CPU taking a battering...where's the RAM??

[Treble]

When I was doing some decoding of DVDs and then encoding them with 3GP for my PSP, I noticed that CPU usage was flying up to 100%. Fair enough, I thought, these are big processes that need a big response. Oddly, though, only about 100meg of my half a gig of RAM was being used, and the rest being paged to the HDD!

Now, correct me if i'm wrong, but shouldn't the large amount of RAM available to the system be used rather than being written as a page file to the HDD? Can I alter anything to use what I suppose used to be called RAMdisks rather than page files? I'm thinking of upgrading soon, and don't like the idea of utilities hardly touching the 1gig of RAM my new PC is going to have

[babs]

I suppose it depends on the application, but try disabling virtual memory and see what happens?

[Freddo]

most likely the extra data was paged to hd because it wasn't being worked on immedietly, in video encoding you can only really work on one frame at a time so.

[kona]

If you're using 100% CPU then there is no need for the app to use more RAM, it's doing the right thing. If you were using say 15% and the disk was working constantly to page memory while you had spare RAM that would be a reason for concern.

[Valken]

Aye, low RAM usage is a sign of a good app rather than poor performance... the CPU usage will always max out for tasks like video encoding though.

[Treble]

Fair enough, thanks.