Best setting for Swap files ( paging files ) please

[beammeup]

Hi,

My win 2000 SP3 system was built solely for video editing etc in mind.
I use dual athlon mp2400's, 1 gig ram and 4 x 120 gig 7200 drives.

Does anyone know much about swap files.

I've noticed that the C drive has a 1500mg paging file allocated
but the E, F & G drives do not.

Should I give them each a 1500mg paging file as well ???

Thanks
any info appreciated
scott

[bugster]

Moved your question to the Computer Forum
/Moderator Bugster

and AFAIK, the answer to your question is NO, you only need 1 swap file, but you may want to consider moving the swap file to a disk other than C:

[Roderz]

AFAIK windoze only uses 1 pagefile
The way I set mine up is
Primary drive, 2 partitions c: (60gig for os+progs), d: (100gig for working material)
other drives for dedicated capture + storage
then set page file to a MINIMUM of 1 gig (defraged drive first with swap file disabled) so when the swap file is made it's a continuos unfraged space on the OS drive.

[808smokey]

Read this:
http://theeldergeek.com/paging_file.htm
and this:
http://theeldergeek.com/physically_setting_the_page_file_size.htm

at the bottom of those pages there's more links
basically it says:
1. Locate the Pagefile on non-OS partition with infrequent access.
2. Make the virtual memory/pagefile, should be 1.5x larger than physical RAM 756MB (RAM) would be 1152MB(virtual)

[Capmaster]

Also .....set the minimum and maximum size for the swapfile to be the same. If you leave the size up to Windows it'll constantly be adjusting it and you'll quickly be in fragmentation hell. Set it the same and it'll never be changed in size. After setting up run a defragger that'll also defrag the swapfile, like Norton Speed Disk.

[Roderz]

set the minimum and maximum size for the swapfile to be the same

No, do not set the maximum other wise what is windoze gonna use when it runs out of ram and swapfile?
Set it to a large minimum (why I set at least 1gig continuious drive space)

[northcat_8]

set the minimum and maximum size for the swapfile to be the same

No, do not set the maximum other wise what is windoze gonna use when it runs out of ram and swapfile?
Set it to a large minimum (why I set at least 1gig continuious drive space)

Then you are wasting space. Common thoughts regarding page file is 2 - 2.5 times the amount of RAM you have.

Setting min and max to the same value prevents fragmentation.

[Roderz]

Then you are wasting space

I can spare it

Setting min and max to the same value prevents fragmentation

true, but what happens if windows reaches the max and runs out!
thats why I have a large (defraged / continuious) swap file and no limit (not that it goes above 1gig often)

[Capmaster]

Then you are wasting space

I can spare it

Setting min and max to the same value prevents fragmentation

true, but what happens if windows reaches the max and runs out!
thats why I have a large (defraged / continuious) swap file and no limit (not that it goes above 1gig often)

Probably not an issue unless you make a habit of having 25 or 30 applications open at once. :P I've never had Windows run out of the combined RAM/Swapfile. And even if you have 30 apps running, it's worth the risk not to have a 1MB file located in 1500 different, non-contiguous sectors on the HD

[Jukka]

Is the swap file accessed in a serial fashion or random, if random would it make sense to have 2-3 swap files of 1 gig on D, E & F to gain some kind of 'parallel access' improvement. Or am I just hoping that Windows is more sophisticated than it is??

Jukka

[Jayhawk]

Is the swap file accessed in a serial fashion or random, if random would it make sense to have 2-3 swap files of 1 gig on D, E & F to gain some kind of 'parallel access' improvement. Or am I just hoping that Windows is more sophisticated than it is??

You are, and it's not. It will only use one swap file and several of the posters nailed the appropriate steps.

In my opinion (pretty much agrees with others):
First set the swap file to NO SWAP File
Reboot
Close all of your apps and run defrag on the drive you're going to put it.
(Non-OS drive preferably). This will get rid of your old swap file and give you contiguous space for the new one).
After defrag, Set your Swap file size and location. The size should be 1.5 to 2.0 your RAM. 2.5 is OK if you have the space and not much RAM. I have a gig or RAM and my swap file is set to a gig. Set the minimum and maximum THE SAME. If you don't Windows will "manage it" and it will become fragmented.
Reboot when done.

[sterno]

Some versions of Windows can and will use multiple pagefiles. However, you will only see a real benefit if you have multiple high-speed drives that can be accessed simultaneously in an efficient manner. Systems with IDE drives probably won't see an improvement.

[northcat_8]

Roderz -

Even though I have 3072 MB in my pagefile, rarely does it use over 500 MB of it. I have 1 GB of PC2700 RAM.

Just for fun, I opened several high memory apps, Studio 8, Premiere, After Effects, Bryce 5, Photoshop, TDA, TMPGEnc Plus, Word, Excel and Publisher, while playing a DVD in WinDVD and only used 762 MB of my pagefile...now I believe in multi tasking but I don't think anyone would ever want or need to use all of those programs simultaneously. I could've started a project in each one but I don't have time right now...lol.

[Roderz]

That the reason I set it to 1gig - It'll probably never go over that - and stay as 1 contiguous / unfragmented file.

[Capmaster]

Microsoft says this about swapfiles across several drives:

Managing computer memory
When your computer is running low on RAM and more is needed immediately, Windows uses hard drive space to simulate system RAM. This is known as virtual memory, and is often called the paging file This is similar to the UNIX swapfile. The default size of the virtual memory pagefile (named pagefile.sys) created during installation is 1.5 times the amount of RAM on your computer.

You can optimize virtual memory use by dividing the space between multiple drives and removing it from slower or heavily accessed drives. To best optimize your virtual memory space, divide it among as many physical hard drives as possible. When selecting drives, keep the following guidelines in mind:

Try to avoid having a pagefile on the same drive as the system files.
Avoid putting a pagefile on a fault-tolerant drive, such as a mirrored volume or a RAID-5 volume Pagefiles don't need fault-tolerance, and some fault-tolerant systems suffer from slow data writes because they write data to multiple locations.
Don't place multiple pagefiles on different partitions on the same physical disk drive.

The page is at:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp?url=/WINDOWSXP..._perf_mgmt.asp