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Anima · 20-12-2003 11:14pm #1

Hey,

Recently i heard that if you have over 512 mb ram you should turn off the page file for an extra performance boost. So i was wondering if it was true or are there any side effects?

I'm running win2k with 1 gig of ddr ram btw.

OfflerCrocGod · 21-12-2003 12:31am

Ye go ahead with one gig you should have no prob you should get a little boost from not needing your HDD for swaping dont put it to 0 MB in Windows put it to 10MB cause Windows tends to change 0MB to default again.

Anima · 21-12-2003 12:59am

If i put it to 10 will it not give me "run out of virutal memory" errors? Also when i get into windows it gives me a big popup saying i have no pagingfile, can i get rid of this?

Mutant_Fruit · 21-12-2003 1:32am

theres a setting that you can change that makes windows use ram (right up to the last kilobyte) before touching paging file. Enable that. Unfortunately i cant remeber wherei saw it.

OfflerCrocGod · 21-12-2003 5:13pm

It will not give you those errors unless you actually run out of RAM - and at 1GB I wouldn't worry to much about it, that error I've never seen it before so I can't help you there:(.

ColmOT [MSFT] · 22-12-2003 1:39pm

It's really not a good idea to disable the pagefile.

The perf boost that you'll see won't be noticable at all, and as a consequence, if your machine crashes, you won't get a dump file or error info.

PhoenixRising · 22-12-2003 5:03pm

I've recently added 256MB of RAM to my PC to bring it up to 512MB. I have the paging file set to "system managed" at the moment. What would be a typical paging file size for a P4 system with 512MB of RAM ? At the moment with system managed paging file, the paging file is set at 766MB. That seems a bit big ?

OfflerCrocGod · 22-12-2003 9:23pm

Nope for system managed 776Mb is proper it's meant to be between 1.5 and 2 times the amount of actual physical memory, you could turn it down to 256-512Mb no prob.....I wouldn't recommend turning it off all together unless you get 1Gb of RAM.

PhoenixRising · 22-12-2003 10:36pm

Ok, that's great. Thanks for the info.

ColmOT [MSFT] · 23-12-2003 10:22am

If you set your pagefile to a static size of about 2x your RAM (preferable on a different controller than your OS), you'll have the most optimum pagefile configuration.

CivilServant · 23-12-2003 10:37am

Hows that now? Surely paging RAM is much faster than paging the hard drive. Thus have 1 gig of RAM and a small page file would benefit performance cos the system would be using virtual memory a lot less.

ColmOT [MSFT] · 23-12-2003 11:26am

You don't page data to RAM. You can only do that if you have a RAM drive configuration.

Windows uses demand paging to page 'pages' out to the HD
This is data that the system doesn't immediatly need.
Users who have a gig of RAM generally use that gig of RAM, so a pagefile is normally necessary.

Otherwise you'll get Out of Memory errors when you approace your RAM limit.

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