Can I stop Windows from Page Filing?

[Kibbo]

Allright,

I recently upgraded to a Gig of Ram, but Windows is still using the page file. I haven't done anything resource intensive since I booted up, I'm running less than 5MB worth of processes, and I'm still paging stuff.

My hard drive still starts running when I close programs, slowing stuff down. Is there anything I can do to make it so that Win XP SP2 is dissuaded from using the page file so much?

 

[cquark]

Originally posted by: Kibbo
Allright,

I recently upgraded to a Gig of Ram, but Windows is still using the page file. I haven't done anything resource intensive since I booted up, I'm running less than 5MB worth of processes, and I'm still paging stuff.

My hard drive still starts running when I close programs, slowing stuff down. Is there anything I can do to make it so that Win XP SP2 is dissuaded from using the page file so much?

I don't know if you can tune the kernel's swappiness like you can on Linux, but the simplest solution would be to eliminate the page file, as long as you're sure you won't need more than 1GB. Defragmenting the page file may help performance, without altering kernel behavior.

 

[Kibbo]

I think I read somewhere that XP always needs a PF, that you have to leave it. I think I'm wanting something more along the lines of the "swappiness" thing. I don't know much about linux, most of my experiments with that have failed due to a buggy network card driver.

 

[tiap]

Go to control panel>system>advanced>performance settings>advanced>virtualmemory>change>no page file>OK
Exit then reboot
Do again to check that settings took.
On my system with 1 gig it really doesn't matter much with or without. Your better off to limit your startup and background processes.
Some progs like photoshop demand a pagefile.

 

[Kibbo]

Cool, thanks. I'd never noticed that button before.

One question, how will I know if my system runs out of RAM? Will it start up a page file, or will it lock up?

 

[tiap]

Lock up
If the box starts acting strange try a very small swap file.

 

[Kibbo]

Thanks, gonna try a 5 MB file, see if windows makes it grow. It does that, right? It'll push up the max if it needs to?

 

[Nothinman]

Don't mess with the pagefile settings, chances are you'll only make things worse. Windows is using your memory, you can't trust the Virtual Memory and PF Usage counters in task manager because they include more than real pagefile usage and Virtual Memory doesn't mean pagefile usage.

 

[Kibbo]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Don't mess with the pagefile settings, chances are you'll only make things worse. Windows is using your memory, you can't trust the Virtual Memory and PF Usage counters in task manager because they include more than real pagefile usage and Virtual Memory doesn't mean pagefile usage.

What does it mean, then? Any n00b links you could show me? Google ends up being either way too basic for this question, or over my head.

 

[Nothinman]

It's hard to explain unless you understand how Virtual Memory works and MS makes a helluva lot more confusing with their constant misuse of the term Virtual Memory in the Windows UI.

Basically it breaks down to: Windows is already using all of your memory, what is displayed in the PF Usage and virtual memory sections of task manager are not all real pagefile usage. The counters include basic virtual memory (which is not the pagefile) and pagefile reservations which havn't been commmited to disk yet.