Paging File...

Joined
May 4, 2005
Messages
23
If you set ur paging file high will it help your pc go faster?? and if so how high should i set it??? i have 512 ram 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 Asus Mobo..
 
No, it will not help it go faster.

Your best bet is to define the minimum and maximum size for XP to minimize fragmentation. I have read many opinions and guides on this matter and have found that minimum of 512MB and a maximum of 768MB is about the optimum for most modern systems.

If you are looking to speed up your system, bump the RAM up to 1GB as it is dirt cheap now. You could also place a second hard drive on a seperate channel and place the page file on it (XP speeds up a bit when the page file does not reside on the same disc as the OS).

Good luck.
 
Upgrade to 1GB of RAM, and then set your page file to 1.5GB. You'll notice the difference.
 
This is what my paging file is set as

C Drive
initial Size (MB): 768
Maximum Size (MB) 1512

D Drive
initial Size (MB) 1512
Maximum Size (MB) 1512

Total Paging file size for all drives
Minimum allowed: 2mb
Recommended: 754mb
Currently allocated: 5000mb

This is alot faster than before i can tell the difference...
 
sixonethird.ltd said:
This is what my paging file is set as
Total Paging file size for all drives
Minimum allowed: 2mb
Recommended: 754mb
Currently allocated: 5000mb

This is alot faster than before i can tell the difference...

Holy crap... 5 gigs for page file total? Wow.

I have mine set 500-1200mb on a different physical drive (All SATA drives)... and I never get anywhere near filling that up. 1 gb of ram, too... I don't know what the hell you'd use 5gb of a pagefile for unless you wanted to load the entire game into RAM and run it.


A page file is a virtual RAM... Its for when you are loading something large into RAM and you don't have the space in RAM for it... it creates it on the hard drive instead, which is obviously slower... so you want more RAM rather than larger page file.
 
sixonethird.ltd said:
This is what my paging file is set as

C Drive
initial Size (MB): 768
Maximum Size (MB) 1512

D Drive
initial Size (MB) 1512
Maximum Size (MB) 1512

Total Paging file size for all drives
Minimum allowed: 2mb
Recommended: 754mb
Currently allocated: 5000mb

This is alot faster than before i can tell the difference...


Something's missing. You have two 1512 megabyte files, which is a total of 3024 megabytes. But you're showing the currently allocated size as 5000 megabytes. Where's the other 1976 megabytes being stored?

I'm curious: you say it's "alot faster than before". What were your previous settings? How did you measure the difference? What specific operation became faster, and by how much?
 
Whats with all these huge pagefiles????

I havent used one larger than 384MB for about 4 years now. If you have around a gig of ram and dont indulge in huge database or photoshop type stuff you dont really need a swapfile. Unfortunately a few items in XP still need one to exist for legacy reasons so for the time being we are stuck with them.

If your system is having to use a pagefile in this day and age, you need more ram, not a bigger pagefile. Using a 'bigger' pagefile can never be faster than using ram.
 
daglesj said:
Unfortunately a few items in XP still need one to exist for legacy reasons so for the time being we are stuck with them.

Could you please be more specific about that? What items in XP need a page file? What are the "legacy reasons", exactly?
 
One of the things I've heard that requires a pagefile is older, poorly coded sound card drivers. Unfortuantely, I can't give any more info than that, as it was a little blurb I read some time that I can't find anymore :(
 
It's surprising that a driver would require a PF, since it's quite odd for a driver to allocate unlocked memory.
 
Optimum Page file

Now don't get spooked cause it's an MS link !
It tells it like it is.
I do alot of Photoshop and 3D rendering stuff and
in the words of Jon Carson " I gotta tell ya"
I can't see any reason to make it as big as you have.
Hey but in the words of Yogi Bearer, "If it ain't broke don't fix it" ;)
 
That article omits at least one important detail. It says that you should put the second page file on another partition. Certainly, you should put it on another physical drive. Otherwise, the same drive will end up servicing the requests if it holds both logical partitions.

The article asserts that Windows tries to choose the best page file. That's probably true, but there's no way to verify it's really happening because no perf counter or system event tells you what faults were serviced by which file.
 
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