Optomizing Windows 2000 Virtual Memory...check it!

I was tweaking out my box and I found some interesting information in the Windows Help file.

Micro$oft says to avoid putting the Virtual Memory on the system partition. So, should I resize my drive and create a new phisical partition for Virtual Memory only? Well, either way, I'm going to try it tommorow at work. Below is a exerpt from the MS help file on Virtual Memory...

Managing Computer Memory
When your computer is running low on RAM and more is needed immediately to complete your current task, Windows 2000 uses hard drive space to simulate system RAM. In Windows 2000, this is known as Virtual Memory, and often called the pagefile. This is similar to the UNIX swapfile. The default size of the virtual memory pagefile (appropriately 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 especially by removing it from slower or heavily accessed drives. To best optimize your virtual memory space, divide it across 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.

Cool. I know what I'm doing with my spare drive now...

I'm sorry to say that you won't see any noticable difference. As a matter of fact, depending on the size of your HD and the amount of free space you have, putting the pagefile on another partition might actually DECREASE your performance slightly.

The maximum amount of speed for hard disk access occurs with spanned archives, and to a slightly lesser extent, RAID-5 (as this is the same thing except that 1 extra bit is being written for every 2). Because (again, *ideally*) each HD can write at the same time, hard drive access performance is much better. This applies to pagefiles just as it applies to every other file on your hard drive. If you have 4 controllers writing to 4 drives, the 1 MB file that took 100ms to write to disk with 1 drive will only take 25ms with spanning or RAID-5. The same concept applies for reading information from the drive.

Now, in a situation where you have only two drives, putting the page file on the second drive *will* increase performance, because one drive can read the program files to load whatever program into memory, while the other disk is writing live memory onto the page file on the seperate disk. This tweak cannot be ported over to a single hard drive with to partitions. With partitioning the HD, you are still limited to one hard drive head to read and write to the drive, as opposed to two or more with the other mentioned methods. If the computer must track over to the end of the physical drive to access the pagefile, instead of it being in the same physical area as all of the other data it is processing, this would actually degrade performance if it was a big enough drive with enough free space to have to skip over.

If you only have one drive, the best way to optimize your pagefile is regularly defragging the harddrive, so that when the system does read info to and from the disk, the head doesn't have to adjust itself to the the correct track, sector, etc. as often. If you have multiple partitions already, then make a special partition that will serve as a mutual pagefile partition so that fragmentation becomes less of an issue, but the benefit of doing this is not very much if you only have 1 partition right now.

If you have two drives, and want to optimize virtual memory, put the pagefile on the second disk, and you'll also want to make sure that it's on a seperate IDE controller to ensure maximum results from the seperation. You will still see improvement if both drives are on the same controller, but not nearly as much as putting them on seperate controllers. Hope this helps you guys! <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">

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Originally posted by opiate:
<STRONG>I was tweaking out my box and I found some interesting information in the Windows Help file.

Micro$oft says to avoid putting the Virtual Memory on the system partition. So, should I resize my drive and create a new phisical partition for Virtual Memory only? Well, either way, I'm going to try it tommorow at work. Below is a exerpt from the MS help file on Virtual Memory...

Managing Computer Memory
When your computer is running low on RAM and more is needed immediately to complete your current task, Windows 2000 uses hard drive space to simulate system RAM. In Windows 2000, this is known as Virtual Memory, and often called the pagefile. This is similar to the UNIX swapfile. The default size of the virtual memory pagefile (appropriately 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 especially by removing it from slower or heavily accessed drives. To best optimize your virtual memory space, divide it across 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.</STRONG>

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Can yu give us the Exact link?

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Originally posted by ilovetheusers:
<STRONG>Cool. I know what I'm doing with my spare drive now...</STRONG>

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I says only on the same drive as the system partition. just resize your system partition and create a 500-800mb partition on it.

Have you read the swap file support page posted by WinDrivers.com?
http://www.windrivers.com/tech/swap.htm

I have two hard drives... Windoze on one, Linux on the other. Each hard drive has a swap file partition for the other hard drive. (Windows is on drive 1, Windows swap on drive 2, Linux on drive 2, Linux swap on drive 1.)

In the above article posted by WinDrivers, they say that the swap file should be placed on the fastest hard drive, which I think is true. Even if you had a second hard drive with the swap file on it, if that drive was slow, you wouldn't enjoy much speed increase. I think you'd be better off with the swap file on the system drive if it were a faster drive.

Now that I think about it, I should probably reconfigure my system now to have both swap files on drive 1 since it's faster. I'll try it out.

Also, defragging is always cool. Use Power Defrag: http://www.e-technik.com/pdefrag.html

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Originally posted by opiate:
<STRONG>

I says only on the same drive as the system partition. just resize your system partition and create a 500-800mb partition on it.</STRONG>

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Am I missing something here, last I knew a partition was not a drive.
some people should not bother...

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Originally posted by kannibul:
<STRONG>

Am I missing something here, last I knew a partition was not a drive.
some people should not bother...</STRONG>

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Gotta agree here. The article means a different HDD altogether, not a different partition.