What does pagefile.sys in windows 2000 do?

[fitzhue]

I'm just curious as to the purpose of this file as it is 768 megabytes big.

 

[Noriaki]

It's your virtual memory.

With 512MB of RAM you most likely do not need a 768MB Pagefile.

What do you do with your machine?

With 512MB I'd set it to 128MB max, I'd probably just disabled Virtual memory if I had 512MB.

 

[Need4Speed]

Noriaki...u can't run win2k without a pagefile or at very least you shouldn't.

 

[fitzhue]

I though that would've been it. I set it back to 128mb. Although I don't even think i need that. I constantly have 300-400 megabytes free in ram. Should I just set it to zero? Should I leave it at 128mb and add a line in my system.ini for conservative swap file usage? Thanks a lot

 

[SharkB8]

Since we're talking about pagefiles, how do you direct them to a different drive?? I have C: drive set as my boot partition/temp & pagefiles and have WIN2K loaded to D: When I had WIN98 set up this way I had my swapfile direct to C: but it is just a bit more complicated with WIN2K. I have gone to Performance and created a pagefile on C: drive of the same size as WIN2K created within itself. The problem is that when I go to delete the default pagefile on D: I get a message saying that my "computer may not boot if I do this". As long as I have created a new pagefile isn't it ok to delete the one on the WIN2K partition????

 

[raaboso]

Need4Speed, you sure can. Why can't you?? As long as you have enough real RAM (512MB+) it works fine...

 

[Shadow07]

The pagefile is used when a program wants to use RAM and there is not enough physical RAM available. When the program loads, Windows Memory Manager swaps certain programs/services from the faster loading RAM to the harddrive in the form of the pagefile. This is all transparent to the app, as it does not know that it is in the pagefile and not in RAM.

You can place the pagefile on another partition, but if you delete the pagefile on the boot partition, you loose all capabilities of a memory dump if your system crashes with a STOP error.

Also, if you set the pagefile below the amount of physical RAM, your system will experience problems. Also, you loose the capability of a memory dump if your system crashes. I would recommend setting your pagefile at AMOUNT OF PYSICAL RAM + 12MB .

 

[khorgath]

I remember a guy asking in a Linux mailing list sometime back whether, with his 2GB RAM machine, he needed a swap partition at all. There was, among other replies, a suggestion that it would be a good idea in his case to create a ramdisk and have his swap-partition there. Can something of that sort be done with Win-NT/2K ?

Ciao
-khorgath

 

[Shadow07]

There are programs out there that you can use to create a RAM disk, but I do not think that you can put the pagefile on it. I could be mistaken, but I have never tried. In most cases, creating a pagefile on your IDE drive does not have a big impact on performance. But, the more physical RAM you have for Windows 2000, the better. Windows 2000 will only perform better with more RAM. Also, having a SCSI system helps too!

 

[fitzhue]

Shadow07
Would you care to explain a little more on this:


<< Also, if you set the pagefile below the amount of physical RAM, your system will experience problems. >>


I don't really see what kind of problem it would cause. Could you elaborate more?
What about the memory dump? Is this something normal that windows automatically does after a system crash, and why is that important anyway? If the system crashed, why would you care what was stored in the ram? Thanks in advance.

 

[Hecky]

You can distribute the page file across as many volumes as you wish. Having multiple paging files available may speed up access when it's needed. The old rule of thumb used to be to set the page file (swap file) at 2.5 times your physical RAM. With 256Mb, that would be a total of 640Mb of disk space. That can be spread over one, two, three or how many disk drives you have in your machine, with min and max set to the same value. For example with two drives (or volumes) one could split this 640Mb in two and create a page file on each disk with min of 320 and max of 320.
I have one machine configured like this and it is fast and stable. And yes, both are SCSI drives....

 

[Shadow07]

Even though you might have enough physical RAM, the system still has to move data out of phsycal RAM to the pagefile. If the OS does not have a large enough pagefile, the OS will have to release some threads in some applications to make more room in physical RAM.

The crash dump is used to troubleshoot problems within your OS. For instance, if you wanted to know if the crash was due to a hardware problem or a software problem, the crash dump will tell you what was in memory and what happened. You can then see if the problem is hardware or software related.

A crash dump is very necessary, and you should care about it, especially if the crash was on a production server. With out it, you could have a hard time figuring out what caused the crash.

But, in order to utilize a crash dump file, you will have to create a pagefile that is on your boot partition that is the size of your physical RAM + 2MB. You will not be able to &quot;spread&quot; this file over multiple physical disks.