Virtual Memory / Paging

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sinj

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Hi all

Quick question, with 6gigs of ram, would things run smoothly If i turned off the paging file? What about maybe 12 gigs? Only real hectic thing I do with pc is a bit of gaming.

Shot
 
sinj said:
Hi all

Quick question, with 6gigs of ram, would things run smoothly If i turned off the paging file? What about maybe 12 gigs? Only real hectic thing I do with pc is a bit of gaming.

Shot
Click to expand...

Windows, esp. vista, needs a page file. There's lots of fud around this subject. Google it. After reading 10 million words, turning your page file off and on and resizing it a half dozen times depending on whose authoritative advice you read, you'll end up after a week or so with:

1) Grey hair.

2) Strained eyes.

3) The default* "let windows manage my virtual memory" setting.

4) The "been there, done that, got the T-shirt" feeling.

5) :) :D :confused: ;) :rolleyes: :o :p

(edit: *XP's default is 1.5 times your physical memory. Can't remember the vista default setting, I've changed it so often:)
 
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Some programs actually require the presence of a paging file. If you have lots of ram and fast hard disks, and the "kernel non-paged" registry tweak you'll be fine with it enabled.
 
On Vista I turned off my virtual paging too. Vista tended to ignore the fact that I had ample RAM and decided to burn into my paging file and it slowed down my computer considerably. If you have more than 4GB of RAM and you don't quite use all of that, definitely turn off your paging file.
 
In the old days virtual memory was needed to swap pages from you systems extended memory to make use for active applications. This was because RAM was very expensive and you never had enough.

These days we do have a lot more RAM at our disposal but the architecture of modern OSes (especially windows 7) are heavily reliant on virtual memory.

The rule of thumb regarding MS OSes is that your virtual memory should be 1.5x your system memory. So I have a 6GB page file and 4GB RAM.
 
Grouter said:
Windows, esp. vista, needs a page file. There's lots of fud around this subject. Google it. After reading 10 million words, turning your page file off and on and resizing it a half dozen times depending on whose authoritative advice you read, you'll end up after a week or so with:

1) Grey hair.

2) Strained eyes.

3) The default* "let windows manage my virtual memory" setting.

4) The "been there, done that, got the T-shirt" feeling.

5) :) :D :confused: ;) :rolleyes: :o :p

(edit: *XP's default is 1.5 times your physical memory. Can't remember the vista default setting, I've changed it so often:)
Click to expand...

Yep - 100%. Do NOT turn of your virtual memory. never ever.

Here are a couple of notes & Tips:

Turning it off won't make windows faster. Windows will use your RAM mostly before ever going to swapfile anyway, forcing it to use RAM only sounds good - but isn't the best idea.

My Suggestion:
Turn off Virtual Memory for your C: Hard Drive, and turn it on for your D:, E:, F:, G:, etc....

Id say You could use it on C: if it is an SSD Drive. otherwise, keep it away from the drive with your Windows on it.

Also disable it from growing and shrinking.

EDIT: and when I say put it on all your other drives except C:, I mean *Physical* hard drives. never put it on D: AND E: if it's the same drive which is partitioned.
 
Yep, sort of as per keepers advice, herewith my machine:

picture.php
 
Thanx guys, quite a few feelings out there

Keeper said:
My Suggestion:
Turn off Virtual Memory for your C: Hard Drive, and turn it on for your D:, E:, F:, G:, etc....
Click to expand...

That is another thing I've always thought about, I have three non os drives, should the page file be split 3gigs per drive (6gigs*1.5/3). If I left it at 9gigs (or 9201mb: vista's suggestion) on on drive, what initial size should i set?

Thanx again
 
No - I would not split it over 3 drives. With your physical ram, I'd be giving vista a single 3 GB pagefile on the fastest of the drives. Too big a pagefile can also be a performance sapper. Experiment.

edit: and don't forget to reboot after changing it, finding the old pagefile and deleting it (you'll have to enable hidden files to find it in the root of the drive). Defragging programs tend to shy away from "pagefile.sys" even if it's been made redundant. Windows will not, often enough, delete your old pagefile after you've created a new one. Then it can get a little confused.

My MO is to: Set no page file in advanced options. Reboot. Delete all instances of "pagefile.sys" on all drives. Defrag. Set a pagefile on the fastest non-OS drive. Reboot.
 
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froot said:
On Vista I turned off my virtual paging too. Vista tended to ignore the fact that I had ample RAM and decided to burn into my paging file and it slowed down my computer considerably. If you have more than 4GB of RAM and you don't quite use all of that, definitely turn off your paging file.
Click to expand...

I believe if you were to read up on the subject you may find you're wrong. Can't think of any other way to say that more nicely. :)
 
You don't need that big of a paging file - i'd say 1 - 1.5 GB on each of your non-OS drives should be good.

Paging Files on Multiple Hard Drives (Physical, not virtual) produce RAID-like performance on your swapfile, even If you don't have a RAID, as all of them are used in parallel (They don't fill up one-by-one)

Please note again though - these MUST be different, *actual* drives - If your D and E is actually the same hard drive, it's gonna slow it down - so make sure.
 
Strange that people are running no page files and their systems are fine, yet we still have Nazi's that deny this.
 
Cool thanx all, will try play around with all the advice, just only problem is I'm not sure how I'll see the difference, on a bad day my usage goes up to 2.5 gigs.
 
mercurial said:
Strange that people are running no page files and their systems are fine, yet we still have Nazi's that deny this.
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Well, for what it's worth:

Contrary to popular opinion, virtual memory is not simply a slow extention to physical memory, and best disabled if at all possible. Virtual memory is a system that combines physical RAM and disk storage in such a way that gives the advantages of both and minimizes their disadvantages. This is done is such a way as to be completely transparent to applications.

Some popular misconceptions.
1. The pagefile is virtual memory. Not only is this incorrect but it leads to further misconceptions. The pagefile is only a part of virtual memory.

2. Disabling the pagefile disables virtual memory. Virtual memory can not be disabled in any modern operating system. In Windows, applications use it exclusively, always, no exceptions.

3. Virtual memory is slow. When an application accesses memory it is accessing physical RAM, only not directly. Memory is accessed through the memory management hardware in the CPU. The data and code an application uses may be stored in program files, the pagefile, or RAM. When accessed the data is brought into RAM, where is is retained for as long as possible. Only when RAM is needed for other purposes the data be removed from physical memory.

The pagefile actually enhances performance. It is used to store rarely used data, thus leaving more RAM available for more important uses. Without a pagfile this data must remain in RAM, no matter how rarely used it might be. This will not disable paging as program code, DLL's etc., do not go to the pagefile. They are simply reloaded from the original file. Disabling the pagefile unbalances the memory management system and impaires performance. There may be cases when disabling the pagefile will give the perception of improved performance but they are relatively rare.

My best recommendations for managing the pagefile: Keep it on system managed. This applies to both beginners and very advanced users. Windows designers understand virtual memory better than you do. Let the sytem work the way it was designed.

Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA
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The article's fine etc... but my point is that action speaks louder than words. There are people running their systems without pagefiles and have not experienced any issues. So why should be still use them if we have tons of RAM and no apparent issues?
 
Can the Virtual Memory be turned off on a really large machine?

Strictly speaking Virtual Memory is always in operation and cannot be “turned off.” What is meant by such wording is “set the system to use no page file space at all.”

Doing this would waste a lot of the RAM. The reason is that when programs ask for an allocation of Virtual memory space, they may ask for a great deal more than they ever actually bring into use — the total may easily run to hundreds of megabytes. These addresses have to be assigned to somewhere by the system. If there is a page file available, the system can assign them to it — if there is not, they have to be assigned to RAM, locking it out from any actual use.
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http://www.online-tech-tips.com/com...uters-performace-configuring-the-paging-file/

http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

Edit: lol I see i'm too slow - damn you Grouter!
 
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mercurial said:
The article's fine etc... but my point is that action speaks louder than words. There are people running their systems without pagefiles and have not experienced any issues. So why should be still use them if we have tons of RAM and no apparent issues?
Click to expand...

Another copy/paste from the How-to Geek:

"but Task Manager is still reporting that it's using some ~500mb of pagefile space. What is this?"

That's Windows creating a dynamic pagefile. It will ignore your manual settings if those settings are 0 or anything less than what Windows needs.

For example, about 10 years ago someone posted at Anand's that some game (I believe it was the original UT) was crashing within minutes of playing. Once he re-enabled his swap file, the crashing disappeared.

Far too many people thought that they could increase performance by disabling the swap file. In theory, this should work. But in actual practice, this "tweak" led to massive system instability: both Win9x and apps/games relied on the existence of the swap file.

Microsoft learned from this mistake. So the pagefile was designed to always exist, and at the amount needed, regardless of manual settings. If you think you see a perf increase after "disabling" the page file, rest assured that it's only an illusion…because the pagefile is still there. And don't believe that forcing a small pagefile will work and place more of the load on the RAM: if the pagefile is too small, Windows will dynamically make it larger.

For the majority, allowing Windows to control the pagefile is best practice.

For power users looking for another 5% bump, a superior tweak is to make the pagefile permanent and at twice the amount of system memory installed (the old 1.5x recommendation is only best for 3.1 and Win9x…on NT systems, 2x is optimal).

For another boost, if you have a second hard drive that is on its own channel (i.e. the two drives do not share a single cable, such as both are SATA drives), you can move your permanent pagefile to that second hard drive, and set the primary drive to 0. This reduces the workload of the heads on the primary drive, because it's no longer reading/writing to the pagefile, which gives another couple of percentage points boost in perf. Note that the second drive should be as fast (or faster) than the primary drive to see optimal perf increase.
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