# "Low Paged Pool Memory" StarCraft II



## stripestemplar (Aug 5, 2010)

Alright, I was playing a game called StarCraft II and I've got a completely new problem that hasnt existed with other games. The game automaticly adjusted the settings to ultra high, but at some point a message like this pops up on the screen:

"Your computer is running low on paged pool memory. Visual quality may degrade. To imrpove performance, some of your graphics settings have been adjusted automatically. Manually lowering your graphics settings further and restarting StarCraft II or closing other applications may also help"

How do I bypass this problem without sacrificing my graphics? I figured it has something to do with RAM? I am currently having 4GB or DDR2 RAM but the game's RECCOMENDED System requirements state that 2GB is enough. What are your reccomendations?

Thank you.


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## jarod (Oct 22, 2007)

Try adjusting your virtual memory. I am not sure about XP ones cuz i abandon XP a few months ago. If you are windows 7 or vista, it should be around there

Go to start>right click on my computer>properties>advance system settings>under advance tab>click settings for the performance area>click advance tab again and you should see your virtual memory section.

Click change. Change it to a higher value, with minimum of 1.5x of your RAM


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## stripestemplar (Aug 5, 2010)

Well unfortunately I am using a Finnish version of Windows XP. I although believe I know what you are talking about, but changing it did not help. I will put up a picture of what it looks like.


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## Elvenleader3 (Jan 1, 2010)

What graphics card are you running?

Also what programs are running in the background? Can you get us a picture of Task Manager?


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## jarod (Oct 22, 2007)

Try setting minimum to 5gb and maximum to 8gb since you have 4gb of RAM.


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## stripestemplar (Aug 5, 2010)

What? I only have the option to set to max 4GB. Wait a second, my friend told me I had 4GB but at first I thought I had 2GB , might be that he was wrong and it would explain alot. So, yeah. I believe I have 2GB then. How do I check how much I have?

I'm running an ATI RADEON HD 4800 with 1024MB

Here's a picture of my Task Manager:


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## Elvenleader3 (Jan 1, 2010)

I can't really see the Task Manager too clearly, but can you check if you have an Anti-Virus running?

In order to see how much Physical RAM you have, right-click on My Computer found in the Start Menu.


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## stripestemplar (Aug 5, 2010)

Alright, I confirmed it. I have 2GB of RAM instead of 4. But still, the game required MINIMUM of 1 GB RAM and reccomended was 2GB of RAM and yet it's still complaining.

I also have 22GB out of 44GB space on my C drive and my game is installed on the E drive where there's 215GB out of 416GB available. What on earth is the problem here? It should be working perfectly according to the requirements!


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## stripestemplar (Aug 5, 2010)

I dont have any official antivirus program, I only use spybot. The problem only exists with this particular game.


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## Elvenleader3 (Jan 1, 2010)

Can you give us a picture of the tab Performance found in Task Manager?


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## stripestemplar (Aug 5, 2010)

Hopefully these are easier to see


Do you want it when the game is running or when the game is not running?


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## stripestemplar (Aug 5, 2010)

Here's when I'm doing absolutely nothing:









Here's when I'm playing the game:








although this time it did not complain but I didnt play long enough either. Also, the settings were on medium instead of high and this was the first time I used it on non-fullscreen.


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## jarod (Oct 22, 2007)

From what i see, in the screenshot while playing sc 2 your balance RAM is about 295 MB. If it is battle intensive or if the map gets larger with more units around, memory consumption would hit the roof.

When the game developer states the minimum and recommended memory or any other setting, they assume the computer is running nothing else but the OS and the game. That's the default level. So if you are adding some other software, its gonna affect it

Maybe it is a memory problem, so try stopping non essential services from running. Go to start>run>type msconfig. Go to startup tab, from there you can stop non essential services from running. For a start, try stopping

1) MSN
2) I Pod
3) I Tunes
4) Apple
5) Tea Timer - Spybot

That's all i can see from the list that are non essential. Restart your computer and try playing it. Don't go to battle intensive part yet, just try to run it and see if it last


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## stripestemplar (Aug 5, 2010)

Can I fix this problem by adding more RAM? I managed to fix the problem by playing on as low settings as possible and shutting down everything else, but that's not how I want to play.


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## Elvenleader3 (Jan 1, 2010)

Adding more RAM will definitely help. The reason why when everything is on low and other programs are off works is because you need more RAM for more programs.


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## shotgn (Aug 10, 2008)

You can try when you are running the game, in task manager right click the game under processes and set the priority to high....this will allocate more resources to the game...Do not put real time or it will crash windows


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## jrnichols84 (Sep 28, 2011)

Ok so this is a bit complicated but it works. If you use Windows XP and have a lot of applications open, you may run into Paged Pool limits when running SC2. The Paged Pool is a chunk of memory set aside for the Windows kernel and device drivers to use as memory. The more programs you have open, the more kernel services (anti virus, firewalls, etc) and the more devices you make use of, the more memory will be allocated from the paged pool. If it gets full, drivers and Windows will no longer be able to allocate memory and very bad things happen. In SC2 this might manifest itself as sluggish performance, graphical artifacting or outright crashing / blue screen.

Note! You only need to do this if you are currently getting warnings when playing SC2 that your paged pool is running low. Doing this unnecessarily will take memory from other kernel needs. This is a fairly complex and involved process because you're dealing with the internals of Windows memory management. This should not be necessary on Vista or later OSes.

Before you start, make sure your Paging File is set to System Managed size. Forcing a small paging file can cause numerous issues including a small paged pool. This is found under System Properties, Advanced, Performance, Advanced, Virtual Memory.

1. Install Windows debugging tools:
Download and Install Debugging Tools for Windows

2. Open a CMD prompt, Start, Run, cmd

3. Type the following commands, replacing M: with the appropriate drive letter (I imagine this will be C: for the majority of you).
cd "\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows"
symchk.exe /om m:\symlist /if m:\windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
symchk.exe /om m:\symlist /if m:\windows\system32\ntkrnlpa.exe
symchk.exe /im m:\symlist /s SRV*m:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols



4. Download Process Explorer:
Process Explorer

5. Run Process Explorer, and go Options / Configure Symbols and fill in the appropriate paths:

Browse to your Debugging tools for Windows folder to find DBGHELP.DLL.
Browse to your X:\symbols folder to find the symbols.



6. Go View / System Information
If all has gone well, you should now see your Paged Pool values:



The "Paged Limit" is your maximum paged pool size. In my case, it's about 368MB.

7. Download http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/R1CH/PagedPoolRegFiles.zip
Open one of the .reg files corresponding to how big you want your paged pool to be. I recommend starting with the next highest size, eg if you paged pool is currently 140MB, use the PagedPool-192MB.reg file.

8. Reboot.

9. Run Process Explorer again and verify the Paged Limit has increased. If it hasn't changed or has decreased, the value was not valid for your system. This happened to me when I tried to use the 384MB size. Try the next size down, or if that is too small, go back to the defaults. If all else fails, you can try PagedPool-Max.reg which will force allocation of the largest paged pool possible.

In my case, the defaults worked best since I have 4 GB of RAM, so Windows allocated a fairly large paged pool by itself. The reason I was having trouble was some years ago, TF2 also had this paged pool issue and I'd used a .reg file for 384MB, not realizing this was too high so Windows was ignoring it and only using 260MB. You can use the PagedPool-Default.reg to restore Windows defaults.

Hopefully this is useful to someone .


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