Maximum Paging file size?

[dale]

I am having trouble increasing the size of my paging
file. I am working with 2 gigs of ram, a 3 gig processor
and a 130 gig hard drive. Using the processes described
in the articles posted, the maximum size of the paging
file the system will allow me to allocate is 4090 megs.
Is there an upper boundary that I don't know about
because when I increase the size of the file any larger,
it gives me a error:reason [8004102b] statement.

 

[David Jones]

The max paging file size is exactly what you're hitting.
Is there a particular reason you think you need it larger?

 

[dale]

I have been running FORTRAN processes that continually
write and read from the hard drive. They have been
taking 4 hours to run for the smaller sized calculations
and I figured with a larger paging file, the processes
may not take so long. Do you have any other suggestions?

 

[David Jones]

Without knowing exactly what they're doing, it's hard to
say...I can say it's not the size of the paging file
though.

A few things to check:

If the process is constantly reading or writing data to
the drive (not for the pagefile, but just reading or
writing data), you'll be limited by the speed of the hard
drive, so there's not really a lot you can do barring
getting a faster drive.

Is the CPU maxed during this time? If so, maybe the
calculations are truly just taking a long time (now, the
process may not be optimized correctly, but that's
another story).

You'll probably want to play around with Performance
Monitor (perfmon.exe) to try and find the bottleneck.
Some interesting counters to look at:

Processor->% processor time: CPU time being used.
Memory->Pages/sec: A rough guide to show how much paging
is happening to the hard drive, a consistent number over
100 (ballpark) means you're paging a lot.

PhysicalDisk->Avg. Disk Queue Length: Shows how many
requests for disk access are being built up, if this is
over 1.0 it means lots of stuff is all vying for the disk.

You can also get a bunch of stuff specific to the process
in the "Process" group, which might help also.