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Switching off Virtual Memory (Pagefile)

Y

Yoshitoshi

Member
What are the dangers of switching off your pagefile when playing games?

I have 768 meg of physical RAM so surely a pagefile is unnecessary with game playing. I can understand a pagefile being required when 'multitasking' or using Photoshop for example.

Would there be a perfromance boost? Does RAM ever get forgetfull? Anyone tried it?

Yoshi.
 
I've tried this before with Win9X but noticed very little performance boost. I have not tried it in W2K. You can tried it and then if you're not satisfied you can always go back and enable it. There's no danger of losing anything. All it is a performance enhancer.
 
There are absolutely no dangers. In fact, this is a great technique, and I highly recommend it. When Windows does automatic swap file management (especially Win2K), it will "randomly" shrink and grow the Swap file, and it's really annoying.

If you think 768 MB is enough for your system, turn it off. If you think you may need 1 GB, set the Swap file to 256 MB fixed size. That's what I would do.

If Windows run out of memory, that's exactly the message you'll get.
 
Friends of mine on WinXP disabled the Swapfile Paging System. They gained a significant amount of performance in games. Not sure of the numbers exactly however.
 
> There are absolutely no dangers. In fact, this is a great technique, and I highly recommend it

This is a repost of a response I left yesterday in the "Operating Systems" forum on the same topic:

While trying to avoid jumping into the argument, let me point out that there are memory mapped file api's in the OS which various applications use which get their backing store from the paging file. Completely disabling paging will cause these api's to (gracefully) fail. How gracefully the calling application fails is up to the app writer

Second, for dumps and mini-dumps 2K/XP requires part of the paging file (thats where it writes to during the blue screen as it knows the file allocation is a safe area to write to).

Bill
 
I have a 1 gb of DDR RAM and I'm running WinXp. I tried turning off the page file but windows still says that I do not have enough memory and will set my virtual memory higher even when I'm using only 150mb of physical RAM. So I guess windows still needs virtual memory. I set it at 512mb instead of what window recommended which was 1500mb. It hasn't bugged me since. So if you have a large amount of RAM, you'll probably be fine using less than a 1 to 1 ratio of your physical RAM for your virtual memory.
 
Unforunately, logical thinking doesn't apply to virtual memory. Crappy programming stille exists. There is probably some code out there that insists on using virtual memory ... no matter how much RAM you have. You don't want to be caught on the short side of the stick.

If you have extra time on your hands, you can set your page file to some small amount (1MB, lets say), and watch the size fluctuate with your various programs/games. You might be able to isolate those executables that insist on using RAM.

-SUO
 
I tried to disable VM in W2K and it keeps asking to increase page file size in some applications.
Looks like some programs want to use it even RAM available. Did not try it in WinXP, but probably results will be same.
 
in win2k how about using ramdiskNT and setting the page file to be on the ram disk that you create.

technically you have a swap file, but its faster than using the hdd.
 
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