Would you ever limit page file size on a server?

Burnsy2023 · 21 Sep 2010 at 12:34

As title really. Does anyone do this?

ethos · 21 Sep 2010 at 12:49

Nope.

ruffneck · 21 Sep 2010 at 13:03

Vince · 21 Sep 2010 at 13:29

nope can't say I have.

Sp00n · 21 Sep 2010 at 13:29

Negative.

MasterPlan1 · 21 Sep 2010 at 14:41

Have to set page file by the corp rules, so yeah... I have to create a partition for 1.5*RAM and make the page file RAM-1.5*RAM

Vince · 21 Sep 2010 at 15:57

MasterPlan1 said:
Have to set page file by the corp rules, so yeah... I have to create a partition for 1.5*RAM and make the page file RAM-1.5*RAM

Can I ask why? I know that the page file if on a different drive to the os drive can increase performance but having it on a seperate partition of the same drive just seems like a mission for no gain.

Am I missing something?

MasterPlan1 · 21 Sep 2010 at 16:00

*shrug* I work for a french company, they're probably too busy eating cheese, drinking wine and shrugging at each other to bother giving me a reason why.

ethos · 21 Sep 2010 at 16:03

MasterPlan1 said:
Have to set page file by the corp rules, so yeah... I have to create a partition for 1.5*RAM and make the page file RAM-1.5*RAM

I don't understand this personally, seems like a crazy rule to enforce and as Vince states having the page file on another partition won't give any gains.

This is an interesting read: http://serverfault.com/questions/23...-a-pagefile-on-an-8gb-ram-machine/23684#23684 (I've linked it before but it seems relevant).

ecksmen · 21 Sep 2010 at 17:01

Burnsy2023 said:
As title really. Does anyone do this?

Yes, we do. We set it to a fixed size, stops it from fragmenting and also means the OS has enough space on the disk that can't be used for other things. Of course we monitor disk usage, but when it takes some customers think drives are free and should have unlimited space.... We like to reserve some just for the OS.

ethos · 21 Sep 2010 at 17:08

ecksmen, do you have any hard performance statistics for fixed vs system managed?

ecksmen · 21 Sep 2010 at 17:30

No hard numbers, but experience of OS drives getting fragmented more so and also issues where by webservers stopped serving webpages when the page file was being expanded.

We do it as our standard build process. Its more of a preventative measure than anything. Leaving it to system managed has bitten us too many times.

Stolly · 21 Sep 2010 at 21:13

ecksmen said:
No hard numbers, but experience of OS drives getting fragmented more so and also issues where by webservers stopped serving webpages when the page file was being expanded.

We do it as our standard build process. Its more of a preventative measure than anything. Leaving it to system managed has bitten us too many times.

Same, for same reasons.

We fix it to a size, its part of the of the datacenter build standard. Not only to stop fragmentation but to entirely remove the possibilty of page file expansion causing problems.

Yes they are monitored, but lets not have the problem in the first place eh ?

Burnsy2023 · 21 Sep 2010 at 21:48

Stolly said:
Same, for same reasons.

We fix it to a size, its part of the of the datacenter build standard. Not only to stop fragmentation but to entirely remove the possibilty of page file expansion causing problems.

Yes they are monitored, but lets not have the problem in the first place eh ?

The reason I asked was because fixed pagefiles have caused annoying problems and I was wondering if it was a standard thing.

JasonM · 21 Sep 2010 at 22:15

Page files should be spread over different drives. When you do this you get a RAID stripped type performance effect.

I have read in a MS article that the cluster size should be 64k for a PageFile.

I have a couple of small 64k cluster partitions on two identical HDD's, and have 8GB fixed size on each, giving 16GB total. It's overkill in size but almost impossible to ever run out of pagefile space.

s0ck · 22 Sep 2010 at 20:54

In the days of XP/2003, mostly definitely. No one wants to take a server offline to defrag it and a lol defrag from Windows with all your LOB apps running doesn't really do anything.

Saundie · 23 Sep 2010 at 07:46

Unfortunately most of the systems I support are SBS2003 boxes with 12GB system partitions which is nowhere near big enough. As a result, we typically configure a 256mb page file on the system partition, and a (1.5 * RAM) - 256mb page file on a data partition. I don't recall the rationale behind this; it's not my policy, I simply follow it.

Vince · 23 Sep 2010 at 09:24

Burnsy2023 said:
The reason I asked was because fixed pagefiles have caused annoying problems and I was wondering if it was a standard thing.

I am this side of the fence to be honest, I have seen more problems on servers with fixed page file size than those with windows managed. Quite why this is the case I don't know. Anyway its interesting to see some of the responses in here.

Little_Crow · 23 Sep 2010 at 10:52

Like many, we have our page file on a different volume. I've gone with the size of disk being 1.5 x memory, and set the page file to dynamic.

We've done this for a different reason though,
We have our VMWare environment replicated using HP Continuous Access and SRM to another site, and have created the paging file disks on non-replicated storage.
This, in theory, should keep replication to data only, rather than volatile data like the paging file.

Lanz · 23 Sep 2010 at 14:10

I set the sizes to 4096 on all our servers. If left to system managed, it'll use up all the disk on a 64GB server. If a server is hitting the pagefile for more than 4GB, then something is wrong.