Best setup for the pagefile?

manveruppd

manveruppd

manveruppd

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Allrighty, I've bought a shiny new rig, but I'm using my existing HDDs on it, and before installing Windows I'd like to get some thoughts from forum members on the best method to set up the swap file so it'll run fastest.

Disk 0 is a 180GB IDE drive divided into 4 partitions
Disk 1 is a 250GB SATA drive divided into 2 partitions

Now, back before I bought the SATA drive I had a 4GB partition on my IDE drive which was used solely for the swap file. That way it didn't get defragmented or anything, and because I put it near the beginning of the drive it was reasonably fast.

Now that I have the SATA drive as well, though, I plan to put my new installation of Windows on there. The SATA drive has twice the cache of the IDE drive so I assume it'll be faster for Windows. My natural inclination would be to also put the swap file on the same drive, since it's newer and probably slightly faster.

However, I then thought that even though the SATA drive is faster due to the bigger cache, I'll probably get better access speeds by putting the swapfile on the IDE drive. Since the two are different physical drives and are on two different buses, my computer can read/write from both drives simultaneously, which means that accessing data on the SATA drive and reading/writing to the swapfile on the IDE drive can happen simultaneously.

Opinions? Am I right in what I'm thinking or is this all complete horse doody? How do you all have your pagefiles set up across multiple drives?
 
Is it nessassary to have modify the pagefile when on Windows XP SP2 with 2gb of RAM installed and around 250mb loaded upon startup?

Must say i've never looked into it much, but would like to know if most people like me would use a seperate drive for it. (i have another SATA that could be used)

What are the benfits/drawbacks of modifying it? :)
 
OzZie said:
Is it nessassary to have modify the pagefile when on Windows XP SP2 with 2gb of RAM installed and around 250mb loaded upon startup?

Must say i've never looked into it much, but would like to know if most people like me would use a seperate drive for it. (i have another SATA that could be used)

What are the benfits/drawbacks of modifying it? :)
Click to expand...

First of all - you need the pagefile. Turning it off slows the machine down and can break certain software. Some people have previously gone to extreme's to fix the minor performance hit with paging to disk by sticking it on a i-RAM/RAM disk etc which is all totally unnecessary.

Put it on a different physical drive which is either clean or has enough contiguous space for the pagefile, let windows sort the size itself.
 
I remember in Win98 it was advissable to fix the size of the pagefile (eg. minimum size: 2048MB, maximum size 2048MB) because there was a performance hit when Windows had to dynamically adjust its size on the fly. Is this still the case in XP, or is it ok to just leave it on auto?
 
OK, this is irrelevant to me, since I'll be using two physical drives and can therefore follow MagicBoy's advice to put the swapfile and OS on separate HDDs, but I read the following here:
A guy who works for Diskeeper Corp. said:
I still recommend certain partitioning strategies based on disk spindles - such as placing the paging file on a separate spindle than the boot partition (i.e. \Windows).
Click to expand...
So, if I were using a single HDD and wanted to put the swapfile on a different partition than the OS, how would I know at what point to partitiont he drive so that the two partitions are on separate spindles?

MagicBoy said:
The pagefile size defaults to 1.5x the amount of RAM installed. It's probly best to set the min and max sizes to this value in a modern machine with over a 1Gb of RAM.
Click to expand...

Alas, I bought 4GB for my new rig and I seriously think a 6GB pagefile is overkill! I might need 10GB of total memory in a few years time, but definitely not now! :p
 
By spindle I'm 99% sure that Diskeeper guy is referring to a different physical drive. Those crazy American's ;)

I'm still inclined to let Windows do it's thing, my tutors on the MCSE courses have said the same thing.

Slightly off topic but I can't see the requirement for 4Gb of RAM. My desktop and Mac laptop both have 2Gb in them. I've got 30 user Citrix servers at work that happily run on 1.5Gb.
 
MagicBoy said:
I've got 30 user Citrix servers at work that happily run on 1.5Gb.
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How are they usable? What do people run in the sessions. Unless it's remoting into other boxes and you're using Citrix as some sort of pseudo-VPN I can't see how you're getting anywhere near acceptable performance. We're buying 16GB Dells just to run J2EE apps (though that is J2EE so maybe the requirements are inflated somewhat).
 
manveruppd said:
Alas, I bought 4GB for my new rig and I seriously think a 6GB pagefile is overkill! I might need 10GB of total memory in a few years time, but definitely not now! :p
Click to expand...

The page file isn't an overspill from the main memory though, it is closer to a mirror of the main memory, programs that are used frequently are placed in the pagefile for quicker access than loading them separately from the hard drive, and only programs that you are currently using are placed in physical memory.

You would seriously hamper performance on your machine if you reduced it below 4GB...


As said, Windows knows what it is doing... and Vista is much better at managing it than XP is..
 
Caged said:
How are they usable? What do people run in the sessions. Unless it's remoting into other boxes and you're using Citrix as some sort of pseudo-VPN I can't see how you're getting anywhere near acceptable performance. We're buying 16GB Dells just to run J2EE apps (though that is J2EE so maybe the requirements are inflated somewhat).
Click to expand...

Windows 2003 + Office 2003, plus a couple of CRM apps and some not particularly demanding intranet hosted apps (purchasing system etc).

They're old boxes - Dual 933Mhz P3's, so will be getting replaced in a couple of months. Users can't tell the difference between them and the newer dual xeon boxes with 4Gb (which take 40 odd users).

We're careful about what software we will stick on the boxes - anything wasteful (eg Java) is not allowed anywhere near the farm until it's been fully tested.

In day to day use I get better response using apps on one of these via the Thin-Client than running locally on my ThinkPad.
 
Caged said:
Leave the page file settings alone, Microsoft know more about how Windows virtual memory works than you do.
Click to expand...

fair enough, let windows manage the size. but surely it's quicker to have it on a separate disk from your apps - that way the read and write are on separate disks and can be done at the same time when things are being put into VM?

And windows will NEVER automatically put your page file on any partition other than the one it's installed on.

I have my Vista64 installed on a 500GB Seagate 7200.11 and my Pagefile (size is system managed) on the end of a 36GB Raptor which also has Debian installed on it . Seems to work fine for me.
 
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Moving the pagefile from one physical disk to another is actually a good idea. And works out best performance wise if the pagefile is on the faster of the two drives. Setting it to a specific size can cause problems especially if it is set too small. You can also Create a Partition on a sepparate platter on the same disk to achieve similar results.(see bellow)

Someone was talking about spindles and layers/platters and so on. Now the Idea that a Hard disk is made of one single disk went out the window years ago when we started wanting bigger and faster drives. So now the manufactures produce drives with multiple layers/platters all sat on a spindle, You can work out how big each platter/layer is by working out the number of heads per disk, as if my memory is correct the number of heads per platter is the same no matter how big the drive is.

hope this helps :)
 
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I'll probably have it like this once I do a fresh install and clear enough space.

Drive 0 - 120GB Windows
Drive 1 - 320GB games
Drive 2 - 250GB storage
Drive 3 - 120GB pagefile and storage
Drive 4- 80GB storage.
 
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