commander
December 11th, 2001, 09:43 AM
In Windows NT, the usuall setting for pagefile size is the amount of memory + 12. would the system run faster or slower, if the setting was twice the amount of memory? <img src="confused.gif" border="0">
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tha 4NiK8R
December 11th, 2001, 10:22 AM
um...faster...it is always best to put the intial pagefile on the C: and any extended pagefile on a separate physical disk.
confus-ed
December 12th, 2001, 04:13 AM
Mmmm, indeed. Where do you get the idea that the 'ideal' size for a swap file is system memory + 12?
The only reason I can think is that you want to be able to dump memory on a crash(Small dump is 12), which would be just about right.
There is no real right answer for this. The only thing you can say for sure is that more memory = more speed.
How many pagefiles are we talking? This isn't 9x where we have one, we have a system pagefile, a printerspooler pagefile, application pagefiles etc.
NT works it out itself, or you can set the values yourself, if you know what effect it will have, but as a rule of thumb I'd say you want about 1.5-2.0 times physical memory. Where you have multiple disks the situation is more complex, if all the disks are roughly the same speed, then again rule of thumb says seperate disks for each pagefile. But now you need to estimate the size for each file, again this is almost impossible to estimate without some system insight.
Making the pagefile bigger and bigger may not be the answer, infact once you get past about 3 almost all systems will run slower, as the time to write to disk becomes too big an overhead. Remember that you are replacing something with an access time of milliseconds with something that takes at least that long to just find it, not read it as well.
Just a crumb of comfort, I generally set the system pagefile to be the same as RAM, if I get memory errors, then I add more physical memory!
Its this simple ram is faster than your hard disk!But virtual memory is faster than none at all.
The only reason I can think is that you want to be able to dump memory on a crash(Small dump is 12), which would be just about right.
There is no real right answer for this. The only thing you can say for sure is that more memory = more speed.
How many pagefiles are we talking? This isn't 9x where we have one, we have a system pagefile, a printerspooler pagefile, application pagefiles etc.
NT works it out itself, or you can set the values yourself, if you know what effect it will have, but as a rule of thumb I'd say you want about 1.5-2.0 times physical memory. Where you have multiple disks the situation is more complex, if all the disks are roughly the same speed, then again rule of thumb says seperate disks for each pagefile. But now you need to estimate the size for each file, again this is almost impossible to estimate without some system insight.
Making the pagefile bigger and bigger may not be the answer, infact once you get past about 3 almost all systems will run slower, as the time to write to disk becomes too big an overhead. Remember that you are replacing something with an access time of milliseconds with something that takes at least that long to just find it, not read it as well.
Just a crumb of comfort, I generally set the system pagefile to be the same as RAM, if I get memory errors, then I add more physical memory!
Its this simple ram is faster than your hard disk!But virtual memory is faster than none at all.
commander
December 12th, 2001, 07:56 AM
Hi Confus_ed
I got the 'idea' of how big the page file should be from any of the MS training manuals I've read & from some of the exams I've written. Any thoughts on this are welcome. My understanding is that if the page file is bigger, it tends to slow the system down because of the extra writing to disk that is being done.
I got the 'idea' of how big the page file should be from any of the MS training manuals I've read & from some of the exams I've written. Any thoughts on this are welcome. My understanding is that if the page file is bigger, it tends to slow the system down because of the extra writing to disk that is being done.
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