disableing VM *nevermind*

[SilthDraeth]

For the last few months I have been running Vista x64 on my laptop with no problems at all. All my drivers work etc. But I only had 2 Gigs of RAM. I just upgraded to 4GB.

I would like to, if it will increase system performance, disable virtual memory and remove the swap file.

Should I be ok doing that? Most I usually run at one time on the laptop is WOW, Ventrilo, and firefox with several tabs open. Plus my security software, ie Kaspersky Internet Security.

And where do I locate the swap file to remove it, and free up the disk space it was eating?

I will be checking this when I get home, since I am posting from work.

Thanks.

 

[lxskllr]

You won't increase performance, and you'll likely reduce the stability of your system. The best tweak you can make to your pagefile is to leave it alone.

 

[Jiggz]

I seond that! Just leave it alone.

 

[Nothinman]

I would like to, if it will increase system performance, disable virtual memory and remove the swap file.

Get a copy of Inside Windows or Understanding the Linux Kernel and read the chapters on memory management, then you'll understand why what you want to do is an extremely bad idea and even impossible with the wording you've used.

 

[thegorx]

I guess if you want to reduce it's initial size to save a very little space relative to drives these days that wouldn't hurt.

 

[Continuity28]

As the others are saying, don't remove the pagefile! Regardless of how much memory you have, Windows will expect and work better with a pagefile.

The only tweak I can recommend, and only if you know what you are doing, is to keep the pagefile on a separate fast drive from where Windows runs from. Even that is negligible.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Well I just "almost disabled" my paging by setting the minimum and MAXIMUM page
file size to something semi-small like 256 MBy.

I have 8GBy of RAM and the default was to make the page file around 8.5GBy AND
the hibernate file around 8GB, so that was 16GB of dedicated "semi wasted" disk space
where 8GB of it was just for VM paging, and that left unexpectedly little room free on (C🙂.

Now I understand a fair bit about VM and disk cache and swapping and so on, but
I really don't see much practical or theoretical benefit of having 8GB of page file
when you have 8GBy of RAM.

I plan to NEVER fill up my RAM with application data under a Windows OS (different
story under UNIX); just sitting idle the OS takes around 2GB memory and
with a couple big applications loaded it'll stay under 5-6 GB.

So if it was going to "use" the rest of my physical RAM it'd be basically for disk
cache and prefetch and stuff. So what'd be the benefit of letting it generate
nearly 8GB of cache / prefetch in memory, and then 8GBY *more* paged out to
disk, not a dedicated super fast disk, not a flash/SSD/readyboost disk,
just the same disc it's ALREADY cacheing,
so given reasonable defragmentation there's ZERO speed benefit of reading
paged out disk cache / prefetch data from the disk vs just reading the
data / program code from the OTHER PLACES ON THE SAME DISC.

Sure if I had less than about 3-4GB of physical RAM I'd probably let it have a
2-4 GB max. size page file just for the rare times it would dip into it out of necessity
due to physical ram exhaustion (other than for irrelevant things like disk cache and
prefetched exe images etc.). But otherwise? Why bother?

Anyway the "right" way to disable paging is to set the MAX size of the page file to
something small on each of your drives or just tick the button to disable it all together.
It's buried somewhere in the control panel sub-menus, advanced system
environment settinfgs, along with data execution protection, etc.
Technically that doesn't disable virtual memory -- you WANT/NEED virtual memory,
just not necessarily much/any DISK PAGED virtual memory; YMMV.

 

[Nothinman]

I plan to NEVER fill up my RAM with application data under a Windows OS

Then you've wasted your money.

So what'd be the benefit of letting it generate nearly 8GB of cache / prefetch in memory, and then 8GBY *more* paged out to disk, not a dedicated super fast disk,

Ignoring the fact that it won't do that, the benefit would be that you'd have faster access to the most recently used data. Even Windows won't evict something from memory unless it has something better/more recent to stick there.

 

[SilthDraeth]

Nothinman thanks for the book references. I will most likely be reading them in the next few years as I work through college etc.

 

[martensite]

If you have 8GB RAM, then will the OS even bother to page anything to the disk at all? Does windows have a habit of paging stuff to disk just to keep some (a large amount, in this case) of RAM free at all times?

Nothinman, thanks for the references :thumbsup:; I'll hunt them down in the library tomorrow. Although my field of study is far from anything to do with computers (except for a little bit of dabbling in HDD media), it's always great to read good/useful references.

 

[Nothinman]

If you have 8GB RAM, then will the OS even bother to page anything to the disk at all?

Possibly, it depends on your workload. But chances are that even if it does it'll just be a proactive, "just in case" action and the data will stay in memory until pressure gets high enough to justify evicting it.