system page file

[badboy 0]

According to Microsofts white paper on tweaking Windows 2000 if you have a second hard drives they recommend storeing your system page file on you second drive which makes Windows run faster does anybody know where this file is stored or how to do this !!!

[LM 0]

right click on My Computer,

Properties,

Advanced,

Performance options(?)

allows you to set page file size on all your drives or partitions

I believe there would be a greater perfomance increase if the second hard drive was on a different IDE channel

[badboy 0]

Thanks for the advice I have moved my swap file to my other hard drive I will see if I get a performance gain I have set a minimum of 500mb and a max of 1000mb is that to large !!!!

[FrogMaster 0]

LM is right.

Put your pagefile on another drive, if possible the fastest of your setup, on a separate channel.

I have Win2K system on the first partition of HD 1 on ide 1 and the swap file on another drive on channel 1 of ATA66 : fast and clean swaps

[LM 0]

the 500-1000 page file is probably overkill...how much physical RAM do you have?

after using your system for a while, check the max memory usage, then you can set the page file so that your physical ram + page file is a bit larger than your max memory usage

 

 

[This message has been edited by LM (edited 06 May 2000).]

[badboy 0]

I have 256mb pc100 sdram windows recommends a minimum page file of 382mb and a max 764mb, memory usage is 160060k / 1021700k this is after running for a while.

[YuppieScum 0]

It's a good idea to set the page/swap file to a single size for both min and max - that way it doesn't fragment.

 

Unless, of course, you dedicate an entire drive to it...

[Arin 0]

I have an old cold war craptastic 200 meg hardrive... should i put that in there as a slave to my cdr and make that deticated to swap? would that speed stuff up?

[CUViper 0]

no, putting it on a 200 meg drive would probably be worse than if it were fragmented. A drive that old is probably WAY slow, and you want the swap file to be as fast as possible.

[YuppieScum 0]

If using IDE, don't have other devices on the swap channel - especially if it is a CDR, unless you need more coasters.

[badboy 0]

Is it better then that I set the the swap file to a minimum of 328mb and a maximum of 328 mb on the other drive to stop fragmentation.

[DosFreak 2]

yes

[badboy 0]

To you gentlemen I take off my hat thankyou.

[Maniac_NL 0]

Some programs doesn't work when you put your pagefile on a other drive

[Dragon-Lord 0]

Excuse me? Could you be a bit more specific? I find it hard to believe that any program could have problems with the location of the page file, since the OS handles memory allocation (virtual versus real), not the program itself...

 

What's the scoop?

 

:}

[badboy 0]

I have put the page file on my other drive and everything seems to to fine so far if any thing an increase in performance.

[Maniac_NL 0]

mostly games

example need for speed 5

 

(i know, it's just a game)

[LM 0]

yeah, can you provide more information...have you tested this? NFS5 works better or worse depending on where the page file is located??

the program wouldn't even know the difference between page file and physical memory, so I don't understand how this would affect it

[Dragon-Lord 0]

yes, I still don't believe that there can be any connection. Programs don't access VM, only the system does.

 

Perhaps there can be issues with using a page file on the same drive as a drive-intensive game, but that would be a different issue.

 

:}

[clutch 1]

Ideally you don't want to put the swap file on the same partition/drive as one with high I/O activity (namely the system partition). I put my pagefile on a different partition on this machine and on a different RAID5 array on my server here and the servers at work. There are some trade-offs to keep in mind though. Say, if you had 2HDs with one partition each. You would have the system root on one and maybe SQL7 on another. I wouldn't recommend putting the pagefile on the same partition as the SQL7 install due to constant activity. I usually locate the pagefile on a non-system partition that is more file-only based. No constantly running apps accessing it, just files that may get hit on a moderate basis.

 

------------------

Regards,

 

clutch

[YuppieScum 0]

Also, putting the page file on a slave device where the game/OS is on the master in an IDE environment is very, very bad indeed - due to the single device/blocking nature of IDE. This might explain bad performance...

 

Damn. 600 posts and I'm STILL not "The Man".

[clutch 1]

Maybe you can get a "stud" classification instead.

 

 

------------------

Regards,

 

clutch

[Maniac_NL 0]

Yeah LM i tested it and when i reset my pagefile size, he worked again

i got 128mb of ram and have to use a page off max 400 mb

or NFS 5 wount run anymore

[mickbench 0]

If you have two drives, both drives on the primary IDE channel, and your CD Drive on the second IDE, with W2K installed on your system partition, its a good idea to use the second drive. Even though its slaved from your primary hard disk.

 

The NT Memory Model is handled by the Kernel Mode, where as Apps are handled by a user mode, and thus, apps don't have control of VM or swapfiles.

 

When you run an app in NT, the Virtual Memory Model gives apps what appears to be 4GB of memory. Well in fact thats 2GB for the Apps and 2GB for the O/S. Demand paging file...

 

So it allocates more memory then is actually contained in the computer...

 

My point is, that apps have no control of this, the NT Kernel takes care of this, so any app will still function, no matter where the Pagefile may be located...

 

The idea behind the paging file is to enable you to swap between more applications then your system may have memory to run...

 

If you have say word and excel open, and you haven't used word for some time, this gets put into the swap file, and excel is given more actual memory...

 

Word is still running, but actually stored on the hard drive and not physical memory...

 

So saying that an app won't run because the swapfile is located somewhere other then the system partition is like saying my word document won't load as Word is installed on the wrong partition...

 

Now to get corrected by someone..!!!

[badboy 0]

Since I put the page file on my other hard drive no problems what so ever. Windows allocated a minimum of 382mb so I made the page file a minimum of 382mb and a maximum of 382mb and Works great.