Running without swapfile

Stickman

Stickman

Stickman

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Joined
7 Jun 2009
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394
Location
East mids.
I always tend to disable virtual memory whenever possible, because I hate the slow down, and am wondering how much ram you'd need with win7pro64 to do this and still be able to run most programs like office, games, etc?

On windows XP I found as little as 2-4gb will do, so does anyone do the same in Win7, and how much ram do you use?

Thanks. :)
 
I never get BSOD's/hangs from disabling swap. It's common practise in some security conscious sectors like the one I work in (lessens the chance of unencrypted data being written to disk).

Weird, wonder what makes people think you can't run a stable system without swap? An XP machine will even play GTA4 without any swap with only 3 gigs of ram.

But windows does seem to mess about writing to swap even when ram is not full, hence the slight performance boost if you can prevent this altogether.

edit: Maybe things are different in Win7 to the NT/XP machines that we use at work, I dunno - I just know that on our machines disabling swap gives a slight boost - if anyone knows of a reason why windows 7 would need swap even when it would have enough ram i'll leave it enabled, but surely you're better off if the system can all run on RAM rather than a much slower HDD, or even SSD - the speeds are just light years apart?
 
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mattyfez said:
What happens when the ram is full though
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Dunno about Win7 but in XP when you try to load the program that caused the ram to be full, it would just give you a dialog box letting you know there's not enough memory. So you just free up some ram and then it works. But what I'm talking about is simply having enough ram so this never happens (on XP 4gb does the trick for everything I use the machine for). I was just wondering if anyone knew what the equivalent amount needed in Win7 was.

Avathar77 said:
Running the pagefile on the ramdisk seems more snappier in windows tasks and it did give me higher 3dm06 marks - but nothing to get over excited about.

There was an article on custompc mag about this thing - I will try to dig it up if I have some time.
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Sounds interesting, can't hurt to see what happens eh? Thanks :)
 
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edscdk said:
I recomend disc encryption if they are that security conscious :P ...
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They do that too, so you can put that tongue away LOL... it's electronic banking. Never underestimate how paranoid a company can be when they have hundreds of billions of pounds to protect. :)
 
I know what you mean: a lot of what is done is overkill and I myself don't always see the point...

As it was explained to me the reasoning was something to do with the longevity of data on HDD as opposed to RAM: data on a hard disk, such as stuff that somehow got left behind by a swapfile (even tho in theory this should never happen from a secure program) is more likely to remain on the disk, and it may be possible for a subsequent different authorised user to recover data from a previous session. But yeah there would have to be some really sloppy coding or a crash or something for that to happen since any secure data should be wiped by whatever program used it.

As I said I don't always see the point of some of the security policies, but I have occasionally noticed XP machines with swapfile disabled being a bit more responsive than those without - and like most people here I'm always interested in anything that might give a little more performance, so I wondered if it might help with Win7, and if so, how much RAM would be needed. :)
 
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