Pagefile Questions

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mhenley

[H]ard|Gawd
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I was looking into different ways to speed up the performance of my system. Would I see a performance increase by switching my page file to my second hard drive? Would I see a decrease in performance from application running from the second hard drive if I switched the location of the page file? Would I be better off getting a third hard drive specifically for the purpose of the page file?

Win7 Ultimate x64
Gigabyte M4A785TD-V EVO
Phenom II x2 550BE @ 3.7 @ Stock Voltage & FSB
8GB OCZ Platinum 1333MHz 7-7-7-20
2x WD Black Edition 1TB Hard Drives
Other stuff that doesn't pertain to this question...
 
If you've got enough physical RAM in the system, then it doesn't really matter where you put the pagefile...
 
Ok, because Windows apparently still wants to allocate between 8 and 12 gigs on the hard drive, even with 8 gigs of physical RAM. I don't know how much of that is actually being used, but from my monitor I can tell that my physical RAM rarely gets tapped out.

The main reason is because I still get some low FPS issues in games like MW2, I'm trying to do whatever I can to keep fluid gameplay.
 
mhenley said:
Ok, because Windows apparently still wants to allocate between 8 and 12 gigs on the hard drive, even with 8 gigs of physical RAM. I don't know how much of that is actually being used, but from my monitor I can tell that my physical RAM rarely gets tapped out.

The main reason is because I still get some low FPS issues in games like MW2, I'm trying to do whatever I can to keep fluid gameplay.
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what is your gpu? for me with my system, the only thing that drops my fps with mw2 is smoke. (that is when 4 x aa is on)
 
XFX HD5770 XXX Edition 1GB DDR5. Stock clocks are 875 core 1300 memory according to ATI Overdrive. I can turn smoke off and give it a shot, maybe drop AA to 2x and see if that helps.
 
turn the pagefile off and watch the mem usage not change. you have plenty of physical ram for it to not make a difference. i would rather have the system using the physical ram anyway, it is faster after all. its really a preference in your case, i doubt your performance will change at all.
 
I resize my pagefiles (multiple physical drives) to get space back with 8GB RAM. However, I do leave them on just in case (so a memory-hogging app can't deplete my physical RAM just sitting in the background).
 
Tried turning page file off, no change to RAM usage and no noticable performance increase. Set it back to managed so I don't run into future issues.

Thanks for the tips. I will begin looking elsewhere for my tweaking.
 
Some applications that are heavy with pagefile use and also pulling from the hard drive WILL benefit from moving the pagefile to a separate spindle. So yes it can/will give you a performance boost, the average computer use won't see one. But users of heavier applications that use the pagefile heavily will see a boost.

Matter of fact, this is standard practice for building/configuring servers , as having your data, pagefile, operating system, and program all on the same drive...well...common sense..well, maybe not common sense, but having at least minimal computer experience and aptitude, having all of those concurrent hits for input/output on the drive will bog down.

Having lots of system RAM isn't the end of the pagefile either...some applications need it, regardless of how many gigs of RAM you have in the system.

This topic gets debated here several times a year. Spend some time on Google with this subject...you'll see plenty of references that it does help...many of those coming from professional sites. It's harmless to try this yourself...takes about 15 -20 seconds to change the settings, you'll reboot...and then see if it helps you. Hard to tell if it will help you, again, it depends on the applications that you use.
 
The only thing he can do - meaning the OP in his specific situation - to improve performance to any degree whatsoever with the given configuration he's got is to place a small(er/ish) static page file on every physical hard drive he's got. That allows Windows to multitask far more efficiently at any given time as required. With a single page file on the system drive/partition and no others in play, the OS can only do one operation at a time with that system drive/partition: read or write, and that means either the OS is reading/writing or some application is at any given moment.

Putting a page file on each physical drive gives the OS the ability to read/write from any given drive (most notably the system drive/partition) as well as being able to page data as required if required simultaneously - it makes things run a helluvalot more smoothly than just one page file on the system drive/partition.

That's about it.

And max out the RAM in the system if possible, but don't go disabling the page file. It's just not a recommended course of action, ever. If Windows wasn't supposed to have one - even if the OS rarely if ever requires putting it into action - then it wouldn't exist.

If you've spent $30 billion over the past few decades developing your own OS from top to bottom, you can say otherwise; if you haven't, well... there you go. :)

With the two 1TB drives the OP has listed, if he's not using them in RAID configuration (0 or 1) I'd say put a 2GB static page file on each one and that's it, he's done. Nothing more needs to be said about it...
 
mhenley said:
Tried turning page file off, no change to RAM usage and no noticable performance increase. Set it back to managed so I don't run into future issues.

Thanks for the tips. I will begin looking elsewhere for my tweaking.
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Why do you even need to tweak at all? I'm a Phenom II 720 user with 4GB RAM and an ATI 4890 1GB and it's more than fast enough and then some with anything I throw at it.

Using the immortal words of Joe Average, leave it alone.
 
The thing is, unless you are a super heavy multitasker that leaves unused applications running, changing the page file isn't going to effect you one way or another. Windows will not page memory unless the application is 1.) Not being used or 2.) Windows is almost out of memory and has no choice.

Basically OP, open up all of the stuff you would normally have open at one time. Go to your Task Manager performance tab and look at the Memory window. If the amount displayed is less than the physical memory you have installed then don't worry about changing anything. You probably don't have more than a couple hundred megs paged at any given time.
 
Azhar said:
Why do you even need to tweak at all? I'm a Phenom II 720 user with 4GB RAM and an ATI 4890 1GB and it's more than fast enough and then some with anything I throw at it.

Using the immortal words of Joe Average, leave it alone.
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Because I'm having some slow-down issues in some games. They start fluid, and then later during my session things slow down a tad and I drop below 30fps when I start out around 50. Without going to an SSD or 10k rpm drive, I want to try and maximize what I have so that I can wait a bit longer for my next upgrade.

To all the other posters. Thank you for your suggestions.
 
mhenley said:
Because I'm having some slow-down issues in some games. They start fluid, and then later during my session things slow down a tad and I drop below 30fps when I start out around 50. Without going to an SSD or 10k rpm drive, I want to try and maximize what I have so that I can wait a bit longer for my next upgrade.

To all the other posters. Thank you for your suggestions.
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Is your GPU throttling down? Heat? Though I'm not aware if a 5770 throttles or not.
 
mhenley said:
Because I'm having some slow-down issues in some games. They start fluid, and then later during my session things slow down a tad and I drop below 30fps when I start out around 50. Without going to an SSD or 10k rpm drive, I want to try and maximize what I have so that I can wait a bit longer for my next upgrade.

To all the other posters. Thank you for your suggestions.
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That behavior isn't characteristic of swap file problems. It's not even characteristic of harddrive issues. It sounds like GPO/CPU/Memory to me.
 
I'm usually in the "leave it the hell alone" camp, but with 8GB of RAM on a machine that mainly runs games, wouldn't turning down the pagefile to something like 2 GB make sense? I mean it's still enabled, the pagefile is still fairly large, and you save 6 GB.


Azhar said:
Using the immortal words of Joe Average, leave it alone.
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Sorry to get off topic, but whatever happened to that guy?
 
Jon55 said:
Sorry to get off topic, but whatever happened to that guy?
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Beats me. I wonder too. Probably got tired of this place and left, or maybe he's anonymously posting with another name. Joe Average was his second handle I believe.
 
mhenley said:
Because I'm having some slow-down issues in some games. They start fluid, and then later during my session things slow down a tad and I drop below 30fps when I start out around 50. Without going to an SSD or 10k rpm drive, I want to try and maximize what I have so that I can wait a bit longer for my next upgrade.

To all the other posters. Thank you for your suggestions.
Click to expand...
It is absolutely not the page file. Windows does not page applications that are currently being used. If you want this to be proven, then disable the page file and load up the game.
 
Jon55 said:
I'm usually in the "leave it the hell alone" camp, but with 8GB of RAM on a machine that mainly runs games, wouldn't turning down the pagefile to something like 2 GB make sense? I mean it's still enabled, the pagefile is still fairly large, and you save 6 GB.
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I guess if you need that extra 6 gigs then tweak on it, but otherwise it does you almost no good to monkey with the page file.
 
XOR != OR said:
That behavior isn't characteristic of swap file problems. It's not even characteristic of harddrive issues. It sounds like GPO/CPU/Memory to me.
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Absolutely. If you are worried about some performance issues, look into possible causes, and not "tweaks" that haven't been relevant in four years.
Jon55 said:
Sorry to get off topic, but whatever happened to that guy?
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He probably got tired of reading all the threads in which people try to do ridiculous, illogical things to their OSes, rather than just enjoy their computers.
 
I saw a post by a guy on another forum that just purchased his first SSD: an OCZ Vertex 2 drive. He just installed Windows 7 on it this morning and then disabled paging, indexing, Superfetch, defrag, etc etc...

I had to ask him why he'd cripple the OS in that respect so dramatically and his response was "oh I read some guides on the Internet that say my system will be much faster if I turn all that stuff off."

I responded: "You're better off using XP in that case" and I stand by that completely.

Scary how misinformed people are nowadays, ain't it?
 
Or have the wheels dipped in Teflon for a few days, let it really soak in so it'll reduce the rolling resistance on the pavement, get that nice little .00014124 MPG and .02415828 MPH boost!!! :cool:
 
LeviathanZERO said:
turn the pagefile off and watch the mem usage not change. you have plenty of physical ram for it to not make a difference. i would rather have the system using the physical ram anyway, it is faster after all. its really a preference in your case, i doubt your performance will change at all.
Click to expand...

Do not turn it off, just leave it alone.
 
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