2 questions - slack space and filepaging partitions

[LegionX]

hi 🙂
i have 2 questions that i would like to ask and instead of filling up 2 threads i will put them together:

1. PageFile or basically virtual memory on XP Pro... i read on Black Viper site that if you only have 1 drive it is better to have the pagefile on a seperate partition for better speed. is this true? currently i have it on main partition as a set value of 1500 or close to it - i have a gig of memory.

2. on disk keeper it shows alot of system reserve space - as much as what i have on the drive.. is this ok or is this slack and if so how do i remove it and free up the resources?

thanks

 

[bsobel]

1. PageFile or basically virtual memory on XP Pro... i read on Black Viper site that if you only have 1 drive it is better to have the pagefile on a seperate partition for better speed. is this true? currently i have it on main partition as a set value of 1500 or close to it - i have a gig of memory.

No, you will generally wind up with worse performance if you do this do to the increased seek times you get as a result.

2. on disk keeper it shows alot of system reserve space - as much as what i have on the drive.. is this ok or is this slack and if so how do i remove it and free up the resources?

Thats probably the MFT reserved space (which holds directory entries and parts of your files). It's not something you can free up.

Cheers,
BIll

 

[LegionX]

would the mft reserve space be 5-6 gigs? and if so what happens if i fill up my 80 gig drive to where i have 3 gigs left?

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: LegionX
would the mft reserve space be 5-6 gigs? and if so what happens if i fill up my 80 gig drive to where i have 3 gigs left?

By default the MFT reservation is 12.5% (as I recall), so yes that size is reasonable. As for the running out of space issue, bear in mind that NTFS stores as much of the first extent (which could be the entire file in the case of small files) in the MFT itself. So that space while 'reserved' will be used to store files. It's more of a problem if all you store are many very large files (for example a bunch of multi-gig divx files). In 'normal' usage (where normal is say a reasonable mix of small and large files), the reservation works out to be reasonable (you can tweak it so MORE is reserved, just not less)

Bill

 

[Nothinman]

1. PageFile or basically virtual memory on XP Pro... i read on Black Viper site that if you only have 1 drive it is better to have the pagefile on a seperate partition for better speed. is this true?

No, as Bill said all you'll end up doing is causing more disk seeks which causes more latency and slows performance. Leave it on the system drive, with that much memory it won't be a big factor anyway.

 

[LegionX]

ok thanks 😉
wonder why black viper suggests otherwise..
i will keep it as is, with having 1 gig mem does setting my page file at 1.5 still seem to be the right number? and is it better than letting xp handle it?

i play mostly shadowbane which is a memory monster. and plan on playing alot of similar games in future though am trying to upgrade to a raptor then 2 of them for raid.

i know hardware alot more than i do software 🙁

 

[Nothinman]

wonder why black viper suggests otherwise..

Lots of people think they know more about OS design and VM tuning than Microsoft, but most of them are fooling themselves and any improvement they see is either placebo or caused by something else they did at the same time.

i will keep it as is, with having 1 gig mem does setting my page file at 1.5 still seem to be the right number? and is it better than letting xp handle it?

Letting the OS manage it is better overall. Setting it to a fixed size gains you nothing and limiting the growth will hurt if you ever need the pagefile space.