Vista, RAM and Processor Hogger

[kartel]

You need a set 3000mb swapfile on vista.

[dAbReAkA]

[deXter], great! totally correct..

[[deXter]]

You need a set 3000mb swapfile on vista.

That's not entirely accurate. On PCs having 1GB RAM installed, vista sets the max pf size around 3GB. You don't *need* to set it to 3Gb. Vista's memory management logic has changed. For pagefiles, when set to system managed, vista changes it between a min of installed_RAM+300MB to a max of installed_RAM*3. So for a 1gig system, you'd find the pagefile varying between 1.3 <-> 3 gigs. (the pagefile would never exceed 4 GB for a 32 bit system, and 16TB for 64 bit)

Take a look at this article on why vista uses so much RAM and why its good for you.

Also, let me remind you that you cannot use the same pagefile/memory thumb-of-rule logics that you used with 98/xp for vista! For example, while earlier it was always recommended to set the min and max size of the pagefile to a constant size, its no longer recommended to do it. Also, the myth of a constant pagefile size multiplier with the physical ram has been debunked (many people used to follow the convention of pagefile size = 1.3*physical memory). These so called "tweaks" no longer hold good today, even for an XP system.

There's no exact way to calculate your pagefile size, because of the variable nature of SuperFetch, the search indices, etc (they're all virtual memory objects). Therefore, let Vista manage the pagefile size and don't mess around with the setting unless you have a through knowledge of the internal workings of vista, your system and your usage patterns!

[fizban2]

every one needs to go take a read to jan, and Feb's technet magazine

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/default.aspx

has a 3prt EXCELLENT article written by Mark Russionovich on vista internals,

on dexters last note about allowing vista to control the Page file size this is very important now as vista will also Dynamically assign the the Kernel address space, if you have statically set your page file, vista cannot optimally adjust it to work with the changes it is making when it changes the space that has been set aside for the kernel address space

"Vista also introduces the concept of low-priority I/O, which enables background processes to run with lower-priority access to the hard disk drive than other programs. That means better performance while running multiple apps. If you've tried the latest Diskeeper and found that it doesn't decrease the system performance at all- well thats how apps in vista run, the OS has a built in IO-Smart / InvisiTasking kinda feature"

This is the Standby list, it was part of Xp but was not priority based it is now broken into 8 priorities 0 - 7 that can be applied to memory