How much swap space does Windows really use?

[Kaido]

How much swap space does XP really use? How important is it to system performance? Would buying a Gigabyte i-ram PCI card and sticking a couple gigs of ram and setting the swap space to that improve performance noticably?

 

[wasserkool]

no

 

[CreativeTom]

Originally posted by: Kaido
How much swap space does XP really use? How important is it to system performance? Would buying a Gigabyte i-ram PCI card and sticking a couple gigs of ram and setting the swap space to that improve performance noticably?

WRONG FORUM

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: CreativeTom

Originally posted by: Kaido
How much swap space does XP really use? How important is it to system performance? Would buying a Gigabyte i-ram PCI card and sticking a couple gigs of ram and setting the swap space to that improve performance noticably?

WRONG FORUM

No, because it's a hardware question. Would adding the Gigabyte i-ram PCI card improve Windows performance? The stuff about swap space in XP was leading to the question.

 

[CreativeTom]

Originally posted by: Kaido

Originally posted by: CreativeTom

Originally posted by: Kaido
How much swap space does XP really use? How important is it to system performance? Would buying a Gigabyte i-ram PCI card and sticking a couple gigs of ram and setting the swap space to that improve performance noticably?

WRONG FORUM

No, because it's a hardware question. Would adding the Gigabyte i-ram PCI card improve Windows performance? The stuff about swap space in XP was leading to the question.

Well I guess, but it seems to be a fine line. I wouldn't waste your time though on that, not going to be worth your while at all.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: CreativeTom

Originally posted by: Kaido

Originally posted by: CreativeTom

Originally posted by: Kaido
How much swap space does XP really use? How important is it to system performance? Would buying a Gigabyte i-ram PCI card and sticking a couple gigs of ram and setting the swap space to that improve performance noticably?

WRONG FORUM

No, because it's a hardware question. Would adding the Gigabyte i-ram PCI card improve Windows performance? The stuff about swap space in XP was leading to the question.

Well I guess, but it seems to be a fine line. I wouldn't waste your time though on that, not going to be worth your while at all.

Yeah, I figured, but since I had read that AT review of the Gigabyte card I thought I'd ask. It seems like you can't do much better than a nice 10k SATA hdd, fast CPU, and gig of ram.

 

[Stan]

Why don't you check and see how much swap its using? If you never go over 1 gig of used ram, disable your swap.

 

[Matthias99]

As has been covered eight billion times before, completely disabling your swapfile is a bad idea. Some programs will not be happy if they can't access it at all, and if you try to do *anything* that exceeds your installed amount of RAM by even a tiny amount, it will fail (probably in a rather spectacular fashion).

Unless you have very good reasons to do so (and "Uh, I heard it's faster if you do X to your swapfile" is NOT a good reason), leave your swapfile at the default settings in WinXP/Win2K. If you are hitting the swapfile all the time, buy more RAM.

 

[Jeff7]

The review I read of the i-RAM, which may have been at Anandtech, said that you'd be better off just buying more RAM for your motherboard, rather than the added expense of the i-RAM card. It's better that way, as Windows doesn't need to address the system memory AND the SATA interface. Plus you don't have to pay for the i-RAM card either.

It seems that the i-RAM is a commodity item for a very limited market segment. It doesn't support enough capacity to be really useful, and if it did, it would still be very expensive, both for the card and for the RAM. Ok, it has 4 slots for memory. Populate that with 1GB sticks, and you have a really expensive (but fast) 4GB drive. If it had 8 slots, you could maybe find 2GB sticks, and get a more useful 16GB drive. But DAMN that would be expensive.


Moral of the story - if you're considering more RAM, first make sure that you need it. Open up Task Manager, go to the Performance tab, and check your availably Physical Memory. Then check your Commit Charge. Limit is your physical memory + pagefile. Total is what's being used right now, and Peak is of course the peak since you've turned on the computer. If the peak is near the limit (or above the amount of RAM you've got installed) then you're hitting the pagefile.
Right now, this is what my memory usage looks like. Top 4 memory users right now are:
- Videostudio, rendering a video. 144MB RAM, 230MB pagefile
- Folding@Home. 63MB RAM, 123MB pagefile
- Firefox. 44.5MB RAM, 86MB pagefile
- Explorer. 22MB RAM, 31MB pagefile

I'm not entirely sure now why there's so much availble RAM when programs seem to need it. I'm not getting massive slowdowns though, so the programs must be using the virtual memory space rarely.

 

[w00t]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
The review I read of the i-RAM, which may have been at Anandtech, said that you'd be better off just buying more RAM for your motherboard, rather than the added expense of the i-RAM card. It's better that way, as Windows doesn't need to address the system memory AND the SATA interface. Plus you don't have to pay for the i-RAM card either.

It seems that the i-RAM is a commodity item for a very limited market segment. It doesn't support enough capacity to be really useful, and if it did, it would still be very expensive, both for the card and for the RAM. Ok, it has 4 slots for memory. Populate that with 1GB sticks, and you have a really expensive (but fast) 4GB drive. If it had 8 slots, you could maybe find 2GB sticks, and get a more useful 16GB drive. But DAMN that would be expensive.


Moral of the story - if you're considering more RAM, first make sure that you need it. Open up Task Manager, go to the Performance tab, and check your availably Physical Memory. Then check your Commit Charge. Limit is your physical memory + pagefile. Total is what's being used right now, and Peak is of course the peak since you've turned on the computer. If the peak is near the limit (or above the amount of RAM you've got installed) then you're hitting the pagefile.
Right now, this is what my memory usage looks like. Top 4 memory users right now are:
- Videostudio, rendering a video. 144MB RAM, 230MB pagefile
- Folding@Home. 63MB RAM, 123MB pagefile
- Firefox. 44.5MB RAM, 86MB pagefile
- Explorer. 22MB RAM, 31MB pagefile

I'm not entirely sure now why there's so much availble RAM when programs seem to need it. I'm not getting massive slowdowns though, so the programs must be using the virtual memory space rarely.

my taskmanger is diff.

 

[n0cmonkey]

If you're swapping frequently, ignore the iram and use the ram for your main system. If you swap, you need more ram.

 

[piasabird]

Cant even install windows without 1 gig of SPACE on a hard drive. The I-Drive thing is something that is really new and windows may not be able to take full advantage of it. On most motherboards you still can not even boot from a USB Device. Windows is slow to include hardware support on devices that are new and have no track record. This is an entire new class of hardware.

 

[redhatlinux]

Just how much work do you perform on your PC ?? And how much of that work is memory intensive ??. AND, do you manage your muli-user/multi-programming/multi-tasking environment with pre-emptive swapping?? Just how long is a piece of string anyway ??

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: redhatlinux
Just how much work do you perform on your PC ?? And how much of that work is memory intensive ??. AND, do you manage your muli-user/multi-programming/multi-tasking environment with pre-emptive swapping?? Just how long is a piece of string anyway ??

haha :thumbsup: it's definately not an item I *need*. I use a piece of software from Cenatek called RAMDisk currently. I have 2gb of ram in my laptop and sometimes chop off 512mb or a gig for special projects. Apps load SO fast when you install them to the ram drive and files load incredibly quickly. I think I'd rather save up for a faster hard drive for my laptop anyway...a hitachi 7200rpm drive sounds a lot better than my 4200rpm 😛

 

[sandorski]

The i-ram is practically useless for anything, though some are saying it works very well for software that uses Scratchdisks(I believe that's the term). Like others said, to avoid diskswapping, buy more ram for your motherboard.