Stopping Windows Swap...

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These days its common for people to have 6GB+ on their destop machines, I was wondering how many people disable their page file for better general PC performance in typical memory usage scenarios ?

Obviously this probably doe not apply to people using VMWare / Virtual PC or Video Editing.

 

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I never remove the page file, I do however tend to set it to a predefined size.

 

Same.

Qs

 

Doesn't XP moan big time if you try remove the last page file, I'm sure it has to be at least a couple of megs or more though

 

Apparently you get some warnings when you disable it, then your system may run slightly faster due to no paging, if you exhaust physical memory the system will likely crash. Maybe not a great idea in general, just was thinking of ways to reduce paging, seems little silly to have paging during normal low memory use when you have 6GB+ of physical RAM.

Unfortunately the guy who suggested it was assuming windows paging implementation was poor, however he performed no tests to prove whether there is any real benefit and that the implementation is indeed poor.

 

Some programs require paging regardless of the amount of physical memory.

Generally it is not recommended to remove virtual memory according to MS.

 

It warns you but you can remove

Custom size is 2MB Min and 4 GB max... in XP 32bit at least

 

Same place mentioned setting page file to min (16MB ?) then disabling, then physical deletion from disk. Again not sure if its a good idea, might try it just out of interest for a couple of days.

 

You beat me to it. One or two games I have require paging that I know of.

 

I stand corrected, still better to have it than to not if you ask me.

 

I don't play games !

Heres a disscussion of pros and cons:-

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000422.html

You used to be able to buy RAMDrive software to fix the poor windows paging, but I don't really see why I should have to resort to that these days...

 

This.

 

I have it at the recommended size

 

The Windows 'auto-reccomended' size with 6GB of memory is a 6GB swap file, I can't see this being that useful for general desktop use, I'd probably want no more than 1GB swap size.

So the reccomended value by windows is just a totally random guess, normally based on your physical memory size with maybe a lower limit defined by the OS, it might be suitable, it might not.

 

I have never messed with it to be honest it recommends 4990 for me as I have 4GB

 

Vista 64bit then? Like i said 32bit XP is 2MB Min 4GB max

Microsoft's official recommendation is 1.5 x RAM. Of course you cant exceed max or min for your os.

But to be honest the best way is to let windows manage it, measure/work out your baseline and max peaks over a week or so.

and use these values.

 

Yep, 64bit Vista, agreed, determining your own baseline is what Mark Russinovich reccomends here :-

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/11/17/3155406.aspx

He is extremely intelligent and a MS fellow, but I'm still not convinced that windows does a good job with swap and therefore disabling might have advantages in some scenarios...