page file for a gig of ram?

[EmoshBZ]

Windows 2000 pro

1 gig infineon ram

1 80 gig WD HDD



So what should I set my page file to? 1500 mb?


yes?

no?

other?

 

[Crusty]

I would set the size at 1gb.

 

[jgobert]

Any time I've investigated manually setting pagefile sizes, the general rule has been to set your min and max sizes both to 1.5 times your physical ram. Since you have 1GB, I'd go with the 1500MB. Try it out and see how you perform... adjust as you need until you find the right mix for your needs.

JG

 

[Agamar]

I go against the norm on this one. Since I know my max memory usage for ANY programs I have ever run has never peaked past 450M, I set my page file to 384 (fixed on D: drive) with a small 64M page file on the C: drive. I have 512M of ram.

Remember, if you know you will never need the virtual memory, you don't have to follow the rules.

 

[John]

Set a fixed 512-512

 

[John]

Originally posted by: jgobert
Any time I've investigated manually setting pagefile sizes, the general rule has been to set your min and max sizes both to 1.5 times your physical ram. Since you have 1GB, I'd go with the 1500MB. Try it out and see how you perform... adjust as you need until you find the right mix for your needs.

JG

That's the old school way of setting your pagefile when memory was very expensive and most people had <256MB.

 

[gsellis]

Use the recommended setting of 1.5x mem as start and 3.0x mem as max. If you set the pagefile to the same size as memory or smaller, expect issues with Hibernate and Standby if you use them. Do not set it to 0. Also, leave a portion of the pagefile on the OS drive.

 

[chocoruacal]

Do a search...this has been discussed ad nauseum . In short, leave the pagefile alone, let Windows manage it. Many programs need a pagefile and you won't gain 1/10th of a percent in anything by changing it around.

 

[RussianSensation]

The general rule of thumb is 1.5 x the amount of ram you have.

See right at the bottom of the page

 

[maluckey]

Extreme system Forums had a couple of threads about this a while back, and after countless benches, registry tweaks, and cache managing software, it all came back to leave it alone, and let XP manage it as it sees fit. In NTFS, there wasn't a single method to speed it up that was statistically significant (consistently over 1 percent) faster in normal usage.

I tried most all of he settings in that thread, and have to agree tha the ONLY setting that helped was to set up the drive for "file server optimized", via the memory manager tab. Even then, the performance gain was very small, and showed no real world gain except while transferring lots of files from drive to drive and trying to use the computer at the same time for something else. HD tach, Sandra, and timed data transfer between HDD's was used to test on my setup for comparison.

 

[vailr]

There should be less HD file fragmentation when the page file is set to a certain min. and max of the same size.
I use a min. and max. size of 640 K, located on a second physical HD (1 GB ram). Once set, then use a defrag utility such as Raxco Perfect Disk, which can defrag the page file.

 

[Atlantean]

I use 128-256mbs for my pagefile size with 1gb of ram.

 

[Alptraum]

Originally posted by: maluckey
Extreme system Forums had a couple of threads about this a while back, and after countless benches, registry tweaks, and cache managing software, it all came back to leave it alone, and let XP manage it as it sees fit. In NTFS, there wasn't a single method to speed it up that was statistically significant (consistently over 1 percent) faster in normal usage.

I tried most all of he settings in that thread, and have to agree tha the ONLY setting that helped was to set up the drive for "file server optimized", via the memory manager tab. Even then, the performance gain was very small, and showed no real world gain except while transferring lots of files from drive to drive and trying to use the computer at the same time for something else. HD tach, Sandra, and timed data transfer between HDD's was used to test on my setup for comparison.

This is pretty much what I have found as well. I have a gig of RAM and just let Windows (XP pro in this case) handle the RAM. I always recommend just leaving it that way. The odds you will see any benefit from altering it yourself are very small. And you may hamper performance. I have run into software before that wants a certain amount of page file space no matter how much free RAM you have.

 

[EmoshBZ]

Thanks for the replies......


Remember that this is a WINDOWS 2000 pro OS and NOT winxp. I assume windows 2000 pro will handle it for me just like winxp?

But if I set it to 1500 mb it still won't hamper performance in any way I assume. It might not change anything performance wise but it won't hurt it either I am sure.

 

[Alptraum]

Originally posted by: EmoshBZ
Thanks for the replies......


Remember that this is a WINDOWS 2000 pro OS and NOT winxp. I assume windows 2000 pro will handle it for me just like winxp?

But if I set it to 1500 mb it still won't hamper performance in any way I assume. It might not change anything performance wise but it won't hurt it either I am sure.

While I run XP Pro at home most of my experience with this is actually on 2k screweing around with test machines at work (both pro and Advanced server). Its been awhile and I can't remember the programs any more (I know they were network apps, probably management ones though who knows, I ran a lot of visual studio as well) but I ran into problems on some programs when messing around with the page file.

As I mentioned earlier, some just want to use it in certain ways no matter how much RAM you have or what you have the pagefile set too. Thats why I just leave it alone. While its a pretty safe bet setting it to 1.5 won't hurt anything (my probs were only with a few programs that are not terribely common) why bother? There has never been any substantial evidence that it will help you either. Why not just leave Windows in charge? Thats what I would do.

Though if you get bored you can play around with it and test various configs. Thats what I was doing when I was playing with it. Manually setting it didn't give me any benefit and actually caused me a few problems.