Page File Query

[Dave Gillingham]

I'm new to XP. In 98SE the standard wisdom seemed to be to keep your
swap file on a separate logical drive of its own, with some debate
over size. What is the advice for Win XP SP2?
My relevant system specs are:
Processor: P4 3 GHz
RAM: 2 x 512 as dual channel
HDD: 160 GB parallel ATA 133; 8 MB cache

Dave Gillingham

 

[David Candy]

It doesn't matter. You'll be virtually not using your swap. And it is always a seperate drive not a logical drive.

 

[André Gulliksen]

I'm new to XP. In 98SE the standard wisdom seemed to be to keep your
swap file on a separate logical drive of its own, with some debate
over size. What is the advice for Win XP SP2?
My relevant system specs are:
Processor: P4 3 GHz
RAM: 2 x 512 as dual channel
HDD: 160 GB parallel ATA 133; 8 MB cache

If a pagefile grows on a populated volume it might get fragmented, causing a
performance hit. This can be circumvented in two ways:

1) Use a separate page partition.

2) Set the minimum size of your pagefile high enough, so your pagefile
rarely, if ever, grows.

So yes, you can use a separate partition. But I don't think it is necessary,
especially not in your case. You have a gig of RAM, so unless you do some
very heavy computing you should not need much paging at all. Unfortunately
some Windows applications and system calls seem to malfunction if there is
no page/swap, no matter how much RAM you have, so you will probably need at
least a small pagefile. But apart from that you should be set.

My advice would be to partition your drive in at least two (maybe three)
partitions. First a relatively small C:, max 20 GB, for Windows and system
files. Then a larger D: for applications. And then maybe even an E: for data
storage. The reason for this is that your drive is fastest at the beginning
of the user space, and slower at the end. Thus you want Windows and the
pagefile on your fastest volume, which is C:. After installation (and of
course a full run of updating, including SP2) turn off the pagefile and
hibernation, defragment C: and then reenable hibernation if you think you
will use it. Then make a pagefile with an initial size of 512-1024 MB and a
maximum size of whatever you think will be free on C:. Every once in a while
when running heavy programs (I don't know what you're into, but video
editing, professional image editing or certain games might do it for you)
check the task manager and see how much page file usage it reports. If it
ever grows larger than the minimum you specified you might consider
increasing the initial value. If not, I would leave it.

Also, if you ever install a second physical drive, you might want to put
another pagefile on the first partition of it. This way any pagefile usage
will be split across two physical drives, which should increase page
performance.

Personally I have 512 MB RAM, and two pagefiles on two physical drives with
initial sizes of 512 MB each. And I have never noticed any of them growing
above this.

 

[Sharon F]

I'm new to XP. In 98SE the standard wisdom seemed to be to keep your
swap file on a separate logical drive of its own, with some debate
over size. What is the advice for Win XP SP2?
My relevant system specs are:
Processor: P4 3 GHz
RAM: 2 x 512 as dual channel
HDD: 160 GB parallel ATA 133; 8 MB cache

Dave Gillingham

With one physical drive and a good amount of RAM, I would leave the
pagefile at its default settings. A primer on WinXP's virtual memory can be
found here: http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Win98 only kept the page file on a separate drive if the user specifically
set it up that way. Same with XP. The primary gain with using a separate
drive for the page file is to reduce head movement on the system drive. The
more memory you have in your system, the less gain there is in doing this.
You do not get any gain from putting the page file on a separate partition
of the same drive. To benefit, you need two internal hard drives with the
system on one and the page file on the other. Do not use an external or
removable drive for the page file.

 

[Richard Urban]

One thing that people miss is this. Each IDE channel has one IRQ to share
among 2 possible installed drives. The two drives on this channel will
read/write sequentially. If drive 0 is reading there is no writing on drive
0 or drive 1, until the IDE controller shares out the disk activity or the
reading on drive 0 is completed. Thus, placing the pagefile on the second
drive (drive 1) of the same IDE controller gains you "nothing"!

Now, if you place the pagefile on drive 2 (attached to the secondary IDE
controller) the pagefile can be written to or read from "concurrently" with
any action on drive 0 (which is usually where the operating system is
installed) or on drive 1.

This will definitely give you a perceptible performance gain. I have tested
the various combinations repeatedly over the past 3 years while burning
CD's, ripping CD's, rendering large PhotoShop files, working with huge
AutoCAD files and converting video files. The place for the pagefile to be
is on a separate drive on another IDE controller from the operating system.
Any active programs and associated working files should be on another
controller from the pagefile also.

Because of this I have always installed the operating system, Office and any
necessary utilities (those programs that I would never run without) on drive
0. All my other programs are installed on drive 1 (both on the same IDE
controller channel). My page file is always installed either on drive 2 or
drive 3 on the second IDE controller channel.

I have set up many multiple dozens of clients computers the same way and
they have all been extremely pleased with the outcome!

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

Win98 only kept the page file on a separate drive if the user specifically
set it up that way. Same with XP. The primary gain with using a separate
drive for the page file is to reduce head movement on the system drive.
The more memory you have in your system, the less gain there is in doing
this. You do not get any gain from putting the page file on a separate
partition of the same drive. To benefit, you need two internal hard
drives with the system on one and the page file on the other. Do not use
an external or removable drive for the page file.

--
Colin Barnhorst [MVP Windows - Virtual Machine]

I'm new to XP. In 98SE the standard wisdom seemed to be to keep your
swap file on a separate logical drive of its own, with some debate
over size. What is the advice for Win XP SP2?
My relevant system specs are:
Processor: P4 3 GHz
RAM: 2 x 512 as dual channel
HDD: 160 GB parallel ATA 133; 8 MB cache

Dave Gillingham

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

You are correct. I have not bothered moving the page file for a couple of
years because I use a fast system with 2GB of ram and SATA drives now and I
just am not displeased with performance. I did use a 20GB second IDE drive
for the page file on a previous machine but I was using a Promise ATA133 PCI
controller so everything was asynchronious; but I had forgotten that until
you mentioned it. Thanks for the reminder.

--
Colin Barnhorst [MVP Windows - Virtual Machine]

One thing that people miss is this. Each IDE channel has one IRQ to share
among 2 possible installed drives. The two drives on this channel will
read/write sequentially. If drive 0 is reading there is no writing on
drive 0 or drive 1, until the IDE controller shares out the disk activity
or the reading on drive 0 is completed. Thus, placing the pagefile on the
second drive (drive 1) of the same IDE controller gains you "nothing"!

Now, if you place the pagefile on drive 2 (attached to the secondary IDE
controller) the pagefile can be written to or read from "concurrently"
with any action on drive 0 (which is usually where the operating system is
installed) or on drive 1.

This will definitely give you a perceptible performance gain. I have
tested the various combinations repeatedly over the past 3 years while
burning CD's, ripping CD's, rendering large PhotoShop files, working with
huge AutoCAD files and converting video files. The place for the pagefile
to be is on a separate drive on another IDE controller from the operating
system. Any active programs and associated working files should be on
another controller from the pagefile also.

Because of this I have always installed the operating system, Office and
any necessary utilities (those programs that I would never run without) on
drive 0. All my other programs are installed on drive 1 (both on the same
IDE controller channel). My page file is always installed either on drive
2 or drive 3 on the second IDE controller channel.

I have set up many multiple dozens of clients computers the same way and
they have all been extremely pleased with the outcome!

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

Win98 only kept the page file on a separate drive if the user
specifically set it up that way. Same with XP. The primary gain with
using a separate drive for the page file is to reduce head movement on
the system drive. The more memory you have in your system, the less gain
there is in doing this. You do not get any gain from putting the page
file on a separate partition of the same drive. To benefit, you need two
internal hard drives with the system on one and the page file on the
other. Do not use an external or removable drive for the page file.

--
Colin Barnhorst [MVP Windows - Virtual Machine]

I'm new to XP. In 98SE the standard wisdom seemed to be to keep your
swap file on a separate logical drive of its own, with some debate
over size. What is the advice for Win XP SP2?
My relevant system specs are:
Processor: P4 3 GHz
RAM: 2 x 512 as dual channel
HDD: 160 GB parallel ATA 133; 8 MB cache

Dave Gillingham

 

[Richard Urban]

You're very welcome!

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

You are correct. I have not bothered moving the page file for a couple of
years because I use a fast system with 2GB of ram and SATA drives now and
I just am not displeased with performance. I did use a 20GB second IDE
drive for the page file on a previous machine but I was using a Promise
ATA133 PCI controller so everything was asynchronious; but I had forgotten
that until you mentioned it. Thanks for the reminder.

--
Colin Barnhorst [MVP Windows - Virtual Machine]

One thing that people miss is this. Each IDE channel has one IRQ to share
among 2 possible installed drives. The two drives on this channel will
read/write sequentially. If drive 0 is reading there is no writing on
drive 0 or drive 1, until the IDE controller shares out the disk activity
or the reading on drive 0 is completed. Thus, placing the pagefile on the
second drive (drive 1) of the same IDE controller gains you "nothing"!

Now, if you place the pagefile on drive 2 (attached to the secondary IDE
controller) the pagefile can be written to or read from "concurrently"
with any action on drive 0 (which is usually where the operating system
is installed) or on drive 1.

This will definitely give you a perceptible performance gain. I have
tested the various combinations repeatedly over the past 3 years while
burning CD's, ripping CD's, rendering large PhotoShop files, working with
huge AutoCAD files and converting video files. The place for the pagefile
to be is on a separate drive on another IDE controller from the operating
system. Any active programs and associated working files should be on
another controller from the pagefile also.

Because of this I have always installed the operating system, Office and
any necessary utilities (those programs that I would never run without)
on drive 0. All my other programs are installed on drive 1 (both on the
same IDE controller channel). My page file is always installed either on
drive 2 or drive 3 on the second IDE controller channel.

I have set up many multiple dozens of clients computers the same way and
they have all been extremely pleased with the outcome!

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

Win98 only kept the page file on a separate drive if the user
specifically set it up that way. Same with XP. The primary gain with
using a separate drive for the page file is to reduce head movement on
the system drive. The more memory you have in your system, the less gain
there is in doing this. You do not get any gain from putting the page
file on a separate partition of the same drive. To benefit, you need
two internal hard drives with the system on one and the page file on the
other. Do not use an external or removable drive for the page file.

--
Colin Barnhorst [MVP Windows - Virtual Machine]
I'm new to XP. In 98SE the standard wisdom seemed to be to keep your
swap file on a separate logical drive of its own, with some debate
over size. What is the advice for Win XP SP2?
My relevant system specs are:
Processor: P4 3 GHz
RAM: 2 x 512 as dual channel
HDD: 160 GB parallel ATA 133; 8 MB cache

Dave Gillingham

 

[Ken Blake]

In

I'm new to XP. In 98SE the standard wisdom seemed to be to
keep your
swap file on a separate logical drive of its own, with some
debate
over size.

No, it was poor "wisdom" in Windows 98, and remains poor advice
in Windows XP.

Putting the swap file (or page file) on a second partition on
your only physical drive puts it farther from the other
frequently-used data on the drive, increases head movement to and
from it (head movement is by far the slowest aspect of disk I/O),
and thereby slows down all use of the page file. It's the worst
place for it.

If you have more than one physical drive, moving the page file to
a second drive *is* generally a good thing to do, for the same
reason. It decreases head movement and speeds up using it (unless
less that second drive is much slower than the first one). As a
general rule of thumb, put the page file on the most-used
partition of the least-used physical drive. For almost everyone
with a single drive, that's C:\

What is the advice for Win XP SP2?
My relevant system specs are:
Processor: P4 3 GHz
RAM: 2 x 512 as dual channel
HDD: 160 GB parallel ATA 133; 8 MB cache

Overriding the above, in your case, with 1024MB of RAM, unless
the applications you run are extremely demanding, it's highly
unlikely that you will use the page file at all, or if you do, it
will be very seldom. So it hardly makes a difference where it is
or how large it is. As a general rule, it's good to make the
initial size small (100-200MB), but give it a very large maximum
so it can grow if it ever (even if unlikely) needs to.

Leave it where it is, and make it 100MB-2000MB. Or even leave the
Windows default, which is much more than you need, but other than
wasting a little disk space (which you would seem to have plenty
of) won't hurt you. For more info, read Alex Nichol's article,
"Virtual Memory in Windows XP," at
http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[null]

No, it was poor "wisdom" in Windows 98, and remains poor advice
in Windows XP.

Putting the swap file (or page file) on a second partition on
your only physical drive puts it farther from the other
frequently-used data on the drive, increases head movement to and
from it (head movement is by far the slowest aspect of disk I/O),
and thereby slows down all use of the page file. It's the worst
place for it.

Actually, if I remember my hard drive partition layout correctly from my
class at college, partitions (volumes) that don't use the entire drive
are 'pie-shaped', and thus - because the platter is in motion - the head
doesn't necessarily have to move any farther to (nor take any longer to
get to) any particular data on the swap file, than it would necessarily
have had to move had the swap file not been in a separate partition on
the same drive.

--
The reader should exercise normal caution and backup the Registry and
data files regularly, and especially before making any changes to their
PC, as well as performing regular virus and spyware scans. I am not
liable for problems or mishaps that occur from the reader using advice
posted here. No warranty, express or implied, is given with the posting
of this message.

 

[Dave Gillingham]

Thanks for the helpful responses. My understanding of the
recommendation to put Win98's swap file in its own partition was to
protect it from fragmentation - the defragmenter ignored the swap file
& left it fragmented. If WinXP's page file comes into play & becomes
fragmented, does the same problem occur?

I'm new to XP. In 98SE the standard wisdom seemed to be to keep your
swap file on a separate logical drive of its own, with some debate
over size. What is the advice for Win XP SP2?
My relevant system specs are:
Processor: P4 3 GHz
RAM: 2 x 512 as dual channel
HDD: 160 GB parallel ATA 133; 8 MB cache

Dave Gillingham

Dave Gillingham

 

[PaddyBob]

Hi Dave,

From experience it doesn't really matter if the SWAP file (with XP that is)
is on it's own partition. However, if you do have more than one partition,
the standard setting for the Pagefile is to spread this over multiple
partitions. Now this is a cause for fragmentation and also slower pagefile
access if either of these files is getting to its max size allowed. I'd
recommend (and again this is from experience) to put the pagefile on one
partition only and don't spread it. I'f you'd like fast access though, put
it on a separate harddrive, which is hardly used for anything else. (The
fastest is though, to put in enough RAM that you don't need any pagefile
whatsoever anymore...)

I hope this helped...

Cheers,

Robert

 

[André Gulliksen]

Thanks for the helpful responses. My understanding of the
recommendation to put Win98's swap file in its own partition was to
protect it from fragmentation - the defragmenter ignored the swap file
& left it fragmented. If WinXP's page file comes into play & becomes
fragmented, does the same problem occur?

Yes. The easiest way to prevent this is to set an initial size high enough
so the file hardly, if ever, grows.

To defrag an already fragged pagefile there are a couple of options:

1) Turn your page file _off_, reboot, run a full defrag and then turn your
pagefile back on.

2) Use a third party defragmenter capable of defragmenting files during
startup. http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pagedefrag.shtml is a
free program that does just this.

 

[Ken Blake]

In

Thanks for the helpful responses. My understanding of the
recommendation to put Win98's swap file in its own partition
was to
protect it from fragmentation - the defragmenter ignored the
swap file
& left it fragmented. If WinXP's page file comes into play &
becomes
fragmented, does the same problem occur?

Fragmentation of the swap (or page) file is seldom an important
consideration, since access to it tends to be random anyway.

However seek time, moving the drive heads from the commonly used
data on one partition to the separate page file partition *is* a
big factor and can slow you down substantially. Seek time is the
slowest aspect of using a hard drive.

For those reasons, with a single drive, it's better to keep the
page file in the same partition as Windows.

 

[Dave Gillingham]

Again, thanks for your help.

Thanks for the helpful responses. My understanding of the
recommendation to put Win98's swap file in its own partition was to
protect it from fragmentation - the defragmenter ignored the swap file
& left it fragmented. If WinXP's page file comes into play & becomes
fragmented, does the same problem occur?



Dave Gillingham

Dave Gillingham

 

[Alex Nichol]

I'm new to XP. In 98SE the standard wisdom seemed to be to keep your
swap file on a separate logical drive of its own, with some debate
over size. What is the advice for Win XP SP2?

With a single physical hard drive, leave it where it is. The important
thing is to reduce seek times by having it near other activities. And
old advice in 98 is going to mislead. Read my page
www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[Alex Nichol]

Actually, if I remember my hard drive partition layout correctly from my
class at college, partitions (volumes) that don't use the entire drive
are 'pie-shaped', and thus - because the platter is in motion - the head
doesn't necessarily have to move any farther to (nor take any longer to
get to) any particular data on the swap file, than it would necessarily
have had to move had the swap file not been in a separate partition on
the same drive.

Quite wrong with modern PC hard drives. That was from the days of IBM
mainframes

 

[Alex Nichol]

Thanks for the helpful responses. My understanding of the
recommendation to put Win98's swap file in its own partition was to
protect it from fragmentation - the defragmenter ignored the swap file
& left it fragmented. If WinXP's page file comes into play & becomes
fragmented, does the same problem occur?

Provided the initial size is big enough to handle all normal use, it
will not shrink and will not fragment. It was in Win95, where it was
constantly dynamically shrunk to the minimum needed at present that the
matter arose, and the conventional wisdom is a long time dying.
Fragmentation of the file is in any case far less important than is
sometimes made out with modern size RAM