Understanding Windows - Low On Registry Space

[freakedenough]

Quote

The system has reached the maximum size allowed for the system part of the registry. Additional storage requests will be ignored.

EDIT: Solution in this post: https://msfn.org/board/topic/187763-understanding-windows-low-on-registry-space/#findComment-1286190

 

 

Has anyone got a clue how to get rid of this error on XP SP3?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/sysinfo/registry-storage-space 

and

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/performance/unable-allocate-memory-system-paged-pool 

don’t really make me any wiser.

The most common and useless internet tip ever since it exists is changing the key RegistrySizeLimit https://web.archive.org/web/20080121131118/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/124594/de / https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/remote/honors-registry-size-limit-functionality-key-set - setting to 0, or 0xFFFFFFFF or completely deleting it (it isn't there out of the box) has 0 effect.

System: Pentium M, 2GB RAM, 2GB pagefile managed by Windows

Edited March 9 by freakedenough

[NotHereToPlayGames]

edit:  see below posts instead

Edited March 9 by NotHereToPlayGames

[NotHereToPlayGames]

xp-AntiSpy would get rid of the "bubble notification".

The yellow exclamation mark icon would still be present in the systray.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

Several forums suggest this to defrag/compress your registry:

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/ntregopt.html

[user57]

im not certain what you even want to accomplish, so lets give it a try

the area you opened dont seems to have anything to do with the registy
for example PAE (physicaladdressextension)

that has nothing to do with the registry
there are some info already in this forum about the 4GB limit and the PAE discussion

the registry dont store files into the RAM 
the registry is made to store data to the harddrive
this is why the size in registry have some limits for example the data that can be stored per "key value entry"
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/sysinfo/registry-element-size-limits
these limits however dont show what the software that sets these are limited to

unlike a other myth going around PAE has nothing to do with the HDD (now often SSD drive) limit of around 2 TB (512*4GB)
this is because even a 64 bit system cant just move 100 MB or something - at beast 64 bit - what is a very small amount 
thanks to the TLB and other harddrive stuff the hardware such as the CPU can detect if this is coming - and translate these to bigger transfers
like 512 bit or even more

the 4 GB ram limit or PAE where already often discussted here in this forum, here are a few:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/186531-winxp-pagefile-with-16gb-ram/#comment-1274484
https://msfn.org/board/topic/176356-simple-xp-32bit-64gb-ram-true-pae-guide/page/8/#comment-1280589
https://msfn.org/board/topic/129999-32bit-windows-not-usingseeing-all-4gb-ram/

to make it smaller, there are no 4 GB moves there are theoreical not even 32 bit or 64 bit moves
this is because the the ram is made of at least 4096 (4k) (the common mode) chucks 

currently XP can pass that 4 GB ram limit with certain patches, but only over multiple executables
(it can have then 4 GB RAM for each running executable/app/module)
if you want to do that with 1 executable a must say is that a compiler would not know how to do this
noone have done this before, its certainly some work to bring it to work
and most importantly all builded executables (such as games, apps, webbrowsers, chattools) are limited to their compiler (and these dont know how to do that)

a pagefile is the harddrive being used as memory storage, it can store data at the harddrive and pull it in or out on demand (pagefile.sys)
this is a piece wise method, but so you can also go beyond 4 GB writes

transfers as said are made in chucks - they are never like "move 1 GB" - that is not possible
the compiler transfer a such code to 32 bit moves (4 bytes per tick(in theory)) - for 64 bit it would be 64 bit (8 byte)
but that problem has been solved by the hardware long ago - thus 64 bit or 32 bit have the same performance
the FSB for example there was a nice story with QUADPUMPED
what it actually did ? it just pumped the data 4 times 

[freakedenough]

50 minutes ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

Several forums suggest this to defrag/compress your registry:

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/ntregopt.html

no success there. tried the tuneup utlities defrag, ntregopt.

 

1 minute ago, user57 said:

im not certain what you even want to accomplish

i want to fix this registry error, i just have 2gb ram so i know PAE is not of relevance here.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

25 minutes ago, freakedenough said:

i want to fix this registry error

Do you only get this error when you are trying to do TOO MUCH ?

ie, running Outlook Express *and* MSN Messenger *and* HexChat *and* whatever icons are hidden to the left of the yellow exclamation mark is TRYING TO DO TOO MUCH.

You can only *realistically* expect so much out of only 2 GB RAM and it looks to me like you are expecting too much.

[freakedenough]

2 minutes ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

Do you only get this error when you are trying to do TOO MUCH ?

ie, running Outlook Express *and* MSN Messenger *and* HexChat *and* whatever icons are hidden to the left of the yellow exclamation mark is TRYING TO DO TOO MUCH.

You can only *realistically* expect so much out of only 2 GB RAM and it looks to me like you are expecting too much.

Please stop participating the thread with that nonsense.

[Dave-H]

It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion to you, to consider whether your issue might be being caused by trying to run too much simultaneously on an underresourced machine.
Please respect this.

[freakedenough]

Please stop telling people that XP-included apps like Outlook Express and MSN Messenger are the reason for a registry error. XP was designed for a minimum of 64 MB of RAM when it came out. I'll allow that to be increased to 256 MB by the time of the SP3 release, but telling me that 2 GB of RAM run full and cause registry errors because I run Outlook Express is blatant nonsense. So also for you: please stop participating in this thread if you have no clue. There are enough threads out there that have plenty of these nonsense posts to scroll through without an actual solution. "Please respect this"!

Edited March 9 by freakedenough

[user57]

are the registry files oddly big ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Registry

to free some resources is a idea, even if they are not much

but actually i never heared the registry being to small

a good idea useally is to show a reconstructable error for the other people to try and see

the german description you posted in one of the links dont show a error, rather it shows how to change a registry setting, and specific names the pagefile (Auslagerungsspeichers)

the same thing with the page to microsoft - there they dont describe a error - they rather describe differences between windows versions and 32 and 64 bit modes

and the last one from microsoft tells you to install KB2567018 - what fixes a problem if that registry PagedPoolSize is wrongly set (common is 0 - probaly means system controlled)

[Tripredacus]

First find whether or not the errors being reported are actually the correct errors. A lot of times, Windows will show an error when a condition is blocked, but that doesn't necessarily mean the error text shown is accurate. For example, you can get a disk space error if a process that is attempting to write to disk gets interrupted or blocked because Windows doesn't actually run a secondary check on whether or not there is free space. All it knows is that it tried to write and could not, so it presumes there is no space. You could run into the same issue here.

But since you are looking at Paged Pool Memory, you do have the ability to check to see whether or not this is actually exhausted and if so, what is using it. BUT for this you need to use Kernel Debugging with WinDbg.
I can't find a download for the version that would work on XP using google! but the Windows Software Development Kit for Windows 7 would at least work.

Then this would be a start:
https://gemini.google.com/share/adaf5e6e2c36

But windbg is not an easy program to use, you'll end up having to do a lot of research before you can actually know what you are looking at. An LLM would be able to help, but of course they make mistakes in interpretation just like people do.

3 hours ago, user57 said:

the registry dont store files into the RAM 

yes/no. Some parts of the registry are compressed on disk, and on OS load, they are expanded into RAM. Then they only exist in RAM at that point. You can probably research which portions are like this, but you can get some hints when using regedit when you run across either parts that are read-only or parts that if you change them, do not survive a reboot.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

2 hours ago, freakedenough said:

Please stop telling people that XP-included apps like Outlook Express and MSN Messenger are the reason for a registry error. XP was designed for a minimum of 64 MB of RAM when it came out. I'll allow that to be increased to 256 MB by the time of the SP3 release, but telling me that 2 GB of RAM run full and cause registry errors because I run Outlook Express is blatant nonsense. So also for you: please stop participating in this thread if you have no clue. There are enough threads out there that have plenty of these nonsense posts to scroll through without an actual solution. "Please respect this"!

You're going to have to live with it.  They won't deactivate my account no matter how many times I request it.

You don't have to like me.  I don't have to like you.  "Respect that."

[NotHereToPlayGames]

If I cannot walk away from my past, then I'm going to steer into the skid.

[freakedenough]

I seemingly identified the cause and workaround. My XP installation originates from a VirtualBox installation, where I patched it with POSReady updates, preinstalled all C++ and .NET libraries, etc., and since then I have deployed it to any PC on which I want it installed.

Windows XP stores the hardware configuration under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum and its underlying folders, and clones the configuration to HKLM\System\ControlSet00x as well (1 failed, 2 last known good, and 3 currently used - the assignment might differ, check HKLM\System\Select).

Any device it has ever identified is saved in this registry section, blowing it up with useless data. The complete hardware change - by deploying the VirtualBox image on a real and completely different PC - litters it with an usual amount of useless data.

I now went through all ENUM subfolders and deleted all entries that are unrelated to the hardware my installation is currently running on. Voila, the error is gone. And the SYSTEM file in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG shrank from 8192 kB (which is exactly 8 MB) to 5632 KB.

I hope this helps other people in the future who run into this problem.