paging file help!

[morkus64]

Will it cause any dysfunction to move the paging file settings from c: to a different drive? Also does a larger size (this is also known as swap-file, right?) mean better performance? What is a good size?

Of course, being the man i am, i already changed it to a different drive (actually i made it on 2) and increased the sizes of each to 500-1000 MB. Am i screwing anything up?

What made me fiddle with this is that whenever i do some things, such as printing a large file or burning cds, it tells me that there is very little space left on c: . Will this help?

Thanks!

[g0at]

if its your swap file taking that last 500megs-1gig of space, yeah, i could see that. but remember to have your swap file on your FASTEST drive, even if its the C drive.

[morkus64]

Fastest so far as rpm? both of my hard drives (maxtor diamondmax 40gig and western digital 80 gig) are 7200rpm.

[EciDemon]

Fixing the pagefile is often a good idea as then Windows wont have to dynamicly change the size all the time (slower) just be sure to set it to above 200mb.
Also, if you have more than 512 mb ram you could dissable the pagefile. (Windows might complain abit but it will work real good)

If you dont have that much memory you could set the page file where you Dont have your games.
So put it on C if you have all your games installed on D for some performance boost.

[The Baron]

On XP, either don't have one or leave it dynamic. It's been my experience that on an NTFS HD with a fast drive, it degrades performance anyway to set it at a fixed size. Put it on the fastest drive, absolutely.

But, it doesn't make THAT big of a difference no matter what you do as long as you have at least 512 megs.

[morkus64]

well, i do have 512 megs ram... so maybe i'll do that... hmmm... so far as games on d:... hehe... i have c, d, e, f, g, and h! :)

[The Baron]

leave it on if you play UT2k3.

it will go bad and crash on you if you don't. ;)

[PsychoSy]

Whatever you do, stop believing the "set the pagefile to 2x the ammount of RAM installed" myth if you have 512MB or more of RAM installed. That's just overkill. In my experiances, anytime you have 512MB of RAM or more, just set a 784MB-1GB (go with 1GB...hell, what's a 1 GB nowadays?!?) pagefile to static and leave it alone for good.

Under these circimstances, WindowsXP will barely touch it while your browsing the internet or doing piddly crap (if at all) except when you might play a game, edit music or video and stuff like that. A swapfile of that size will keep these applications very content, especially any games based off the Quake 3 and Unreal engines. :)

[Kruno]

Ahh thanks, so it does improve average performance in todays games.




Originally posted by PsychoSy
Whatever you do, stop believing the "set the pagefile to 2x the ammount of RAM installed" myth if you have 512MB or more of RAM installed. That's just overkill. In my experiances, anytime you have 512MB of RAM or more, just set a 784MB-1GB (go with 1GB...hell, what's a 1 GB nowadays?!?) pagefile to static and leave it alone for good.

Under these circimstances, WindowsXP will barely touch it while your browsing the internet or doing piddly crap (if at all) except when you might play a game, edit music or video and stuff like that. A swapfile of that size will keep these applications very content, especially any games based off the Quake 3 and Unreal engines. :)

[Blakhart]

My rules for swapfiles are thus:

A. 1 pagefile per physical disk, and a fast disk that did nothing but swap calls would be best, on a separate ide/scsi channel. You can have up to 16 swapfiles in 2k and I think xp, and having a swap on multiple disks increases swapfile bandwidth, a good thing

B. no more than 1 fragment in any pagefile, this is the most important file as far as fragmentation is concerned

C. set a minimum that is greater than any expected use and it will not become fragmented, unless the os lays down the swapfile on the drive fragmented during os install. In that case defrag the swap or reduce the swap size till the fragment is deleted and you have one contiguous file

D. if you have set maximum and an app calls for more or the os needs more you are headed for crashville/app will not run

E. if you do video/photo editing you need a huge swapfile, in some cases greater than 768. This is not a bad thing if you have the drive space. So perhaps no set max is a good idea

Note: I do no editing so I have set min/max to the same number, but rather large for my usage. This should allow me to never get any error due to too small a swap.
I have a separate partition as c: and swap lives there at 700 megs, placing it here on the edge of the drive places it on the fastest part of the drive, the first few megs. You should not run multiple swaps on multiple partitions on the same drive, it will be self defeating, see A above...


The Golden Rule tho, is to have plenty of ram, 512 or more depending on apps you use. This ensures swapping will be at its minimum. Did I mention that even if you disable the swapfile, the os still swaps, and you will never be able to stop it? True.
If you disable swapfile, the os will swap dlls and exes all over the drive, the worst kind of swapping, as it will be fragmented. So a contiguous swapfile is best.

[Kruno]

Thank you for that
Blakhart. :)

[Blakhart]

Hope it is helpfull, M8.

[PsychoSy]

Originally posted by K.I.L.E.R
Ahh thanks, so it does improve average performance in todays games.

Not necessarily.

What a static 1GB swapfile does is allows most applications to be satisfied just in case it needs it while telling Windows not to bloat the sonofgun prematurely, causing even more pagefile fragmentation.

If an app wants more pagefile that 1GB, it'll tell you...either in the documentation or by GPFing like crazy (but the chances of latter happening with a 1GB swapfile are slim since 90% of all the popular applications on the market will be happy with it - even if it doesn't have to use it).

There are two exceptions to this rule - the first being if you're working with large MPEGs for video editing and - trust me - if you're the Spielberg in your family, you'd be borderline clinically insane to be editing large ass MPEG files on a machine with just 512MB of physical RAM. Oh, sure - it can be done with 512MBs of physical RAM but you'll probably need a pagefile larger than 1GB and...something that'll take a while to read while your harddrive gnaws away...like maybe a bathroom reader or the hardcopy version of "War & Peace"? :p

The second exception being if you're running Netscape! :eek: