Is a Swapfile needed when you have 1 gig of pc3200 ram?

[pr-man 1]

I have 1 gig of pc3200 ddr and 2 80 gig HDs in my system. Under winxp fo I really need a swapfile?

[AndyFair 0]

With a gig of RAM, it's possible to get away without using a swapfile.

However, some applications (Photoshop is one, I think) are funny about systems without a swapfile. I'm sure I also read somewhere that Quake3 also expects a swapfile, but I may just be making that up

Also, if you don't have a swapfile, Windows will be unable to save debug info when it crashes - but that's probably not a major consideration for you!

 

I would say that it's probably safer to setup a minimal (say 64Mb) swapfile rather than get rid of it completely - you'll avoid some of the stranger effects than if you dump it completely.

 

But that's just my opinion - better safe than sorry!

 

Rgds

AndyF

[jmitchel 0]

I don't remember where I read this or I'd give you the link.

 

General consensus is to put swap files on ALL physical hard drives with the range set to 1.5 to 3 times physical memory size. I say physical, because you don't want to put a swap file on every logical partition on a physical hard drive.

 

You're probably not running a server, but using this scenario I've seen server performance increases in most applications.

[kasandoro 0]

Windows WILL use a swapfile even if you turn it off. Windows cannot function without a swapfile...

 

I read that somewhere, but I can't find the link anymore.

[clutch 1]

If you disable, you will not see a pagefile.sys file any longer on any of your harddrives. As this is the pagefile that Windows uses, that would indicate to me that you have completely disabled it. As for the old rule of 1.5xRAM for your file size, I used to follow that rule up to a pagefile of 256MB in size. Having a file any bigger than that was pointless, as it would take up way too much drive space. In addition, you wanted it *off* of the same physical drive (or at least off of the same partition) as the OS and any other drive that had a lot of I/O activity (for example, a drive used for video editing would not be a good choice).

 

Now, with the current Windows OSs (especially Windows Server 2003) I have found the paging management and operation to be much improved over the old OSs to the point where I don't mess with it anymore. When I think to, I still cap the file to 256 (or 512 if the machine is doing image editing and the app doesn't support a separate scratch drive) just to get my drive space back.

[ooops 0]

Place a small pagefile on the other hard drive , the one where the OS DOES NOT reside.