Win XP Paging File Question

[nitemareglitch]

did you set the max and min? it'll bump it up if you don't set the max too. with mine at 1024 on both, it just stays there. my peak usage is 600Megs, but that's cuz i told a memory testing program to use 2G of ram, so it had to swap system stuff to page

 

 

Yeah, if I rememer right if you set the min/max to the same value it does not mess with the paging file, mine had a lower value for min. Weird that does that.

[finagle69]

Yeah, if I rememer right if you set the min/max to the same value it does not mess with the paging file, mine had a lower value for min. Weird that does that.

 

yeah, it does that so it doesn't hog too much space. it'll only allocate up to the max value if it needs it. which should be very rare with the amount of RAM in most of our systems.

 

but still, some programs need it, and like i said, some games i've played simply won't run right with it disabled (i think Vampire: Bloodlines was one of them). so i said, "hey, what the heck, i won't really miss 1Gig, lol"

[nitemareglitch]

"hey, what the heck, i won't really miss 1Gig, lol"

 

 

hehe, TRUE :nod:

[Fight Game]

Well like I said in previous post, it all depends on what you read where and when. That is, unless you do some testing yourself, then you don't have to listen to anyone else's advice. Upon searching today...

http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/supertweaks5.htm

says "1. The average user is best served by LEAVING THE PAGE FILE ALONE. XP does an excellent job of managing the page file settings for most people.

 

2. For 99.999% of the configurations on the planet you need a page file. XP itself wants one and a number of programs out there do too. (Please don’t email me to argue this, I won’t respond. Find a forum to argue about it.)"

 

http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

says"Can the Virtual Memory be turned off on a really large machine?

Strictly speaking Virtual Memory is always in operation and cannot be “turned off.” What is meant by such wording is “set the system to use no page file space at all.”

 

Doing this would waste a lot of the RAM. The reason is that when programs ask for an allocation of Virtual memory space, they may ask for a great deal more than they ever actually bring into use — the total may easily run to hundreds of megabytes. These addresses have to be assigned to somewhere by the system. If there is a page file available, the system can assign them to it — if there is not, they have to be assigned to RAM, locking it out from any actual use."

 

http://www.certificationsuccess.com/index....id=329&siteid=1

says"The paging file is used regardless on how much physical RAM is in the system. This makes this setting extremely important.

 

Windows 2000/XP supports multiple paging files and can read and write to all of them simultaneously. Below are suggestions to configure the size and location of these files."

 

 

And since XP supports multiple page files and can read and write to all them SIMULTANEOUSLY, is why I suggest putting some on each drive (assuming each drive is pretty fast). If it's reading and writing to each one, at the same time, this is similar to having a RAID-0 set-up, but for your page file alone.

The size doesn't matter much, since all the hard drives are huge today. In this reading, it states that there is no disadvantage of having one too large. Having one too small, and windows will increase the size. I'd start at 1024 and watch for the yield sign down by the clock, telling you that it is increasing. If you see this, and you don't want to, then incrase it another 512. Regardless of all this, if you tested actual load times on large applications, using a small one, a large one, not having one (even though windows still uses one), you won't see any difference. Trust me. I've done it myself about 10 times on 10 different machines. The small difference you may see will just be variability (assuming nothing else is going on in the backround, like an antivirus update or anything).

And don't try turning it off on windows NT. It really will turn it off, and not create one behind your back, and it will totally freak out. After doing this, I spent the next couple hours just trying to get into windows so I can turn it back on!

[Kilamon]

Make a ram drive and put your swap file there.

[nitemareglitch]

I know what tech people say, and I am not denying that older legacy versions of Windows (such as NT) may actually require this file to boot, NO WHERE on Microsoft's support page, after doing a search for "Page File Windows XP" does it say anywhere that this file is required, or that Windows will go ahead and make one behind your back without you telling it to. I did a simple search for the page file after disabling it, and it was no longer present on my drive.

 

I am also not denying that some applications may need this file to run, but, so far in my experience I have not needed a page file at all. Not on my GFs Win XP Pro box, my Quicksilver G4 nor my wee little HP NAS running Gentoo. When I get my new rig (listed below in my sig) I will not be running a page file there also, and if you have any "tests" or applications you would like me to run, go right ahead. Once it is up and running I plan on recording boot times, application load times rendering times ect. With every page file configuration that Windows allows, and setting the page file according to the support pages on microsoft.com.

 

I will get back to you with my findings.

[THunDA]

When I get my new rig (listed below in my sig) I will not be running a page file there also, and if you have any "tests" or applications you would like me to run, go right ahead. Once it is up and running I plan on recording boot times, application load times rendering times ect. With every page file configuration that Windows allows, and setting the page file according to the support pages on microsoft.com.

 

I will get back to you with my findings.

 

I'd be interested in your results.. Because to be honest Ive ran mine a few different ways and NEVER noticed any difference in performance.. Thats why now the only thing I do to my PF is make the min and max the same size..

[nitemareglitch]

I'd be interested in your results.. Because to be honest Ive ran mine a few different ways and NEVER noticed any difference in performance.. Thats why now the only thing I do to my PF is make the min and max the same size..

 

 

What kinds of experiences have you had with setting no page file on all drives?

[THunDA]

What kinds of experiences have you had with setting no page file on all drives?

 

I think I tried that once before and didnt really notice a difference.. I'll try it again and try to run some tests..

 

What type of bench or tests do you think would show a difference if any ?

[nitemareglitch]

I think I tried that once before and didnt really notice a difference.. I'll try it again and try to run some tests..

 

What type of bench or tests do you think would show a difference if any ?

 

 

Specifically I think that load times (especially for things like photoshop and games) would be the thing to measure. Since parts of programs, and images you work on would load some into the page file, technically having it only load into your physical RAM would make it respond faster. Maybe even loading certain size images, excel spreadsheets ect. I'm not sure what program to use to do it, but, I will be doing some researching on this too.

 

I'm not sure how else this would benefit you honestly except in those instances. I am sure that zoning in certain games would benefit in this.

[red930]

Make a ram drive and put your swap file there.

Nice idea but you're defeating the purpose of "virtual memory" by reducing the amount of RAM available to the OS when creating the RAM Drive. It's a vicious cycle.

 

Here's the bottom line.

 

The pagefile in the XP OS is there to allow the OS to move program and data info from RAM when it's not needed. This keeps the amount of RAM available to the OS as high as possible when running applications.

 

If you have copious amounts of RAM, the OS might never need to use the pagefile to free up RAM space.

 

But, the first time you run an application that requires more space than you have available in RAM, you will run into problems.

 

Photoshop is one application that pukes when you don't have a pagefile enabled.

 

Now there are many schools of thought on setting the optimum pagefile.

 

First, the pagefile should be on the fastest drive you have. Otherwise it's not optimum.

 

Second, you can set the minimum and maximum size to the same value. This will keep the system from changing the size.

 

Third, you pagefile should be on contiguous sectors to optimize performance.

 

Here's what I do...

 

I let the system manage my pagefile. I use the fastest drive in the rig. I set the pagefile to a partition by its self. No other data is stored in the partition. This keeps the pagefile from becoming fragmented.

 

Now if you want to set the pagefile to a fixed size you still want to make sure it's not fragmented.

 

Here's a third world technique.

 

Go into Virtual Memory and turn of the pagefile. The OS will complain but just do it.

 

On reboot, enter Safe Mode. Run Disk Cleanup then Disk Defragmenter. Run the Defragmenter at least twice.

 

Reboot into normal Windows, then go right back to virtual memory and turn it on with your preferred settings.

 

Done.

[NEOAethyr]

What I did was:

 

Make sure to have a 1024m sized swap file from a previous install of windows.

 

Cut or copy off the files off drive c.

Then del anything left.

Ie c is now completely empty.

 

Take winhex, zero out the free space on c(I even did the slack).

With 00h, ffh, and then again 00h.

It won't take but a few mins at best since it's a small partition.

 

Copy the 1024m swap file on to c 1st.

Then copy for instance these startup files back onto the partition:

 

boot.ini

NTDETECT.COM

ntldr

 

 

There you go .

Now setup windows to use this swap file, it'll think the entier space is availible on drive c(ie it won't see the swap).

!st thing is to remove any entries for any oher swap files, take make sure the reg entry is gonna be clean.

Just scrol down and see if there's anythign other then no swap or whatever it's called on any other partition.

Then setup drive c as the swap, 1024 min 1024 max.

 

Settup up the max has a bit more benifits then preventing fragmentation .

Windows consistantly b!tches at you when it hits this max, by poop'ing up a small dialog sayig it's gonna re-size the swap.

This will happen mid game, or whatever you're doing.

It's really annoying so I reccomend setting up the max to the exact same value as min.

 

In order to have a swap on it's own partitoin, and plan ahead for it, you need a slightly larger partition then the swap.

What I did was add 1024 by 133 or something in server magic(ie server ver of partition magic).

So I got C:, a drive slightly bigger then 1gig, holds my startup files, and my swap.

It's fat16, and uses a 64k cluster size.

 

 

You don't have to go and take a long route like like this.

But I do reccemend something like this, ie del allfiles from c, then copy over a swap file by hand, then copy over the startup files.

It's up to you if you want to 00 out the drive before hand.

 

If the drive is gonna for swap only(err partition sorry).

Make it fat16, 64k cluster size, I'm not kidding.

 

One thing to note, win9x canot start off a startup partition if it's 64k.

Though win9x can be put on a 64k partition.

The max for c with win9x is 32k .

 

If you got both a nt and 9x ver of windows setup, if you need 9x, I reccomend temp like setting c as 32k, using partition magic to resize the clusters.

Or just use a 32k cluster size.

 

 

Edit:

Anyways if you go about it in this way, and have windows on a diff partition, etc etc.

When it's time to install windows again, all you'll need to do is setup the swap config in windows again, no messing around with files or anything.

It makes it nice and clean for every install of windows to come.

 

1024m swap with 512m of memory seems to be pretty decent, I have'nt run out of memory in a very long time.

Having 1g of phsycal memory would be even better though and it would do very very well when working on very large files.

 

In any case, a good deal of programs these days don't need to use say 30gigs of memory when working on 30gig files .

Like I said, I have'nt had an issue in a long time.

 

 

I used to use a 133m swap long long ago, it's the fastest.

Err maye it was 91 0r 92megs, you used to beable to bench it.

Somehting bigger or smaller was actually slower.

You need a 1024m swap at min these days in any case.