Swap File on seperate partition?

[sephroth777]

Currently I am running Windows XP Pro on a WD1200JB.
I have read that you can increase your performance by creating a seperate partition on your hard drive and use it only for your swap file (virtual memory).

I was planning on allocating 1.5GB to the swap file where the min and max would be 1500mb each. What size should the swap file be?
Has anyone tried this and have any suggestions?

Also when creating the new partition should it be a primary partition or a logical drive?
and should it be NTFS or FAT32 in terms of best performance?
I have read about dynamic and static disk and I am lost to how to create those or what they exactly are.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Nothinman]

First off swap file != virtual memory, they're closely related but far from the same thing.

The only reason allocating a seperate swap partition is usefull is:

A) The partition is at the very beginning of the drive because you get slightly higer transfer rates from there.
B) You have a variable size swap file and don't want it to get fragmented so you give it it's own partition.
C) The swap subsystem uses the whole partition instead of a file (like unixes) to avoid filesystem overhead for swapping to disk, this doesn't apply to Windows.

Most of this is covered in the FAQ so read through the FAQ, then if you have any more questions post them again.

 

[sephroth777]

Where do I find the FAQ relating to Swap file?

Thanks

 

[Nothinman]

Where do I find the FAQ relating to Swap file?

I'll be damned, I could'a swore there was one, but I don't see it either.

Well, the filesystem things are discussed in the FAQs. And as for dynamic vs static disks I would avoid dynamic disks at all costs. They're MS's new form of software RAID in Win2K and they'll just make things more complicated should you have to do any data rescue work.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Dual Athlon 1.2G, WD1200JB, 256MB RAM

Although I only use XP for web browsing and pull MP3s off of newsgroups, my page/swap file has gotten no bigger than 200MB (~150MB is much more accurate). I recently demoted my system to 256MB from 512MB, and the page file has been the same. I've seen it go as low as 97MB. (BTW, I monitor the size in real-time, ... err, once per 3 seconds or so.)

Unless you are really pushing your system, or you only have 2MB of RAM, I doubt you'll need a page file of 1.5G.

Win2K is where I do my really work. I don't think I've even booted into it since I dropped to 256MB last week. I do the same monitoring there, so I'll see if I'm noticing massive use of the page file.

For what it's worth, I am isolating the page file to a 1GB C: drive ... which is also used for TEMP files and web browser cache (and a few other things like DOS utils and benchmark apps, hehe). C: is likely to be the fastest drive in the system, given that it is the first Windows partition seen at boot (there's more explanation for that statement, I just don't feel like describing the physics of it all right now).

-SUO

 

[Nothinman]

Although I only use XP for web browsing and pull MP3s off of newsgroups, my page/swap file has gotten no bigger than 200MB

For just those two apps I'd say that's pretty large, but you're probably using IE and OE and since I don't use them I don't know what kind of memory footprints they have.

To find the best size he'll need to do some profiling, watching his page file usage as he works to get an idea as to what his high and low points are. Or he can just take the easy way out and waste some space on an overly large swap file, it's a lot simpler and disk space is cheap.