Best setup for the pagefile?

Most drive families have a standard capacity per platter, say 250Gb. So the 250Gb has one platter using both sides so there's 2 heads, the 500Gb has 2 platters with 4 heads and so on. Most drives families top out at 3 platters as you get heat and noise problems above this - anyone remember the IBM 75GXP with 5 platters? You get the occasional oddity - for example we're still getting machines at work with 80Gb hard drives. They're using one side of a 160Gb platter drive as the older types have gone out of production.

Multiple heads are not independent - they all move from a common assembly as one therefore you don't get the same advantages from multiple partitions as from multiple drives.
 
Microsoft always err on the side of caution, so default page file settings are 'safe'.

It doesn't require a leap of the imagination to realise that putting the page file on a seperate drive to the OS (physical drive, not logical), a drive can only read so much data at a time so seperating the demands of the OS from the demands of the page file.

Also, if you let Windows manage your page file all will be fine, but on occaision (and it depends entirely on what you intend to do with your PC as to whether or not you take the next piece of advice) Windows will be required to change the page file size 'on-the-fly' which generally causes no more than a momentary stutter, which is less noticable if the page file is on a seperate drive to the OS. This behavious is almost always unnecessary in a desktop environment unless you run some very memory intensive apps, in which case more system RAM would be ideal. Since a lot of what is actually paged to the disk is junk that windows isnt currently using (it doesnt generally page items that may be required to disk)it tends to just bloat if you leave it windows managed. If you set a maximum (preferably a min and a max of the same value, as has been said 1.5-2x your RAM) then the pagefile will simply drop the oldest or most unlikely to be required items from the pagefile when it gets anywhere near capacity.
 
Nobody's actually said it yet so I will.

Ensure you have sufficient RAM so that when you are working normally with all apps loaded and everything flying, that your total RAM usage is well below your actual physical RAM.

So long as you do this, the issue of where to put the swap file is just "2nd order" tweaking. It will be better on a different physical drive obviously.

There are tools in windows to monitor various aspects of system performance. I THINK!! it is possible to monitor peak swap file usage. If I had 4GB of system RAM I wouldn't want the enormous default swap file. Swap files are a bit of an anachronism in today's PC. They were really necessary once when 32MB RAM would have cost over £1000 but today - whats the point. As someone said in another post it just gives the OS somewhere to write little notes to itself.
 
EffBee said:
There are tools in windows to monitor various aspects of system performance. I THINK!! it is possible to monitor peak swap file usage. If I had 4GB of system RAM I wouldn't want the enormous default swap file. Swap files are a bit of an anachronism in today's PC. They were really necessary once when 32MB RAM would have cost over £1000 but today - whats the point. As someone said in another post it just gives the OS somewhere to write little notes to itself.
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That is totally not true. The page file is still as (even more?) important today than it ever has been.

And just because you have more RAM doesn't mean you can skimp on the page file. The page file is meant to be a slightly "dirty" mirror image of physical RAM. But more importantly it should always be at least 1x the size of physical RAM.

So yes, unfortunately for users with large amounts of RAM, they will also have to allocate a page file of at least that size.

This is just the way virtual memory works. Don't think of it as "oh the OS hasn't used all my physical RAM yet so the page file will be empty". It's NOT an "overflow carpark".
 
Can anyone tell me what the windows XP 32bit Default page filing is using 2GB of RAM? I think I may have played around with mine at some point, and want to revert back to standard settings.
 
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