Cool VL Viewer forum

Greetings from the dwagons, and best wishes.

Since installing CoolVL 1.26.4 (4) I've had consistent problems with an error message:
"Your Virtual Memory is dangerously low. This may result in a crash."

Nothing I seem to do fixes that. In older viewers I could minimize the screen for 5 seconds and memory would clear itself out. However now that doesn't help. When this message comes up, it's a guaranteed eventual crash.

My Windows XP Pro virtual memory is set to 9 gigs, 4 gigs on one drive and 5 gigs on my second drive.
I have 4 gigs RAM (of which as I understand, XP can use 3gigs)
Geforce 450 1 gig graphics card
Quad-core computer, high-speed cable internet.
Viewer cache is set to 1 gig.

Wondering how this problem might be overcome.

Also, CoolVL keeps automatically resetting my draw distance to 64. Is there a way to stop it from doing that?

I can't answer about the first part, but this sounds like the teleport speed-rezzing feature. If that's what it is then you can just wait until your draw distance builds back to what you have it set to or turn off speed-rezzing in the preferences (Cool Features->Miscellaneous->first check box). If not, then ignore this post

Yes, the Cool VL Viewer, unlike all other viewers, watches its memory usage and tries hard not to crash when the addressable virtual memory space gets low. At this point (when the viewer shows this message), other viewers would already have crashed without giving you any clue as to why...

Only if you configured your boot loader to reserve 3Gb for user space, else the limit for XP 32bits is 2Gb of user space per program... which is far from enough in crowded areas with a mesh viewer. See this article and this procedure for how to increase the user space to 3Gb. I suspect your problem comes from there.

Reducing the draw distance is one of the measures (after increasing the textures discard level) the viewer takes to try and lower the memory usage and avoid crashing. You may disable this behaviour by disabling the Memory Usage Safety Check (in the Advanced menu), but then you'll just crash sooner...

The virtual memory monitor is very handy, but the associated meter in the menu bar raises questions. It looks as if it measures the virtual memory allowance being used up, rising from green to yellow to red, but often the meter stays red even after one has TP'd to an empty, low prim, low texture location. It seems to take quitting and restarting the viewer to return the meter to green. Is this a quirk of the meter, or is there a problem with virtual memory not being released once it has been allocated?

The memory is released progressively by the viewer, as the textures are flagged as "not seen in a while", "a while" meaning about 3 minutes. You can watch this process taking place via the Texture Console. If you wait 3+ minutes, then the memory is released.