I now have a gig of RAM installed in XP. do i turn off virtual memory?

[valic]

Or just let windows manage the memory still... ?

 

[RPB]

i've been running without a swapfile for the last year with no problems and with just 512 mb of ram.

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: RPB
i've been running without a swapfile for the last year with no problems and with just 512 mb of ram.

no you havent, there are about a dozen threads about this. even if you turn it off windows still creates one because it needs the swapfile to function correctly.

I would recommend setting it small (say 64megs on your fastest drive) and using the reg tweak to make windows keep more of the system paging in RAM.

-Spy

 

[spyordie007]

read this

 

[Bovinicus]

You have to use a little bit of virtual memory. I have 512MB, and I tried to set the size to something really small (16 or 32MB) and I got error messages indicating I was running out of memory. Keep it small, but sizeable. I keep my pagefile at 256MB, just because I don't really care about the space THAT much I want to risk having problems. 128MB should be enough.

 

[Nothinman]

The constant misuse of terminology kills me, although it's MS' fault for their constant mislabling of things in the GUI.

Virtual Memory is not the same as swap space. There is no way to disable VM in a modern OS, although some (most notably not Windows though) can run fine without swap space. I know I can 'swapoff -a' to disable all of my swap space on Linux and things will run just fine as long as I keep my working set within the confines of my amount of physical memory. But generally it's not worth it, I like having the safetey net of swap space because I run things like VMWare that eat memory like candy.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: valic
Or just let windows manage the memory still... ?

Just let windows manage it (unless you have disk space issues). I have 2 gigs on my primary machine, I still let windows manage it. Windows won't USE the swap file until it needs to, so you'll still be running from ram without swapping in most cases.
Bill

 

[JOSEPHLB]

I wouldn't recommend Windows managing it..

From what i've read, and experience.. applying a fixed size is most optimal
128 MB - 256 MB should be sufficient

I have 512MB , so I have a fixed swap file space of 256 MB

 

[Derango]

Sigh...Here we go again.

Windows XP/2k/NT has a memory manager that WORKS. Unlike 9x/ME. Its smart enough to do whats best without your intervention. In fact, forcing it to conform to your settings may be hurting its performance, since it can't do what its programmed to do.

 

[stebesplace]

I have heard that you want to take the amount of ram you have divided by 2, then add that result to the total ram you have = page size. . .so. . .

I have 768 megs

768/2 = 384
384+768 = 1152

1152 is the size of my page file.

I heard this calculation a long time ago, i would think it still holds true.




I also would vouche for letting windows, especially newer systems, to manage page files.


-Steve

 

[Booter]

I have a 1 gig ram box running without a pagefile.sys.

Works just fine. You can read more about it here

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Booter
I have a 1 gig ram box running without a pagefile.sys.
Works just fine. You can read more about it here

It works 'fine' in most cases (not that the OS was using the pagefile when you had it anyway). But, again, some applications who require page backed memory mapped files will fail if you have no page file.

Bill

 

[Woodchuck2000]

Just let windows manage it! What do you hope to gain by tweaking the settings?

 

[stebesplace]

Here is another question. What about storage drives. For example, I have let windows manage my page file for the c:\ drive which obviously is the primary drive. Where as my drive G is a partition from the C:\ drive, which i have set to not have a page file, and drive D which is a seperate hard disk, has no page file. Now, I do have applications installed and running off of drive G. Should drive G require a page file? I mean will it improve my performance at all with those installed applications? Drive D is solely for storage.

Thanks,

-Steve

 

[skriefal]

You can place page files on multiple drives if you wish, but it is not required. The main reason to do this would be to improve performance by placing pagefiles on separate physical disks. This would then allow the O/S to access an application's files from (as an example) drive C:\ while at the same time reading from a pagefile on drive E:\, as long as those two partitions reside on separate physical disk drives.

 

[NokiaDude]

I have a 40gb WD hdd and a 2gb WD hdd on the same IDE channel. Will I get a performance increase by placing my page file on the 2 gb hdd that does not have anything on it?

 

[HalfCrazy]

Originally posted by: NokiaDude
I have a 40gb WD hdd and a 2gb WD hdd on the same IDE channel. Will I get a performance increase by placing my page file on the 2 gb hdd that does not have anything on it?

I don't think you would see any real proformance increase by doing it. Since the 2gig is only a 5400rpm and ata33 if I recall that right.