Paging File

[Aegis]

Running without a page file is fine. I've done it for a while now, and haven't noticed any side effects. If there's a program that doesn't work well without a page file, then either it's taking more than 2GB of RAM (most desktop apps shouldn't) or it was poorly programmed.

[Delprat]

just to say :

(...) inner tracks of a hard drive, which is the fastest area (...)

HDs rotates with constant angular speed and heads are parked outside the plates, thus outer tracks are the fastest area (anyway your idea is true 'coz first partition is on the outer).

For pagefile (and mostly anything except ex. videos), transfer speeds are not as important as access times. Then, pagefile shouldn't be on the outest track, but somewhere between the first third and the second third of the tracks. (obviously, this is invalid if pagefile is not on systemdrive)

And a fragmented pagefile, spread across this area, can sometimes acheive better performance than a contiguous one (again, it depends on what you load : for video editing, this is false).

This is exactly what is done by default on NTFS : the MFT is not at the beginning of the partition (outest track) ; and if enabled the "boot optimize function" (prefetcher) tries to place files "somewhere in the middle". Sadly, pagefile is not placed according to these rules...

++

Edited June 24, 2006 by Delprat

[JoeMSFN]

Just to throw another wrench into this thread.

I had a message:

Director Player - This program requires at least 3MB of free virtual memory to run.

A Google search produced a few interesting pages, basically there was a bug in older Director software that if you had more than 1gig of ram, you had to hard set the page file size to about 500MB.

So just consider that in all of your need more or less wizdom. (I just learned about this issue a little under 2 weeks ago.)

Now for my question/thoughts. I can understand why having the page file on a different partition than the OS on the same hard drive might degrade performance.

I haven't seen any reference on this thread to the paging file on a separate hard drive. Maybe a data only hard drive. I'm guessing slave on the OS hard drive chain would be OK, but perhaps a separate IDE port would be better ?

Edited June 24, 2006 by JoeMSFN

[Andromeda43]

A wise old Owl once wrote....

my response to you and everyone else is to leave it alone, (System managed size).

The OS programmers at M$ aren't complete idiots. When they came up with the idea of a file on the HD to supplement ram, (virtual memory) they put it in the most convenient place for the DOS (disk operating system) to find it.

Lo and Behold, they put it in the root directory of the boot drive, usually "C:".

Whether you have partitions or not, has nothing to do with system performance. It's just kind of nice to have a place out of the way to keep your "STUFF".

Your best bet is to just leave your Pagefile alone. Windows handles it nicely, thank you.

You can stuff your PC with all the ram it can hold and windows will still use the Pagefile for certain functions.

One of the biggest things you can do to improve performance is to get the Kernal up off the HD and into your ram where your OS can access it quickly. That's seldom done and can greatly improve perfromance.

Here's the Registry Tweak to do it:

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

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.

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

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

Andromeda43 B)

[Zxian]

Man... why does this question keep coming up?

Just do a search for "pagefile" in the XP forums and you'll find a LOT of topics with this already. I've already written about the whole "pagefile-on-separate-partition" here. Read it well. If you don't get what it says, read it again slowly...

System Managed will do you just fine. If you do want to make your pagefile size max=min, then make it a size that is at least the size of your RAM+50MB (can't remember if that's the exact number). That extra space is required for WIndows to do a memory dump. If you're ever unsure about the size of your pagefile, then you probably shouldn't be playing with it.

Also - the whole "you don't need a pagefile if you've got over XX GB of RAM" argument is just wrong. 32-bit Windows can address 4GB of RAM. If you've got that much or more, then you're probably running a server or a very serious CAD/graphics workstation.

[Tarun]

After 1024MB (1GB) of RAM though, you don't need a paging file anymore, at all, ever, period, (unless you're doing some professional work with high resolution images or movie editing or something) and you can safely ignore all warnings about the paging file (like Photoshop, etc).

Set both options (minimum size and maximum size) to the same value for added performance -- with a static setting, Windows won't ever have to resize the paging file, it'll be the same size all the time. Also, try to stay within powers of two. For 512MB of RAM, 1024MB is great! If you want to do 1.5x rule as described above, then that'd be 768MB. I recommend 1024MB though.

[Yzöwl]

Tarun, this is the Windows XP Forum!

and I will say nothing else on the subject.

[bledd]

why will it degrade performance if its on a parition?

becuase it has to write from one side of the hd, then quickly to another side..

having multiple pagefiles on multiple drives increases performance

not a good idea to put it on different partitions if you're not running raid5/10

[Tarun]

Tarun, this is the Windows XP Forum!

…and I will say nothing else on the subject.

Indeed it is. This thread is discussing pagefile settings for Windows XP.

[Zxian]

After 1024MB (1GB) of RAM though, you don't need a paging file anymore, at all, ever, period, (unless you're doing some professional work with high resolution images or movie editing or something) and you can safely ignore all warnings about the paging file (like Photoshop, etc).

No no and no. This is just wrong. Windows NEEDS a pagefile. Everything that you do in Windows requires the presence of a pagefile. Even when you've set things to "No pagefile", there still is temporary disk space reserved for Windows to page unused portions of memory to disk.

[LLXX]

After 1024MB (1GB) of RAM though, you don't need a paging file anymore, at all, ever, period, (unless you're doing some professional work with high resolution images or movie editing or something) and you can safely ignore all warnings about the paging file (like Photoshop, etc).

No no and no. This is just wrong. Windows NEEDS a pagefile. Everything that you do in Windows requires the presence of a pagefile. Even when you've set things to "No pagefile", there still is temporary disk space reserved for Windows to page unused portions of memory to disk.

Set it to no pagefile, pull out one of your sticks of RAM, and run a program that allocates a lot of RAM. You'll get out of memory, Windows will refuse to just create a pagefile if you've disabled it.

[Zxian]

Set it to no pagefile, pull out one of your sticks of RAM, and run a program that allocates a lot of RAM. You'll get out of memory, Windows will refuse to just create a pagefile if you've disabled it.

Take your computer set it to no pagefile. Install just 128 or 256MB of RAM and startup. Use performance counters or Task Manager to see how much RAM is being used (Total - Available). Install more RAM and repeat. The amount of used RAM increases as you have more, and yet the rest of the system stays the same. That "missing" memory is on your hard drive.

[Takeshi]

Zxian: Page File setting is one of the most encountered FAQs everywhere. I think a sticky from one of these threads would be very useful. Or perhaps you and the other knowledgeable members could make a definitive tutorial on the subject. Time to put an end to all the perpetual misconceptions!

[Aegis]

Zxian I believe you're mistaken. I've done some (a lot) of XP Embedded work, and there have been scenarios where a client would use PXE RAM boot to download an XP image off a remote server and run everything in RAM, without a physical hard drive available. You can't really argue that XPE is different since it's based off of the same code as XP, so if a page-file free XPE system can run Word, Excel, Acrobat Reader, IE, Photoshop, etc. just fine, why can't XP?

And I tried the experiment you suggested about cutting down the RAM. I cut it down to 256MB from 2GB, but the RAM usage didn't go down significantly enough to be attributed to something beyond the margin of error. What you were really observing was the way Windows manages system resources. With less RAM, Windows would spend less on caching, buffering, etc.

Edited June 27, 2006 by Aegis

[ripken204]

beleive me too, i tried his xpge and there was no page file. photoshop worked just fine.