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Anyone have info on if this increases performance and by how much/what area?
Why don't you add more ram and disable page filing?
I thought thats been debunked as not really helping anything?
Adding more ram has never hurt*. Disabling paging is generally not a good idea; see How to: Size your windows XP page file. I'd tend to leave the pagefile enabled, to allow for more system stability in times of memory demand.
*Except where it makes the memory downclock. Opterons, I'm looking at you.
I thought thats been debunked as not really helping anything?
Let me preface this by saying this is hypothetical. I haven't written any operating systems, and definitely not the one you're using.I don't see how having a sligh increase in performance is hurting. If you don't get BSOD's then you have nothing to worry about.
Well, duh. How about 2 gigs/no PF versus 2 gigs/standard PF? I don't think 512/PF versus 2 gigs/no PF is a very relevant test.However, toss vista ultimate on 512mb memory with file paging, then try disabling pagefile and tossing in 2 gigs of ram... tell me if it's going to make a diffrence or not.
that doesn't workWhy don't you add more ram and disable page filing?
2gigs doesn't seem like enough memory to disable the page file, 4gigs and you'd probably be in the clear.
The theory to "keep paging space away from data space" is nonsense because the system is stalled anyway. While a heavy pageout is in progress there will be no disk activity in your data areas.
BTW - what exactly do you mean by "stalled"?
This contradicts MS's own recommendations.
BTW - what exactly do you mean by "stalled"?
When you run so low on memory that the OS initiated a large pageout then the application that requested more memory in first place is stalled - it won't do anything because it waits for the OS to give it the memory requested.
In particular, there will be no or almost no disk activity other than the pageout. Again, keep in mind that normal disk write is asynchronous but pageout is not.
But couldn't another process get cycles and initiate disk activity?
Of course there will be some readahead done by the OS.
Paging space should always be on all drives.
Is this basically optimization - i.e. if the current page is needed, then the next one will likely be needed too, so load it now, not later?
To reiterate, I've run Windows XP both with a page file and without a page file, and it runs better with one. When I am doing a defrag using the Windows utility, i boot into safe mode after turning off the page file (I always turn off restore, it isn't useful for me) so that everything gets defragged. I left it off to see if I would get a performance increase, and ran it like that for about a week. I had 2 GBs of RAM. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't great either. I rarely boot, so it was sucking after a few days. I set a static page file, rebooted and all was better.
Also, to clear up any confusion, Windows XP (or any 32-bit Microsoft OS, for that matter) cannot address much more than 2GBs unless you use the /3GB switch, which forces the OS out of resident memory and into paging so that applications can address the 3 GBs, rather than ~2.25GBs which is typically where it bottoms out. As you can imagine, this is not optimal for desktop usage and performance, and only truly benefits a server application. A server isn't used locally, so it is beneficial. Don't bring Linux or OS X into this , because it *Nix based OS's have a different memory usage model than Windows, though 32-bit flavors of those ALSO have a 4GB total addressable limit, and again, they usually top out somewhere around ~3.25 on their very best days.
Summary: Page file good. More than 2GBs of RAM on 32-bit XP, not useful. /3GB switch on XP, bad. /3GB switch and no page file, very bad.
I agree with most of the points but if you have 4+ drives why keep a page file on your OS/Apps drive?
Unless the OS knows to avoid using that pagefile whenever the OS/Apps drive is in use, it could slow down performance by choosing that pagefile instead of the file on the other 3 drives. I don't see how 4 swap files is better than 3 or even 2 when it raises the risk of being accessed when data on the same drive is being accessed.
By adding the disk to the pool of disks the kernel can page to you speed up the process of paging out, thus making the stall shorter.
Are you saying that Windows will write to more than one drive for a single paging operation? Or is it just that it will write to the least used drive?