cheats to Fertilizing all your neighbors in Farmville

Fertilizing all your neighbors without Farmville choking

Farmville requires a lot of system resources in the form of RAM, and the more farms you load the higher the RAM count goes. Eventually your computer will run out of RAM and start paging* some of it to your hard drive in order to load in more stuff. This is when everything comes to a screeching halt and the next farm takes 5 minutes to ‘load’.

* paging means taking stuff that is stored in RAM (very fast) and writing it to the hard drive (very slow).

If you have a lot of neighbors you can speed things up considerably by keeping an eye on your RAM use. To do this I recommend Process Explorer for Windows users. Since I can’t link you to it, google ‘Process Explorer’ and click I’m feeling lucky.

Download it. Unzip it. Run procexp.exe. Click Options -> Replace Task Manager. Click Options -> Tray Icons -> Physical Memory History. Click Options -> Hide When Minimized (unless it’s checked already).

Now before you start farming you can do CTRL-ALT-DEL to load process explorer, minimize it, and have a little chart in your system tray telling you how much of your physical memory is being used.

As you load your neighbors’ farms you will see the bar creep up and up and up. It goes up anywhere from 10 to 50MB per farm depending on how many decorations crops and animals each neighbor has.

When it gets to about 100MB BELOW the maximum RAM on your computer, close your browser. In a few seconds your browser will be unloaded from memory and the bar will plummet back down to almost nothing.

The time it takes to close your browser and reload it in order to get back to where you were is much much much less than when you exceed your RAM totals and have to wait while it chugs away swapping memory back and forth with your hard drive.