Bad idea to disable pagefile?

[ValuedCustomer]

My posts are shorter... yours just go on and on and on, quoting every five seconds. It's clear who needs to see a therapist.

verbosity is now grounds for needing/requiring therapy.. yes, it's "clear" as crystal who's in need - on that we can agree. :laugh:

 

[binkyvamp]

Edited: Nah, nevermind. Scratch that post. Grr why is there no delete button!?

Uh.... Bump? lol.

 

[lyssword]

I've used to have p/file disabled, but if you are a hardcore gamer likeme who plays 6+hrs at a time its better to leave pagefile on, specially if you are also multitasking. Because after ur ram memory ran out it will get really choppy and u will wonder why ur system sux so much

 

[binkyvamp]

Ok, this post is worth it, unlike my last one that i deleted.

I just discovered the circumstances under which Windows XP will swap your programs into the pagefile.

Open an Internet Explorer. Set Task Manager to "Always on top" and enable the "Mem Usage" column. The IE should be using around 20MB, at least on my system it does, what with a few toolbars and what not. Now, use a program like TaskInfo to watch the page file usage, and have Task Manager watching the IEXPLORE.EXE and out of the way of TaskInfo's "Swap in Use KB" so it's all nice and visible the moment you do the following:

Now minimise the Internet Explorer.

What happens?

Immediately the IEXPLORE.EXE drops to 2MB mem usage (down from 20MB), and "Swap in Use KB" climbs gradually at a rate of about 300-400KB/s until it hits about 6MB higher than where it started.

Voila. The tests varied with IE, it wasn't the same every time. Sometimes it went to 1.5MB Mem Usage and only 4MB of swap was used. Windows XP swaps minimised programs. I tried the exact same thing with Encarta Dictionary, WinAmp, MSN Messenger, Microsoft Word, and Paint Shop Pro. All exhibit the exact same behaviour when minimised. They drop their "Mem Usage" in Task Manager and "Swap in Use KB" in TaskInfo grows gradually with the disk light flashing. I need not bother trying it with other programs because i know exactly what will happen.

Some further stats:

MSN Messenger: 29MB -> 1.5MB, 13MB swap file growth.
Paint Shop Pro: 60MB -> 4.5MB, 37MB swap file growth.
etc, i'm not going to post them all. You get the idea.

It might pay to know that currently i have 2GB Physical RAM, 348MB in use, "1.36GB" of "System Cache" (in Task Manager's "Physical Memory (K)" section) so there's plenty of room for the disk cache to grow.

What a stupid policy. To swap minimised programs.

Finally solved it. Hurray for me! :beer: I'm turning off the pagefile altogether, unless somebody has a fix for the "swap on minimise" policy?

Regards.

 

[Nothinman]

I just discovered the circumstances under which Windows XP will swap your programs into the pagefile.

It's all still speculation if any pagefile activity did actually happen it's probably process private data that has no other backing store. There's no way to prove that iexplore.exe was the thing actually written to the pagefile with the tools MS provides. Shrinking a process' working set is the default operation (beside actually minimizing the window) for minimizing a window, it's been that way as long as I've known.

What a stupid policy. To swap minimised programs.

As I mentioned above it's the default, a process can 'opt out' if it really wants to.

I'm turning off the pagefile altogether, unless somebody has a fix for the "swap on minimise" policy?

Don't minimize things.

All you've proven is that the pagefile is necessary for certain things. Disabling it will just put more memory pressure on the system and leave less room for filesystem cache thus hurting performance more than anything.

 

[binkyvamp]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I just discovered the circumstances under which Windows XP will swap your programs into the pagefile.

It's all still speculation if any pagefile activity did actually happen it's probably process private data that has no other backing store. There's no way to prove that iexplore.exe was the thing actually written to the pagefile with the tools MS provides. Shrinking a process' working set is the default operation (beside actually minimizing the window) for minimizing a window, it's been that way as long as I've known.

You like the word "speculation" don't you. Mmmhmm, i'm sure it is speculation that i used MS and 3rd party tools to assess MS and 3rd party applications that all exhibited the same behaviour. Riiiiight, speculation..

What a stupid policy. To swap minimised programs.

As I mentioned above it's the default, a process can 'opt out' if it really wants to.

You just said it was speculation, not the default.

I'm turning off the pagefile altogether, unless somebody has a fix for the "swap on minimise" policy?

Don't minimize things.

All you've proven is that the pagefile is necessary for certain things. Disabling it will just put more memory pressure on the system and leave less room for filesystem cache thus hurting performance more than anything.

Sometimes it's nice to see the desktop (ie: minimise), or put things into the system notifcation area, you should try it sometime.

I've proven that the pagefile is used whenever an application is minimised, which you still claim is "speculation" while subtley admitting that it's true. Face the cold hard facts and proof buddy. You're just plain wrong. My system is running as smooth as a whistle now, not a single thing is swapped and everything is responsive upon alt-tabbing even when using massive amounts of RAM.

You overrate the filesystem cache. I'd rather everything alt-tab to, maximise, and run smoothly over reloading applications faster which is usually all it's good for. With 2GB there's always plenty of space for caching filesystem searches or game files for example. Unless of course you like hashing 1GB files or something over and over again, and want that to run fast, do you?

 

[bsobel]

I've proven that the pagefile is used whenever an application is minimised, which you still claim is "speculation" while subtley admitting that it's true. Face the cold hard facts and proof buddy. You're just plain wrong. My system is running as smooth as a whistle now, not a single thing is swapped and everything is responsive upon alt-tabbing even when using massive amounts of RAM.

Oh, your still swapping. The pagefile is not the only backing store, the code backed by executables themselves will get swapped out too.

 

[Markbnj]

Just leave it on and let Windows manage it's virtual memory. The engineers who designed it are smarter than both of us.

 

[Nothinman]

You like the word "speculation" don't you. Mmmhmm, i'm sure it is speculation that i used MS and 3rd party tools to assess MS and 3rd party applications that all exhibited the same behaviour. Riiiiight, speculation..

If you can think of a better way to describe you looking at some numbers and guessing about what's really happening in the background I'll be happy to use it. I have no doubt that some small amount of data will end up in the pagefile, but the affect it's going to have on your system is going to be miniscule compared to to the I/O done when paging in all of the binaries and their dependencies that you're running. Taskinfo just displays the same data that you can get from perfmon and I don't even know if the "% swap used" perfmon numbers mean "this is definitely in the pagefile" or "this much pagefile space has been reserved just in case".

You just said it was speculation, not the default.

No, I said your conclusions were based upon speculation. The fact that processes get their working set trimmed on minimize by default is a fact.

Sometimes it's nice to see the desktop (ie: minimise), or put things into the system notifcation area, you should try it sometime.

I used to do that when I ran Windows, now I have 8 or more desktops and never minimize anything because they're all on their own desktop. Actually I don't even have a taskbar or notification area.

You overrate the filesystem cache. I'd rather everything alt-tab to, maximise, and run smoothly over reloading applications faster which is usually all it's good for.

It's good for a lot more than that, I wish there was a way to disable it so that you could see how much it really does affect overall performance. Hell, why do you think your windows can be alt-tab'd to quickly? Partially because the binaries are in the filesystm cache.

With 2GB there's always plenty of space for caching filesystem searches or game files for example. Unless of course you like hashing 1GB files or something over and over again, and want that to run fast, do you?

No, I don't hash files over and over again for no reason. But I do like it when things run faster the second time around or even the first time if something else happened to pull some of the files I'm working on into the filesystem cache.