Virtual Memory + 16GB of RAM

Solaris

Solaris

Solaris

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31 Oct 2006
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Ok,

Say I was to buy one of the new X58 boards.

They have 6 DDR3 slots.

If I put 2GB in each thats 12GB of RAM....

How big would my Swap file, virtual memory, whatever its called need to be?
 
depends what you're doing. If you have tonnes of ram you don't really need much swap at all. Especially under linux as it is far better at not using swap while there's memory free than windows.
 
Depends what software you are running and what its needs are.

I wouldnt need 12GB in the first place, so hypothetically, if someone gave me a 12GB X56 tomorrow, I would set the swapfile to 2GB (mainly because I dont know enough to know if setting it to 0 would be a bad idea or not).

Edit: Beaten to it.
 
JTrickle said:
Depends what software you are running and what its needs are.

I wouldnt need 12GB in the first place, so hypothetically, if someone gave me a 12GB X56 tomorrow, I would set the swapfile to 2GB (mainly because I dont know enough to know if setting it to 0 would be a bad idea or not).

Edit: Beaten to it.
Click to expand...

you can turn pagfile off completely in windows if you have that much memory. However certain games like Battlefield 2 for example were coded in a way that they need a minimum of xxxMB virtual memory.

Memory is much faster than Virtual memory so you want as much in thre as possible, thus it should be as small as you can practically make it.
 
I have always set my page file to 1.5x the amount of RAM I have. However with 8GB of ram thats gonna be 12GB, I have not manually set a size with Vista, although it has allocated about 8GB, but says 12GB is recommended.
 
I've often thought that swap file size is one of the least well understood aspects (me included) of system building and configuration. Years go by and you still see a wide range of ideas being trotted out. I still don't fully understand it.

My recommendation is, assess how much total memory you think you will need, add a bit for contingency, and then set the swap file accordingly. If you have more physical memory than required, still enable a swap file as it is expected by the Windows kernel. Personally I just set it to 2GB.

Rules of thumb like a multiplier (say 1.5x) of system RAM just seem ludicrous and totally illogical to me as all that means is that low-end systems may not have a large enough page file (fancy gaming on a 512meg Vista rig with a 768meg swapfile?), whereas high-end rigs just end up wasting HD space (8gig RAM resulting in 12gig of space taken up).
 
vista handles pagefile just fine by itself. if you feel the need to set it yourself you can turn it off or set it to 10x the system ram. its never made a bit of difference for me.
 
Yup Windows will resize accordingly. Like any other OS it is designed to page - there will always be some page file usage by the kernel. With that much memory there will be very few programs that will struggle!
 
mrochester said:
I assume if you turn the page file off it'll force the OS to use all of the available memory?
Click to expand...

Yes but it will throw up other issues, as previously mentioned some apps are configured to use a minimum amount of virtual memory.

Just let Windows manage it, with 12GB, while it might set aside about 8GB swap, chances are it'll barely use it.
 
Brian Stuart said:
Let Windows handle it. You won't notice any difference with that amount of RAM.
Click to expand...

My minion is totally correct. Windows will generally use about 1.5x you RAM size if it's set to automatic (more if the system has insufficient RAM for your running applications)

The pagefile in windows is best seen as a 'dirty mirror' of what's in memory and you won't get much is any performance increase by turning it off.

Look at this thread: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17719983

And this: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=11603011&postcount=12
 
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