Swap file size

[William Lurie]

I think I need to increase size of swap file. I have a monstrous file
(apparently greater than 1 GB) to download and it is taking intolerably
long. Using XP Home/ SP3 with 1.5 GB RAM. Plenty of empty space on the
hard drive.

Advice regarding the problem and how to increase swap file (if that's
the solution) will be appreciated.

 

[pjp]

I think I need to increase size of swap file. I have a monstrous file
(apparently greater than 1 GB) to download and it is taking intolerably
long. Using XP Home/ SP3 with 1.5 GB RAM. Plenty of empty space on the hard
drive.

Advice regarding the problem and how to increase swap file (if that's the
solution) will be appreciated.

There's lots of reasons for a slow download, swap file size isn't one of
them. Think in terms of how many "other" computers each peice of that file
has to transit (and they may take different routes) where any and every
otrher computer could be the bottleneck.

 

[William Lurie]

There's lots of reasons for a slow download, swap file size isn't one of
them. Think in terms of how many "other" computers each peice of that file
has to transit (and they may take different routes) where any and every
otrher computer could be the bottleneck.

Thanks for the good points. In this case, I don't think that particular
reasoning applies because the source is family-owned and operated and
dedicated with passwords. However, I did find out how to increase
from1.5G to 2.27 GB swap file and it didn't help.

 

[Daave]

I think I need to increase size of swap file. I have a monstrous file
(apparently greater than 1 GB) to download and it is taking
intolerably long. Using XP Home/ SP3 with 1.5 GB RAM. Plenty of empty
space on the hard drive.

Advice regarding the problem and how to increase swap file (if that's
the solution) will be appreciated.

The size of the pagefile has nothing to do with download speeds.

For most XP users, System Managed size is mor than adequate. FWIW, I
have 2GB of RAM in my PC. I use System Managed size. The current
allocation is 2046MB (about the same amount of physical RAM).

If you have performace problems and not enough RAM (and assuming there
is no malware or any legit program hogging memory), then the surefire
way to increase performance (although not download rates) is to add more
RAM.

If you want to download large files quicker, you need to get a faster
Internet connection.

More info on virtual memory:

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

 

[Stan Brown]

I think I need to increase size of swap file. I have a monstrous file
(apparently greater than 1 GB) to download and it is taking intolerably
long. Using XP Home/ SP3 with 1.5 GB RAM. Plenty of empty space on the
hard drive.

Advice regarding the problem and how to increase swap file (if that's
the solution) will be appreciated.

Why don't you let Windows manage the virtual memory? XP is better at
doing that than older Windows were, and there's really no good reason
to have a fixed limit.

 

[Stan Brown]

Why don't you let Windows manage the virtual memory? XP is better at
doing that than older Windows were, and there's really no good reason
to have a fixed limit.

Sorry, I should have made it ore explicit that this was a general
recommendation. I can't think of any reason why swap file size would
affect download speed, since the downloaded bytes are being written
directly to the hard drive and not stored in virtual memory -- aside
from a temporary buffer, of course.

 

[William Lurie]

Sorry, I should have made it ore explicit that this was a general
recommendation. I can't think of any reason why swap file size would
affect download speed, since the downloaded bytes are being written
directly to the hard drive and not stored in virtual memory -- aside
from a temporary buffer, of course.

Thanks for all the above. After the stuff is done downloading, the files
are still so big that scrolling is a fits-and-starts proposition, and
I'm abandoning that project as being just too unwieldy. And that applies
to both Firefox and IE.