I don't have to set the ram preview to zero or do the second monitor work around bit but I do use the 32 bit version and have no problems. However I do not "push the envelope" as the big guys on this forum do.
JJK

Sorry I should have said this is for 64 bit. 32bit users don't seem to be having the problem.

I'm wondering since you stated you don't have many crashes, but do occasionally set ram preview that you are reducing crashes unknowingly.

I also forgot to mention that after setting ram preview to zero overall vegas performance improved and you have found that out too. I believe this is directly related to allowing Windows to manage all available ram.

"I also forgot to mention that after setting ram preview to zero overall vegas performance improved and you have found that out too. I believe this is directly related to allowing Windows to manage all available ram."

There is such a possibility :)

Piotr

Like Megabit and JJKizak I also do not need to set preview RAM to 0 - my Vegas 11 system works rock stable as long as I keep away from panning in large jpg's and keep away from certain mp3's.

BUT: remembering some test we made as Vegas 11 was released I just tried to reduce Preview RAM from my "normal" 200 MB down to 0 MB and voila: the render time doubled from 1:25 to 2:16.

I have tested this about 10 times now to be sure that conditions were the same for the 2 tests.
I use the 32 bit version only because of some plug-ins.

"BUT: remembering some test we made as Vegas 11 was released I just tried to reduce Preview RAM from my "normal" 200 MB down to 0 MB and voila: the render time doubled from 1:25 to 2:16."

Very true - this is why I only set it to zero when have problems with MC fps; for renders I always use default values (200 MB - quity probably some gretaer value would be even better).

Generally, my system is fast enough so I don't have to use RAM previews...

Piotr

PS. OK, I don't do compositing almost at all...

"(200 MB - quite probably some greater value would be even better"

Earlier Vegas versions had a speed peak -as far as I remember- at 4-500 MB while the speed peak for version 11 lies lower.

I just tested it with 600 MB and that upped the render time from 1.25 (at 200 MB) til 1:30 (at 600).

The version 11 has a much more "flat" speed peak than earlier versions. I remember a version which had a quite pronounced peak around 75 MB.

All this, however, does depend on your input media, your FX's etc and your output format. My little unscientific test above was made for my normal situation: AVCHD 1080i 24 Mbps input and mpeg2 1080i 32 Mbps output.

I just tested a 30 second m2ts file. 0= 1:17 200= 1:04 1000= 1:04.

I also said I had "overall" system performance improvement and I can honestly take longer on renders if I have gone from a dozen or more crashes a day to ZERO in over a week. And I probably got some increased performance from turning gpu accl back on and coming out of compatibility mode.

I am just offering up what finally worked for me and hopefully it will help those who are having problems like I did. It should be meaningless to those who have Vegas purring like a kitten.

@ Tim20: Strange - on your machine nearly no difference - on my machine a 1:2 difference...

If possible it might be interesting to do the same test on my machine too.

What is your input media? and which template do you use for rendering it? any FX's ? and how many rendering threads do you use?

(I use 5 threads on an 8 physical cores machine and have 8 GB of RAM and a small GTS450 card for GPU acceleration)

It was a 1920 x 1080 x 32 .mov png with 2 audio tracks rendered to 1920 x 1080 60i

i3770k with threads set to 8 and 16gb ddr3 1600 ram. GTX570 w 2gb + HD 4000 graphics enabled.

Question? Why only 5 threads and not something like 14. Does your Xeon not support hyperthreading?

Fine, I will try that.

I have two Xeons quad core = 8 physical cores - but not supporting Hyperthreading.
Funny, however, that this more than 4 years old machine can preview Full HD AVCHD (1080 50i) at 100% speed - also if I use a little FX etc.

Earlier tests have shown that we get way the fastest renders using a limited number of rendering threads. One of the last tests showed about 4 threads, as far as I remember.
We reached near 100% CPU utilization with this low number, and more Rendering threads just still used the CPU at 100% but gave significantly longer render times as the overhead managing all the rendering threads just wasted cpu time.

See this very interesting thread about it:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=818497

And again: These numbers are very dependent on the Vegas version/update number and the in/output media used - and probably also machine dependent too.

I have experimented with the number of threads and it appeared that 7 or 8 gave me the best performance.

On a side note in After Effects you can specify # of threads and amount of RAM dedicated to each thread. Adobe recommends 2gb per thread and when I do that I can only run 5 threads, but if I go to 1.5 gb threads go up and rendering performance dramatically increases.

I guess performance is a balancing act with no one answer. I'm just glad I don't crash anymore :)

What is the gain going from 14 to 7-8 threads ?