Would you agree with Me putting a 2gig swap file on my C drive?

[DARQ MX]

I known for a while that putting a swap file on my local C drive. And to make it 2x my ram. Now. I looked around and lots of sites also agree on this because it is faster acess time and better for the HD cause the swap file does not fragment.

I got PM 8 open right now, should I do it or should I do something else?

 

[Bateluer]

I have 2GB of RAM and a 2GB paging file.

Unfortunately, most users can't disable the swap file entirely. A lot of applications require a swap file in order to function correctly, so you can't disable it entirely.

 

[DARQ MX]

well, I plan to use it, just on a seperate partition

 

[Nothinman]

Putting it on a seperate partition will just increase seek times when it does need accessed, just leave it system managed and you'll be fine. If the pagefile is being used so much that it is causing noticable performance degredation, you'll get a much bigger boost from simply buying more memory than any amount of tweaking you can do.

 

[DARQ MX]

really huh? wow, Lots of ppl that are partition freaks say to make a 2-6gb patition in the middle of windows to use as the swapfile and it will be the best perfromence, instead of windows going hald rertarded and not using all you system ram, It happens to me a lot. I have a gig of ram and there is no way windows should have to page so much.

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: DARQ MX
really huh? wow, Lots of ppl that are partition freaks say to make a 2-6gb patition in the middle of windows to use as the swapfile and it will be the best perfromence, instead of windows going hald rertarded and not using all you system ram, It happens to me a lot. I have a gig of ram and there is no way windows should have to page so much.

The majority of pagefile tweaks and tips out on the internet are misinformation. Pick up Microsoft Windows Internals if you really want to understand what's going on.

 

[Nothinman]

wow, Lots of ppl that are partition freaks say to make a 2-6gb patition in the middle of windows to use as the swapfile and it will be the best perfromence, instead of windows going hald rertarded and not using all you system ram, It happens to me a lot. I have a gig of ram and there is no way windows should have to page so much.

Those same people probably spent $100 on stickers to make their ricer faster.

Where you put the pagefile won't affect it's use (generally, there are some exceptions), so putting it on it's own partition won't buy you anything. Some people claim it's to keep it contiguous, but a fragemented pagefile is irrelevant because it's not accessed sequentially anyway. A fragmented pagefile growing may cause other files to become fragmented, but even that's not going to cause a noticable performance problem unless you're doing something that requires very low latency reads like real-time audio or video editing.

 

[Drakkon]

make a 1GB ramdrive and put the swapfile on there

 

[statik213]

Originally posted by: Drakkon
make a 1GB ramdrive and put the swapfile on there

now that's an idea, :thumbsup:

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: statik213

Originally posted by: Drakkon
make a 1GB ramdrive and put the swapfile on there

now that's an idea, :thumbsup:

I do this and not only does it make my computer way faster, it makes it smell nice too!!

 

[Nothinman]

now that's an idea,

Sure it's an idea, just like sticking a pen in your eye is an idea =)

 

[JBT]

I have tried almost every tweak and/or configuration, it seems to really make 0 difference where the heck I put the swap file personally.

 

[smack Down]

The only worth while tweek is setting the minium size to be large so that you never have to wait for windows to increse the size of the swap file. And that is only usefull if you don't have much ram.

 

[bchivers]

Text

 

[Nothinman]

Text

That link is extremely wrong. He doesn't seem to understand what Virtual Memory is, he's under the impression that it's actually the pagefile and is an extension of physical memory, which isn't true. Sadly, he seems to have gotten this idea from Arstechnica, the Ars guys are smarter than that and I would have thought something like that would have been caught before it went on the site.

 

[DARQ MX]

What is he wrong about?? He is right about what a paging file does. Your page file is used as a temp area for ram. That is exactly what it is.

But he is wrong on a few things. Like him saying that windows only uses it when you run at out ram. That is untrue. Windows will use it no matter what. I bet if you had 4gb of ram it will still use it.

 

[BigPoppa]

Get a spare hard drive and set your swap file to that drive on its own IDE channel. Easy and cheap.

 

[bchivers]

From the articles I have read I think the majority of them feel that Windows does a good job with the swap file. I am not convinced of that,not sure if it would be better to build a partition on a spare HD. making it the first partition of the drive. Another question I have is,if that is the case is it still faster if your C:\ is 10,000 RPM and your spare drive is slower 7,200RPM?

I looked around and lots of sites also agree on this because it is faster acess time and better for the HD cause the swap file does not fragment.

If you want to defrag your page file (and registry hives) you can use Pagedefrag from Sysinternals. It will do it when ever you want or set it to defrag at every boot. It's a good program. Another thing that I have read is if you make the swap file min. and max size the same it won't get fragmented.

 

[necro007]

Do you think that This program will make a diff in the way your PC performs?

.eg. Would this program speed up your system.

 

[DARQ MX]

Yea, I have 2 drives...

One single partitioned Sata 250GB with windows, Apps, games.

and

One Pata 80gb with just all my backups like music and all Data on 2 partitions.

Now you said it would be the best to pt my swap file on maybe my 2nd drive the one that windows is not on? I think that does make since cause your sysem can seek for windows and seek make a pf really at the same time, hence the 2 drives. If I had all that on one drive the armautre would be going back and forth like crazy between OS and swap on that same drive. So would it be the best way to put a swap on the 2nd drive? And how much you think? Remember I have 1gb of ram.

 

[bchivers]

"So would it be the best way to put a swap on the 2nd drive? And how much you think? Remember I have 1gb of ram."

They say to make it your first partition on your second drive. As far as size I can't come up with a definite answer because there are different views and I don't know which one is correct.



"Do you think that This program will make a diff in the way your PC performs? "

I think it does,it seem to make sense to me,if you defrag your page file and registry hives things are going to run smoother,but I can't say for sure.this is just MHO.

 

[Nothinman]

What is he wrong about?? He is right about what a paging file does. Your page file is used as a temp area for ram. That is exactly what it is.

No, it's not. He calls the pagefile an extension of memory and refers to it directly as Virtual Memory, which is untrue. VM is in use whether you have a pagefile or not. Yes, the pagefile could be described as a temporary storage area for memory pages that the OS decides it needs freed for other uses, but that's not what he says and VM isn't dependent on a pagefile in anyway. Although use of the pagefile does require VM.

edited for clarity.

 

[DARQ MX]

o, ight...

 

[bchivers]

"Virtual memory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Jump to: navigation, search
The memory pages of the virtual address space seen by the process, may reside non-contiguously in primary, or even secondary storage.
Enlarge

The memory pages of the virtual address space seen by the process, may reside non-contiguously in primary, or even secondary storage.

Virtual memory or virtual memory addressing is a memory management technique, used by multitasking computer operating systems wherein non-contiguous memory is presented to a software application (aka process) as contiguous memory. The contiguous memory is referred to as the virtual address space.

Virtual memory addressing is typically used in paged memory systems. This in turn is often combined with memory swapping, whereby memory pages stored in primary storage are written to secondary storage, thus freeing faster primary storage for other processes to use.

The term "virtual memory" is often confused with "memory swapping" (or "page/swap file" use), probably due in part to the prolific Microsoft Windows family of operating systems referring to the enabling/disabling of memory swapping as virtual memory. In fact, Windows uses paged memory and virtual memory addressing, even if the so called "virtual memory" is disabled.

In technical terms, virtual memory allows software to run in a memory address space whose size and addressing are not necessarily tied to the computer's physical memory. To properly implement virtual memory the CPU (or a device attatched to it) must provide a way for the operating system to map virtual memory to physical memory and for it to detect when an address is required that does not currently relate to main memory so that the needed data can be swapped in. While it would certainly be possible to provide virtual memory without the CPU's assistance it would essentially require emulating a CPU that did provide the needed features."

Described by the Wikipedia. The rest of the article is here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory

Sorry I can't get the quote or http hot link to work.

 

[Nothinman]

I was a little worried when I first saw the Wikipedia link because the articles there can be edited by anyone, but it seems to be accurate.

I was especially surprised to find this section:

Misconceptions about the Windows page file

There are some common misconceptions about Windows page file expansion, in that a page file can become heavily "fragmented" and cause "performance issues". The common advice given to avoid this problem is to set a single page file size, and not allow Windows to resize the page file. This is problematic for a few reasons;

* If a Windows application requests more memory than is available from both physical memory and the page file, and Windows cannot resize the page file to fulfill this request, then the memory is not successfully allocated. Many applications (and sometimes Windows itself) will crash (sometimes gracefully, sometimes not) as a result of being unable to allocate more memory.
* Concerns about "performance" are moot when a Windows system is using two or three times its total physical memory. Performance concerns about a further expanding pagefile are not going to be a user's primary concern at this time.
* Concerns about "fragmentation" are not significant, when you consider how and when the page file is used. Windows does not read from or write to the page file in sequential order for long periods of time, so the performance advantages of having a completely sequential page file is minimal at best. Also, if a large number of pages need to be moved in or out of the page file, chances are quite good that other hard-disk activity is taking place at the same time, further reducing performance.

In short, a Windows system does not benefit from having a locked page file size. A larger "minimum" size will indeed help systems with little physical memory by reducing resizing of the page file by the OS. A large "maximum" will incur no performance penalty.