Celestia Forums

I am using Windows Vista and altough I have 2 GB RAM,the system runs out of memory when I was running the script Libration_EN_2009 in Celestia 1.6.0 SVN R4632 at the same time the Firefox browser was open.Also,in some times of the script,the frame rate dips to below 10 fps.Is it possible that I only can run decently with 4 GB?Where can I find the more recent SVNs?

Daniel,

Firefox is greedy and does not give up the memory that it uses. To save memory, you should exit from Firefox completely before running Celestia. Make sure Firefox is not listed in the Task Manager / Processes tab. That tab shows the programs that are running.

There are three different ways one can "run out of memory". Without knowing the exact error message that you received, I can only guess which one it might have been.

1. You may have run out of paging file space. This is the most likely.

Fix: create a large, fixed-sized paging file.
Here is the procedure for XP. Vista and Windows 7 are similar.
Right-Mouse-Button click on "My Computer"
Select "Properties"
In the popup window, select the Advanced tab.
In the Performance section select the Settings button
In the new Performance Options window, select the Advanced button
In the Virtual memory section, select the Change button
In the new Virtual Memory window, select the Custom Size checkbox
[This forces Windows to physically allocate the paging file space in advance.]
In the Initial Size field, type 8192
[That's 8GB: virtual memory should be 4x the size of your RAM. For the past 20 years, as systems have gotten larger, this 4x "rule of thumb" has not changed. The total size of all of the programs running continuously always grows to exceed the size of the current generation of memory size. Optimists like to think otherwise, but they're wrong. In special cases, the paging file needs to be even bigger.]
In the Maximum Size field, type 8192
[This makes paging faster than if Windows has to dynamically allocate space, and guarantees that the space will always be available.]

Click on all of the OK buttons.
Reboot your computer.

2. Celestia may have run out of address space. This will happen if you have many large Addons installed.

Celestia is a 32bit application. It is not designed to be able to use more than 2GB. A redesign would make it able to use 64 bits of addressing, but this would be a major project. If it happens, I expect such a redesign would not take place until after the next major release after v1.6.1. In other words, I think it will be more than a year before it might be available.

Workaround: Remove large Addons from /Extras/

3. Your computer has filled up all of its RAM and can't use virtual memory. (See #1)
You can improve performance by upgrading to 3 or 4 GB. I suspect you're running a 32bit version of Windows, so it can't use more than that.

I did it,but now I have another problem.My HD space went from 183 GB free to 175 GB free and I suspect that the culprit is the page file of 8192 MB.I did a big download,but not so big...

That's not a problem Daniel, but to be expected.
The pagefile is created on your disk, so the available space for other files is reduced.

Another thing you can do to improve performance (if you have more than one disk) is to locate the pagefile on a separate disk. Make sure however that you defragment that disk beforehand if nescessary.

That's odd. I used to run celestia on a computer with only 1GB of ram and never ran out of memory even when I was running firefox. I would get slow frame rates when looking at worlds with large textures but that's it.