Crazy windows and pagefile relation

[Guest]

As a lively couple, even with a plenty of RAM, windows can’t live without a
pagefile. But as in a normal lively couple, windows pushes the pagefile far
far away and divided it for many fragments. I looked at many pc, and even at
200 GB hd with only ~5% occupied, the pagefile is located near the partition
end while all other files at the beginning, that forces the magnetic heads to
toss through all hd decreasing system performance. Such situation is with
both winxp’s and win2003.

Programs such as “pagedfrg†defragment pagefile to one fragment, but also
place it near the partition end. I believe that it’s better not to use
“pagedfrg†as one remote fragment would be worst than pagefile fragments
located close to system files, or better distributed between all files to
have access to closest pagefile fragment.

I can manage to place pagefile at the partition beginning between system
files and all others, but in a multi stage boring way described in the manual
for easy Linux and windows co-existing.
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17024

I posted a similar question before, but have not got clear explanation. May
be somebody knows why windows fragment pagefile and place it far far far away
from system files??? Is there any normal way to place pagefile close to
system files??

I’ll appreciate any information
Best, Alex

 

[R. McCarty]

Raxco's Perfect Disk (Using off-line Defrag, w/Properties settings) will
place the Pagefile.Sys at the mid-point of a drive/partition. You can get
their 30-Day fully functional trial at:
http://www.raxco.com/products/downloadit/perfectdisk2000_download.cfm
As to Windows placement, I suspect it simply gets located at the first
available contiguous free space when it's originally created.

 

[Richard Urban]

The following is an observation I have witnessed on numerous computers.

The pagefile is created in one segment during the installation of Windows
XP. It is somewhere toward the "beginning" of the partition - visually. Then
the computer crashes with a BSOD. Upon reboot, the pagefile has been moved.
At this point the pagefile may well be fragmented if there was not
sufficient contiguous free space at the time of recreation.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

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

 

[Guest]

As to Windows placement, I suspect it simply gets located at the first
available contiguous free space when it's originally created.

Even, when set pagefile=0 at the system partition, next reboot and fully
defragmenter, moving and compacting all files to the partition beginning, and
next set pagefile again, windows again place new pagefile fragmented at the
second part of the partition, despite of the completely free place after
compacted files. The same situation if fully defragments, reboot to other OS
(dos if fat32, or Linux if ntfs), remove pagefile, and reboot again to
windows.
I know that traffic to pagefile is not big normally, but it’s natural crazy
windows behavior and I’d like to understand why????

Best, Alex

 

[Richard]

Is there a way to move pagefile to a different
partition.
Richard

 

[Ken Blake]

In

Is there a way to move pagefile to a different
partition.

Yes. Read Alex Nichol's article "Virtual Memory in Windows XP" at
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

However why do you want to this? If you expect a performance
increase by doing this, this is not a good idea, and can hurt
your performance. What yoit does is move the page file to a
location on the hard drive distant from the other frequently-used
data on the drive. The result is that every time Windows needs to
use the page file, the time to get to it and back from it is
increased.

Putting the swap file on a second *physical* drive is a good
idea, since it decreases head movement, but not to a second
partition on a single drive. A good rule of thumb is that the
page file should be on the most-used partition of the least-used
physical drive. For almost everyone with a single drive, that's
C:.

If you have enough RAM, the penalty for doing this may be
slight, since you won't use the page file much, but it won't help
you.