the screenshot! Now, a low memory warning popped up. The bad thing is: There are still 1777 MB which are used for caching, according to the Task Manager! On the other hand, it reports a page file usage of 2851 / 2939 MB, and shows a graph with 2.36 of 3.00 GB Physical RAM usage – rather strange?!

Update: This post is now almost two years old, but it’s ranked pretty high in the search engines so I felt it was worth an update. Bottom line: don’t disable virtual memory. If you didn’t do so, it might have been disabled by a third party software or by accident. To re-enable, go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual Memory. You might have to delete the existing file, pagefile.sys.

Windows is pretty smart when it comes to using resources effectively, but there is quite a bit of dark magic involved. The swap file plays an important role. If you really know what you’re doing, however, you can disable the warning.

In another thread (thanks Arthur), users report issues when using TrueCrypt, so TrueCrypt users might want to head over to Arthur’s. I haven’t checked out Microsoft Dynamic Cache Service, but I haven’t really felt the need. End Update

I see the point in caching frequently used files in the RAM, but an easy way to control this caching behavior would be nice. Due to the fact that I have installed 1GB of Intel Turbo Memory anyways, caching should have a very low priority in my case, I think.

Worst of all, I kinda saw it coming: I acquired a habit of ultra-multi-tasking when using an XP machine with 3GB of RAM … that was almost three years ago, and now that programs have a considerably larger memory consumption, I need more RAM – which is not possible unless you switch to 64 bit, which is fraught with its own perils, especially when it comes to laptops.

NOTE: I have virtual memory disabled completely.

However, having switched to Windows Vista and brand-new versions of all the tools one needs, I have actually hit the limit of my machine - a small window popped up, suggesting to kill both instances of Visual Studio so I would regain free RAM… For a developer system, it is obviously a good idea to trim the database system’s size rather than not using the IDE…

So, even though most people would like their XE Oracles to consume more RAM:

How to make Oracle’s memory footprint smaller:
1. Start Oracle with its default configuration. You can type net start OracleServiceXE on the (administrator-) console.
2. Find ‘C:\YourOracleDirectory\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\config\scripts\init.ora’
Open it and search for sga_target=768M. Replace this with some reasonable value for your machine. You cannot, however, set this value arbitrarily small or Oracle will not work. I used 140M.
Also search for pga_aggregate_target=140M and set it to, say, 40M.
Save the file.
3. Log into SQLplus. In command window, type

sqlplus system/systempass
SQL> CONNECT / AS SYSDBA
Connected.
SQL> create spfile=’C:\YourOracleDirectory\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\dbs/spfilexe_small.ora’
FROM pfile=’C:\YourOracleDirectory\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\config\scripts\init.ora’
File created.
SQL>>exit

4. Stop Oracle: C:\> net stop OracleServiceXE
5. Back up ‘C:\YourOracleDirectory\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\dbs/spfilexe.ora’ and replace it with our newly-created spfile.
6. Start Oracle again: C:\> net start OracleServiceXE

Now, oracle should consume merely about 180MB RAM.

You can also edit the spfile with a hex editor if you are brave enough… But you have to work very carefully then.