Pagefile...

SavellM

SavellM

SavellM

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Joined
15 Nov 2010
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So I was thinking about the pagefile/swapfile.

What is the best way to maximise performance on a drive.
Especially on your drive booting windows?

I was thinking as I have 4gb Ram, on removing the pagefile altogether.

I’m running 2 drives is Raid 0 for performance, but just wondering on how I can get that little bit extra.

I have a few HDD's just sitting around, so could stick another one in, and make it just the page file or something.

Thought on this?
 
Any other HDD that's "sitting around" isn't going to be as fast as your RAID 0 setup. Basically, the only thing you can do performance-wise is to make it a fixed size so that it doesn't become fragmented. With 4 GB of RAM you need to decide what your peak usage will be. For me, I'd probably have a 4 GB page file but it's up to you. Once it's a fixed size and you've rebooted, you should use a defragmenter that can defrag the page file during a boot-up.
 
Ummm ok...
So basically the best thing would be to set it at a specific size.

I thought I read somewhere or in a PC Format or something that the best would be to get rid of it all together.
And if its better to do that and get more Ram, an extra 4gb aint too expensive.
So that's an option...
 
You could disable it altogether but then what if one day you're doing a lot of stuff and start going over the 4 GB limit? You'll start getting crashes and "out of memory" errors rather than Windows just using the page file.

Really, it doesn't do any harm so you might as well have it.
 
SavellM said:
I was thinking as I have 4gb Ram, on removing the pagefile altogether.
Click to expand...

You won't know whether you need a paging file or not based on the amount of physical memory of the machine alone. You need to look at how much system committed virtual memory the peak of your workload requires. For example, if you have 6GB of RAM and the peak of your workload requires 8GB of committed virtual memory, it would mean you would need a paging file size of at least 2GB to support that workload.

On the other hand, if you have 8GB of RAM and your workload requires 6GB of system committed virtual memory, Windows will run just fine without a paging file under that particular workload. However, even in those cases, where you would want to have one anyway is so the system can write private modified data out to the paging file which results in that memory being available for more useful purposes such as caching. Also, if you don't have a paging file, the system won't be able to generate crash dump files.

If you're interested in virtual memory, the following paper is worthy of a read, which will also explain to you how to correctly size the paging file.

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory - Mark Russinovich
 
Thanks Fire Wizard...

I will read that doc and report back.
I mainly only use my Desktop for gaming, so wanted to pull out as much performance as possible...

I have a work laptop for anything thing work related :)
 
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