PhpED turns off code completion when my memory has only a certain percentage available. I don't ever recall having this problem with version 8.1, but started noticing later on that it happened more and more often in the versions after that.

I emailed support about this, and they told me they couldn't help, or make a suggestion to change it (because I only bought a personal license that doesn't include support, which is fair enough. Still, this seemed like more of a "feature" request than actual support). Instead they told me to buy more RAM (I have 4 GB). That would make sense, but what happens when I use 75% of 8 GB of ram? That's 2 GB left. More than if I only had 4 GB, but PhpED would still turn off code completion because it uses a percentage to work out when to turn it off (or so it would seem).

For me, it's quite a big issue to have code completion turn of when PhpED decides it should. It's a feature I like/rely on and it's a little frustrating to have it turn itself off.

Anyway, that's my rant. Really hope someone can help me with this. A check box in setting to turn this off would be nice.

traptta

Whilst a few people have had this problem with 12 & 13 (and I guess 14) from forum comments it appears to have often been caused by *other* applications taking more memory rather than PhpED taking too much. There was quite a long forum post about this 'problem', but unfortunately it seems to be gone.

With large Magento projects I find PhpED consumes between around 650MB and sometimes up to 800MB.

Whilst I personally have never had this error from PhpED (except when I once deliberately used up all the memory to see what happens), common memory hoggers include Chrome when it has lots of windows/tabs open or lots of plugins running.

I'm not sure if PhpED bases its warning on percentage when you have more memory. In my tests I was way up over 7GB before it complained. Apparently there are some PhpED critical threads that must not run out of memory, so it is safer for PhpED to turn them off.

4GB is not a lot by todays requirements, although that is your limit with 32-bit Windows and you might find your true usable memory out of that is as low as 3.25MB to 3.5MB

Adding an extra 4GB with 64-bit Windows could make a huge difference. One of my desktops is Windows 7 with 8GB and with a dozen apps open at the same time (but no Chrome!) have never even got close to having issue.

Check in Task Manager to see if you have any apps or services using a lot of memory.

Correct.
If phped demands more than that, there is a good reason to revise the project and exclude all duplications, backups, temporary, assets, and cache directories.
To exclude such things it's enough to add corresponding directories to the "Hide Directories" list in the project settings.

Regarding thread you referred to is http://forum.nusphere.com/system-is-low-on-virtual-memory-t9786.html

That's not the thread I was thinking of. The one I was looking for had a post from myself where I did a test on PhpED on an 8GB system and described how I deliberately used up lots of memory then at what point PhpED showed the warning. I'm reasonably sure it was referring to version 12.

Ahh, the post mentions a reference to simshaun but there are no posts from simshaun shown. Maybe some posts have been removed?

I realise it's not PhpED that is using up all the memory, but the problem never happened when I started using PhpED in version 8.1 and it never crashed or lost my work under similar conditions. I never experienced any problems at all. I have Windows 8.1 pro 64 bit, so I could easily upgrade my ram, but seeing as the issue wasn't around before, it makes it seem like an artificial limit. The support emails I received do say it's based on 75%, (though I think it may include the pagefile too, i'm not sure). Even so, if I remember correctly, I hadn't even opened a project yet(or maybe a tiny test project, 8 or 9 very small files in total, not sure) and PhpED gave me the warning.

Anyway, my concern is if I do upgrade RAM and for whatever reason, it still get's to the 75% mark somehow, the issue hasn't really been solved and there would be indeed more RAM available, and still the same issue.

dmitri, if you don't mind me asking, is there any particular part of PhpED that has changed since earlier versions that require this 75% threshold, or is it just a general limit for the entire program now?

Yes, it is about "commit charge memory limit", that value includes pagefile. This check for the amount of commited memory is about one simple thing -- if a single running application takes ~ 75% of memory, it may take 10-15% more quite fast. OS can extend pagefile and increase the limit while demand for the memory grows, but it does so relatively slow and the limit can be reached sooner than the file is extended. After that (much before 100%) OS will start returning errors to all applications in the system telling no memory available. In my experience it starts occuring when commit charge is about 87-90%.
Regarding v8, no, we hasn't changed anything in this area.

Are you saying that PhpED looks for a single program that is using 75% of memory? Either way, I still don't understand why it's necessary to have this limit, it never appeared as an issue earlier on, was the limit in v8.1? Anyhow, I've never maxed out my memory to the point that it's caused a problem. Windows seems to manage it quite well.

Thanks for the reply dmitri, apologies for the all the ranting. I really do hope it'd be possible for the warning to be optional and for code completion to stay on though.

The limit was introduced in v6 and it minimised out-of-memory problems to negligible level.
v8 perhaps consumed less memory and your own projects were smaller and the same frameworks were smaller and so forth. That's why you didn't see this limit.
BTW, are you running 64bit version of 32? I'd highly recommend to switch to 64.

Okay, all that makes sense.

I'm using 64 bit at the moment. Is there any particular reason you recommend it?

The reason is obvious -- 64bit applications do not have limit of 4GB.

Sure. But at the moment, there really isn't a lot of difference between most 32 and 64 bit software, in terms of real noticeable benefits for everyday usage (not for the programs I use anyway, web browser, word, excel, etc). Unless, I suppose, if I opened a very large project which would cause PhpED to hit that limit, I doubt I'd see much difference between the two. Still, I just downloaded 64 bit out of habit, as everything is slowly progressing that way.