WinXP Pagefile

[SonicVanguard]

I've been having this debate on and off with a few colleagues here at Michigan State...with the Windows XP page file is it smarter/more effective/more beneficial - assuming you set the pagefile to a Min/Max of say twice your available RAM - to keep that pagefile on a separate partition on the same physical drive as your OS or on a totally separate drive?

[juppy]

I've heard its generally better to keep it on a secondary drive in your system, if you have one. By having it on the SAME drive, whether in a different partition or the same partition, you're still going to have the delay of seek times for the heads to find the page file and access it. If it's on a second drive though, the heads of that drive *may not* move from the previous time you accessed it, since most of the other data seeking is going on in your primary drive. Most places that you find this info will tell you to leave a small amount of page file on the primary drive too, usually an initial size of 2 Meg with a maximum of 50 Meg, just for what they term "emergency situations", and so the OS doesn't totally disregard your page file settings if the primary page file is set to zero (in which case it'll either revert to no page file or it'll make a large one on your main drive, which by default is 1.5 X your installed RAM).

[Statica]

It is definitely better to have your pagefile on a secondary drive, or even a different partition on your system drive. There is usually a conflict in I/O access between having to read from the pagefile and having to read system files.

Addendum - Good read: http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/.../pagefile.html


Rave - I moved your query to a new thread here as it was unrelated.

[TwoRails]

Having it on a second drive can be a good idea, but it would have to be on a second physical drive, not just on a separate partition / logical drive. Setting a Min amount is useful as it helps keep the file from being fragmented. With Win98.2 setting a Max size always gave me trouble, but haven't experience any with XP.

There always seems to be a great debate on this topic, but with modern hard drives and CPUs, I find no "real" difference from a "Windows Managed" swap file on the primary drive versus custom file on a different drive: they are just darn fast anymore.

One trick I still do is delete the file, defrag, reset the file with a Min size, then re-set it to Windows Managed. This gives one contiguous file. Mine as not been fragmented in years this way and I do everything from gaming to ediiting / making (home) movies and the like.

edit... dang, I've got to type faster!! There's one missing post and one new one since I started this!

[Panama Red]

MS's explanation:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...&Product=winxp

[Statica]

The absolute best performance I've got out of the paging file is by running it on a ramdisk. If you've got ample RAM on your system create a ramdisk as a separate partition .. run the page file, internet cache, windows temp directory .. all of it on a ramdisk (the old Win2k ramdisk driver works quite well). Other than the obvious speed, it also reduces disk fragmentation tremendously and doesn't force you to keep having to clean out the directories.

[TwoRails]

With Win 98.2 I had a separate physical drive with it's own partition for the swap file. The link's suggestion to use a separate partition is sound, but I disagree with it if it's on the same physical drive as the OS / boot drive.

Why? It makes no difference as the system can read/write to only on partition at a time on the same channel. It doesn't matter if you have 3 partitions / logical drives on the same physical drive, the read / write will occur sequentially either way. If the file is on a physically separate drive, then read / writes can occur in parallel. So I think it's misleading just to say "different partition."

Edit: Dang! I really do have to learn to type faster Statica got another one in while I was typing -- Ya, RAM drives are a good thing.

[IonicBond]

I keep my swap file on a physical disk that is different from the OS disk. I made a small partition on Disk 1 just for the swap file while Disk 0 contains my OS partition. My system has been running smoothly without any problems. Maybe the difference is psychological but I 'feel' that the system is slightly faster than when I had a single disk setup.

[alanebro82]

Is there a performance "hit" if I have mine disabled? I have 2 gigs of RAM and have never exceeded 500-800 MB being used at a time.

[LeftyAce]

No. If your computer goes outside the 2GB of physical ram I think it will crash though, because there's no pagefile to overflow into. (Windows may be smart enough to create on in this situation).