Can a swap file be too big?

[Rob Nicholson]

An idle question but can a Windows 2000 Professional swap file be too big?
Mainly thinking from a performance angle here. When we were developing a
program, there was a memory leak so we made the swap file huge until it was
fixed - 3GB on a 256MB PC. The leak is fixed now but just wondered if
there's any reason to reduce the swap file back down to more reasonable size
(recommends ~400MB).

Cheers, Rob.

 

[Rob Stow]

An idle question but can a Windows 2000 Professional swap file be too big?
Mainly thinking from a performance angle here. When we were developing a
program, there was a memory leak so we made the swap file huge until it was
fixed - 3GB on a 256MB PC. The leak is fixed now but just wondered if
there's any reason to reduce the swap file back down to more reasonable size
(recommends ~400MB).

You almost answered your own question:

An excessively large swap file can mask the
misbehaviour of a leaking app. Sometimes you
might want to do that, but I suspect most people
would want the symptoms of a leaking app to become
obvious quickly so that they can take steps to
deal with the problem.

Other than things like that, so long as you are not
strapped for hard drive space there is no harm in
having a huge swap file.

 

[Rob Nicholson]

might want to do that, but I suspect most people

would want the symptoms of a leaking app to become

Well the problem was that the server that our server service was running on
had a memory leak somewhere so we had to increase the swap file so that our
server would run for more than a couple of days before the server ran out of
resources. We had a real problem convincing the customer it wasn't a problem
with our software even though the leak was obviously not in our
executable...

Other than things like that, so long as you are not
strapped for hard drive space there is no harm in
having a huge swap file.

We reduced the swap file back down but also adding some key indexes to the
database (256MB), primarily foreign/parent keys. Since then, the server
processes the main print run at about 3 times faster than before. I can't
believe this is reduction in the swap file size so guess it's the
re-indexing.

Cheers, Rob.

 

[Greg Hayes/Raxco Software]

Adding indices can usually dramatically speed up performance in database
applications.

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File System

Want to email me? Delete ntloader.

 

[Rob Nicholson]

Adding indices can usually dramatically speed up performance in database

applications.

Well it certainly has for us. The database is about 400MB big now but some
of the tables have an awful lot of records. One of the key operations is
searching for a customer based upon their postcode. Adding an index to this
field has given us a huge improvement in performance.

Cheers, Rob.