Page file with 2GB of RAM

[PeteRoy]

I have this arguement with someone whether a page file should be disabled when you have over 2GB of RAM.

He keeps telling me how it improves performance for games but I made some tests and I see no difference, I actually think having a page file is better even when you have endless RAM.

Is page file turned off better for games?

 

[Markbnj]

What is better is to let Windows XP (or Vista, or Linux for that matter), manage its virtual memory as it sees fit. You don't need to tweak it, and you won't improve its performance.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Some applications will want Pagefile to run properly. Auto works best, but you could also set a fixed size to reduce fragmentation.

 

[AllGamer]

i prefer to have it disabled

very few applications needs it, and if you happen to be using some of those applications, like Adobe Pshop for example, then they usually wants ALOT!!! and i mean a lot as in 3 to 6 gigs

depending on the images you are working on.

so if you got no applications that request SwapFile then just disable it, it helps your system runs much much faster

 

[JackMDS]

In Vista it should be left alone.

In XP you can try Auto or Fixed and see which one works for you. All the other stories are combination of ignorance, emotional status of the user, and Internet noise.

One of the way to deflect these issues is to ask the "Story Teller" to provide a Link that numerically shows the difference and provide a method to duplicate the Bench Marking.

 

[Modelworks]

Some recent games will not run at all without a pagefile.

 

[AllGamer]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
Some recent games will not run at all without a pagefile.

care to mention some?

 

[Markbnj]

Originally posted by: AllGamer
i prefer to have it disabled

very few applications needs it, and if you happen to be using some of those applications, like Adobe Pshop for example, then they usually wants ALOT!!! and i mean a lot as in 3 to 6 gigs

depending on the images you are working on.

so if you got no applications that request SwapFile then just disable it, it helps your system runs much much faster

No offense, but this is an excellent example of how misinformation about the workings of software gets spread around the Internet. The swap file is the backing store for Windows' virtual memory manager. Applications do not request access to the swap file. Applications ask for memory, and the virtual memory manager gives them pages of memory back. Whether those pages are in the swap file or in physical ram, or on a USB flash drive in Vista, is up to the memory manager. Whether you use the swap file much has to do with how much ram you have, how many processes you run, and how much memory they require.

I have never seen a good argument for disabling the pagefile so far. If you use the search function here you can find some extremely exhaustive debate and consideration of the topic by people who know a heck of a lot more about it than I do, and I don't think you'll find a good argument there either.

Bottom line: you don't need to mess with your pagefile.

 

[PeteRoy]

Mark, I have made a search on these forums and didn't find any such big debate, can you please link one topic about page file?

 

[Markbnj]

Here is one from the OS forum...

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...y=y&keyword1=page+file

 

[Slugbait]

One of my work machines has a permanent page file. There would be times I hadn't rebooted in a couple of weeks, and one day would get a dialog saying Windows required more room and forcibly resized it...just an OK button. I thought it strange that it could do this.

I'm configuring a new uber home machine right now, and was doing research on the best way to optimize the page file. I found hundreds of tweak sites that were carbon copies of the same thing: short and sweet, sometimes just a quick explanation ("1.5 times the size of RAM", etc, etc) and the steps to change your settings. I came across the Virtual Memory topic at Wikipedia, which had a link to this site.

It's very long, very detailed, covers all the MS operating systems, and totally makes sense. Let me summarize: almost everything you've heard and read before is wrong.

XP was redesigned so that it doesn't care if you have a permanent swap file, or no swap file: if it needs the room, it's going to take it...period. Obviously, all the NT5 and earlier Windows machines out there that had a poorly configured swap file were creating PSS headaches, so MS took it upon themselves to prevent you from screwing yourself and then calling them.

In short, the best optimization for XP is to:
1) move your page file to your second hard drive
2) run a memory intensive game for awhile, or load up on all the common tasks you do daily, and check how much usage there is of the page file...then set it to permanent the next rounded 100 up (i.e. page file usage = 723 megs, so permanent gets set to 800). This greatly reduces possibility of page file fragmentation.
3) run Diskeeper and make the page file contigious
4) run Diskeeper and move the page file to the outer tracks
5) if using PATA, the second hard drive must be on the second IDE channel, or the above recommendations will show zero performance boost

In answer to your question: no.

The above instructions will result in far better performance for all games than a system set to no paging file (which XP will create if necessary anyway).

 

[0roo0roo]

Swap begone!

I upgraded to 1Gb of RAM. I have WinXP Home and a 1.1GHz Duron. I don't want a swap file, for performance, so I changed my swap file to 0Mb in My Computer. And at My computer/Advanced/Performance Settings/Advanced/Virtual Memory, the total paging file size says zero megabytes.

In regedit I navigated to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management, and changed DisablePagingExecutive to 1.

But in the FreeMeter system monitor it says I'm using about 300Mb of RAM and still about 200Mb of page file.

What is happening? Is there another program to confirm the swap file is zero?

Glenn

Answer:
FreeMeter may be telling you about data that Windows wants to swap out, but can't, or something - you can't really disable virtual memory on WinXP, only stop it from working properly.

It doesn't really matter, though, because you shouldn't be doing this in the first place.

It is not generally a good idea to try to run WinXP without a swap file. It's possible, but many programs (not to mention a bunch of default XP services) assume the swap file to be available, and may fail in ugly ways if it's not there.

Often, in particular, a program will request much more memory than it's actually likely to need, assuming that this is no big deal because it'll just get a chunk of swap file allocated to it and only use as much physical memory as it really turns out to need. With no swap file, though, every program that asks for 512Mb because it might possibly need it if you open 50 documents will get its own 512Mb inviolable slice of your precious physical RAM, which nothing else will be allowed to use.

Fortunately, generally speaking, the swap file does not actually slow Windows XP (and later) down. Heck, it didn't even really slow Win95/98 down that much. It's not having enough physical RAM that slows Windows down.

Windows can actually run faster with a swap file, because it uses it to unload seldom-used components to free up physical RAM that it can then use for, for instance, disk caching. WinXP's virtual memory management is actually quite smart.

With only a gigabyte of memory, you're not going to be able to run many apps at once without a swap file. The OS itself, even with System Restore and so forth turned off to avoid dire where's-the-swap errors, will eat a lot of your RAM.

Swapless XP is more feasible if you've got more than 2Gb of RAM, and it can be handy for specialised setups. Business boxes that boot from Flash disks that can't handle a lot of write cycles, for instance. Such computers are unlikely to suddenly be used for 3D games and video editing, so a hard ceiling on their memory isn't too dangerous.

For general purpose computing, though, swapless XP still a waste of time.

XP will never be blazing fast on your computer, but it'll run more than fast enough for most purposes as long as you've got enough physical RAM. If you're short of physical RAM, the only solution is to buy more of the stuff.

If you want to get tricky about it, then you can put your swap file - or your whole Windows install - on a RAM-based device, like a Gigabyte i-RAM card. That can let you wring out a bit more performance. It's goofy to do that with a computer that's worth less than an i-RAM with a couple of gigabytes on it, though, and there's close to no point to doing it at all if you haven't already installed at least the magic 3Gb of RAM on your motherboard.

http://www.dansdata.com/io072.htm