370 MB Swap File

[Styria]

I installed Civ III using the typical 700 MB setup, on my D drive. I'm using Windows 98. The game has been slow over all, but has only messed up over one thing. After about two hours of play, a window pops up telling me C: has run out of space, and then Civ III crashes. I searched around, and found the file c:\windows\win386.swp at 370 MB (about how much I had left free on C: before starting playing). After restarting my computer and waiting a minute or two, the file changed to being just 20 MB.

Is something wrong somewhere with my computer's settings, or is this an issue for the patch?

[Nemo]

umm, that file has nothing to do with civ...it is your windows swap file. free up more drive space.

[Styria]

I've never seen other programs make my drive run out of space, and that file started small and became huge again earlier, reaching 200+ by the time I had ended the game on my own. And Civ III was the only thing running the whole time.

If that isn't what Civ III is using, where is it?

[Nemo]

for general program usage i set the PCs to 800Mb of swap/vm in order to not get "out of memory" errors. and i have 512mb (and up) of base ram in the machines. In the machine i have civ3 on, i have 1.2Gb of swap allocated, but it is set that high because i do web design, and programming that need it, its not necessary to be that high for game playing.

it is being USED by civ, but it is a NORMAL windows function. it is a RAM overflow (to put it simplistically). you can make it so that it has one set size, but by default (which is what you machine is at) it expands and contracts based on what is needed by any/all programs using it, and by default the max size of this file is equal to the amount of remaining free space of your harddrive. if you still dont understand, i suggest going to www.microsoft.com and looking up "virtual memory" or "swap file" for more information on how programs use it.

[de166]

I don't know what size worlds you are using but play a smaller world and less Civ's. All that data get's placed in the swap file by Windows since it is commonly accessed data.


DAvid

[Spiker]

By default, Windows will start with a conservative swap file size and increase or decrease it as needed, which takes time and can slow down your games. You can remedy this by choosing "let me specify my own virtual memory settings" and making the minimum and maximum size the same. I recommend something between 350 and 500 MB, but more than that shouldn't be necessary.

[Alkarion]

There definitly _has_ to be a problem with virtual memory. I'm playing Civ 3 on a considerably slow system: AMD K6-2 350, 4 MB PCI Matrox...
The game runs slow but playable in the ancient era and gets even a bit slower in the modern era. But sometimes, without apparent cause, the game starts a hard drive orgy even though I have 380 MB of RAM (it seems to happen more often if the music is turned on). This almost every time concludes in a Windows (Win 2k) error stating I haven't enough virtual memory. If i quit and load again, I can play for hours and nothing unusual happens.

[nathan4778]

More ram is always a fun thing. I picked up 512 MB for 50$. I'm up to a total of 1.25 GB RAM on my PC and have disabled virtual memory.