Pagefile size question

[jaclaz]

You've posted those EXACT links before here in this thread. And we established then already that they are not the most reliable sources. Why are you posting those links again?

enuffsaid:

1) As said in my post those links were already posted by me (on another thread)

2) Unless told not to by an Administrator of this board I will continue to post those links EVERY TIME I think it fit

3) Are you the one and only person in the world to be trusted (on your word only) on this topic? Do you detain the ultimate TRUTH?

4) Who are the "we" who have supposedly "established" ANYTHING? You and KoolDrew?

My friend KoolDrew and I, standing side by side, ......

5) In the other thread, the ONLY support you gave to your OPINION, or to be more exact to KoolDrew's OPINION was your word, and a link to a Linux article with this comment by KoolDrew:

It covers linux, but Virtual Memory is the same

6) As said in the other thread:

The community here is for people trying to exchange info and knowledge, NOT insults or denigrating other people's work or ideas.

Of course everyone has the right to have his own opinion and to express it, but denigrating others plainly it's not polite.

7) No one, EVER, said the the articles linked are the "most reliable sources" and EVERYTHING you find on the internet, or read, or are told has to be interpreted, analysed and tested.

8) At least those links are SOURCES, maybe not 100% accurate, but, let me say, MUCH better than simply your "word" for it.

jaclaz

Edited June 11, 2005 by jaclaz

[Martin Zugec]

I must agree with enuffsaid about this topic - memory management is highly optimized in NT based system. Setting pagefile to "hard" set was popular (and functional) trick in 9x system. Common hoax is, that it is improving performance on NT systems. For trusted sources you can read MSDN articles about memory management - if you dont trust them, read articles from kernel gurus like Mark. Sometimes it can help you, but these are really rare situations, similar to programs to consume big memory block.

[enuffsaid]

@ jaclaz...

I'm not getting into the same discussion we had then. I am only trying to say that although many people have good experiences with disabling or limiting the page file size, they CAN NOT claim that BECAUSE it works for them, it will work for others.

I may not have produced links to information, but my knowlegde is based on STUDY, and NOT on "personal experiences I've had by fiddeling around with some settings."

Plenty people have produced good links and I wasn't in the mood for posting more links to technical references for people who don't even have the SLIGHTEST idea what they are talking about in the first place.

I've said it then and I'll say it again... Do not fiddle with the Pagefile size no matter how much memory you have. And that's final, jaclaz! People can listen or people can chose to ignore me... fine. But it strikes me that people who have no apparent knowlegde of what they are talking about, INSIST they spread their personal experiences as being the correct and only method.

[jaclaz]

@enuffsaid

this is exactly the point I was trying to make:

Everyone should read ALL the info that is available, and judge by himself.

Moreover, there is NO ever BEST setting for everything and for every use one can make of a PC.

The only differences between us is that:

1) I don't claim to be the only expert in the world

2) I produce some documentation to backup the theory

3) I do not "hint" that other people are "dumb":

don't even have the SLIGHTEST idea what they are talking about in the first place

4) I do not assume blatantly that other people experience is based on

"personal experiences I've had by fiddeling around with some settings."

So all in all, the difference is that I respect others and their opinions, while you do not.

jaclaz

Edited June 14, 2005 by jaclaz

[gunsmokingman]

Plenty people have produced good links and I wasn't in the mood for posting more links to technical references for people who don't even have the SLIGHTEST idea what they are talking about in the first place.

I agree with jaclaz in his statement. You did the same thing in a post about a Vbs code I posted, but yet you could not produce any thing except a childish remark hinting at my code being big. Yet you could not produce no code what so ever. So if you dont like what I post or anyone else maybe you should ignore it. If it is not correct then add to the post by correcting it, with out trying to be little some one who took the time to post it.

No where does it say that this is the best all I said is what I have used for the last couple of years, on 3 diferent computers, this was ment only as a reference for other no more or less.

I have used this setting for the last couple of years with no problem max = 384 and min = 384 on my C drive. I dont Install any thing on C:\ other than my page file. I have My Os installed On D:\

[enuffsaid]

OMG! Are we getting into that now? "Childish remark?" "Hinting?". Having a bad day gunsmoker? All I said was that I liked somebody else's code because it was only one line compared to your 30+ lines; that's not a hint. Never have I said anything negative about your code OTHER than that it was much larger than the one liner produced by somebody else. Did I say it was crap? Did I say it didn't work? Thank you.

I even posted a solution to a problem people were having with the shorter command.

Frankly, I don't know jack about VB, but if I get to choose between 30 lines or 1 line, the choice is quicly made. Sorry that it wasn't the solution you posted. I'm just having a hard time believing that's what upset you. I think something deeper is brewing. Let it out, son.

Edited June 14, 2005 by enuffsaid

[Cartoonite]

I've stayed out of these threads until now largely because I will be the first one to admit that I am far from an expert on this subject. Also, since what I learned was picked up during lectures from which I have no notes and no documentation, I can provide no support for what I have to say.

Without trying to pick sides in this sadly volitile discussion, here is my small contribution to the topic:

• Some programs require the pagefile to run. The way they have been written damands it. If you disable the pagefile, these programs will not run. Period. To me, this suggests that disabling the pagefile is a bad idea. Even if I don't currently run any programs that need it, I can in no way guarantee that I will never want to install one that does.
  
• Some programs, especially server applications (Exchange and SQL server, for example) are designed to make use of every bit of memory available. This suggests to me that even if you are running 4GB of physical memory and a large pagefile on top of that, these applications will make use of it. Therefore, by my definition anyway, it is not a waste.
  
• I have always left my pagefile alone and have never had any problems. I suspect anyone who does the same will have a similar experience.
  And finally:
  
• In no way is that last point meant to be interpreted to mean that customizing your pagefile settings is a bad idea. I have already stated that I don't know enough on the subject to make that claim one way or the other.
  

Now to go slightly off topic in reference to the last few posts in this thread.

@eveyone involved

Please remember that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Also, please remember that if your opinion does not contribute to the topic at hand, you are also entitled to keep it to yourself. Now, could we go back to arguing about pagefiles now please, instead of how much or how little each other knows?

Cheers.

[quinriva]

I'm no expert on the situation, however I thought I might share my own personal experiences. I absolutely agree turning off the page file is bad. Tried it once and soon realised that some programmes just won't run. My comp has a sizeable amount of RAM, 1Gb so I've did a fair bit of reading and came to the conclusions that I will get to shortly. It should be noted that most of the articles that I read where not written by kernal programmers or memory experts, just journalists and technicians who have been in the IT industry for quiite a while.

On MY system I have two page files, one at the start of my system disk on its own partition (Y:\), and another on a seperate disk again on its own partiton (Z:\). Y: has both max and min set to 1024Mb whilst Z: has both max and min set to 2048Mb.

My reasoning for this is:

By having a fixed page file the system doesn't have to waste cycles dynamically changing it.

By having the page file fixed on its own partition you prevent file fragmentation from dynamically resizing the pagefile.

By having that partition at the start of the disk you ensure that the page file is on the fastest part of the disk.

By having the page file split over several drives you ensure that the system has access to a fast page file if one of the drives is being heavily accessed by an application.

So for this setup has worked for me just fine and I have noticed a speed increase (mostly when ALT Tabbing out of games). I have a 3Gb page file, big whoop that's like 0.3% of my total hard-drive space.

What I would recommend: try a setup similar to this if you notice a benefit, leave it - if you don't then leave Windows in control. Or if you really need the space reduce your page file. If things slow down you con always change it back.

Just remember changing your page file takes about 30 seconds. What's the worst that can happen? A program doesn't work or your computer begins to slowdown - ok so you wasted a minute of your life, just set things back to the way they were no harm done.

Anyway this is just what I think not the word of God. And do take note of the fact that I've only posted 3 posts in MSFN - so don't flame me to hard.

[Thauzar]

Thats what I tried to say and what you can read in article I provided - dont mess with pagefile, leave it on OS memory management!

The thing is , in my case, I get bsod 0x000000F4 and part of the fix is to try edit page file size. I read alot of contradictory informations here and other places.

some say to have between 200 to 400MB of pagefile size in XP, MAXIMUM... I find this to be too small.

Default was about 2046 min and 3000something max... this is how it was before bsods.

I read the max memory windows can handle is 4GB max (physical + virtual) if that's true I can only allocate a maximum of 2gb since I got 2gb of ram. That would mean the thumb rule would be obsolete for systems with so much ram.

So, I'd like to hear some of your advices, for the moment I've put it on 1000-1500mb since it's still large but under the total of 4gb (2+1.5).

[Tarun]

Let Windows manage the pagefile.

Read More...

[Andromeda43]

Let Windows manage the pagefile.

Read More...

I've only been working on PC's for 26 years so I'm a bit of a 'nube'.

About as much as those OS programmers at M$.

I've tried all sorts of this idea and that idea and this "Expert" and that "Expert" and all I ever saw was some program or another would buck and snort because what it expected to see as Virtual memory wasn't there.

Windows is completely written to take advantage of X amount of virtual memory. There are a bunch of programs out there that just won't run without it.

After ten years of working with this thing those guys at M$ have gotten it down pretty well PAT.

If you want a huge jump in system performance get your Kernal Code up off of that terribly slow hard drive, (compared to RAM Speed) and into ram where the OS can access it in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds.

All it takes is a simple registry tweak of changing a zero to a one and the job's done. I even wrote a script to do the job faster than manually editing the registry. I do this for all my XP customers.

Here's the tweak:

***************************************

Memory Performance Tweak

These Settings will fine tune your systems memory management -at least 256MB of ram recommended, 512 preferred for first tweak.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \

Session Manager \ Memory Management

1.DisablePagingExecutive -double click it and in the decimal put a 1 - this allows XP to keep data in memory now instead of paging sections of ram to harddrive.

2.LargeSystemCache- double click it and change the decimal to 1 -this allows XP Kernal to Run in memory improves system performance a lot. This tweak can actually slow down a system with less than 256 megs of ram.

***************************************

There's more to getting an XP system to run efficiently, but this tweak is a good place to start.

Leave the pagefile alone and put your effort where it will really do some good.

The above tweak costs absolutely nothing but a few moments of your time and is easily reverseable if you decide you don't like it for some reason.

Another HUGE speed increase on any system is achieved by replacing your old, slow, IDE hard drive with the newer and much faster SATA hard drive. With my IDE hard drive a Ghost Backup used to take me over a half hour. With my new SATA drive, the same operation takes me less than five minutes.

If your mobo won't support a SATA drive, a PCI Drive Controller Card can. I used one for about a year till I got my new Mobo with built in SATA support. Typical data transfer rates are around 1500 mbpm.

At least since the release of Windows 95, the Pagefile, or Swapfile as it was called in the early days, was always put in the root directory of the OS drive. Most commonly C:\.

That happens to be the place where the drive controller can access it the quickest and it's certainly where Windows will look for it. Move it and Windows has to go looking for it. (just a thought)

Oh yes,,,,,keep your drive clean and defragged for top performance. (and I don't mean once a year.)

Y'all have a really great day now, Y'hear?

Andromeda43 B)

Edited August 20, 2006 by Andromeda43

[Thauzar]

great, so if I got that right, I should let windows run the pagefile even if when it was the case there was 0x000000F4 bsod, and tweak XP so that the pagefile and kernel are run from my 2gb of ram.

if noone replies with counter indications I think I'm gonna try that out.

[bijicool]

Okay, first of all: always configure a pagefile, period.

And second... I ALWAYS set the pagefile fixed. I've done this before back on Windows NT 4. And ever since on 2000, XP, 2003, ...

On servers this is actually a big improvement and a big issue. Especially on multi-user servers like Terminal Servers/Citrix and other "heavy load" programs.

Just consider this simple logic: suppose you let Windows manage the size of the pagefile. If and when Windows needs to expand the size of the pagefile a slow process will start and performance will take a big hit. Is that what you want to be happening? I don't.

And what's more: the article that's referred to is back from 2004... and in the IT business that's ages ago... I'm a big fan of Mark & co, but from my own experienc I'd say:

set the page file fix

[Thauzar]

well, I stopped having that bsod as soon as I fixed it's size to 1000-1500, so I get 2Gb physical and 1-1,5Gb of virtual memory.

And since I got so much ram I guess it's not dangerous to try the 2 registry tweaks posted above...

[Tarun]

Pretty much any intelligent tech will tell you that you do not need to set your pagefile to a fixed size. It really is best to leave it alone.

Reason: Anything you are working with will STILL seek to use the pagefile. Now, should you be gaming or editing graphics in Photoshop; you'll still need the pagefile (it works with your RAM after all).

When it needs more memory (RAM or pagefile) and Windows is in control, it will automatically make the necessary adjustments. If you're on a fixed pagefile and you have no more memory when an application needs it, it's highly probable that the program will crash (unless it's been coded VERY well).

The article may be dated at the end of 2004, but it hasn't changed because it's accurate. It should be practiced more.

Unfortunately, flame wars often erupt from the pagefile discussions as many do not know the difference between what is right and wrong.

The version of Windows Memory Management by biznatchio is correct. Let Windows manage your pagefile, it will be fine.