moving page file to USB 2.0 flashdrive?

[carl feredeck]

someone asked if moving the pagefile to a second drive would be better...

and now I am asking if putting it on a usb flashdrive would be even better?

 

[John]

someone asked if moving the pagefile to a second drive would be better...

and now I am asking if putting it on a usb flashdrive would be even better?

If you have enough RAM, you can do away with the pagefile all together.

John.

 

[Mike]

If you have enough RAM, you can do away with the pagefile all together.

No, you can't. That is *never* a good idea.

Mike

 

[John John]

No.

John

 

[John John]

If you have enough RAM, you can do away with the pagefile all together.

That is a bad idea and in most cases counterproductive.

John John

 

[John]

No, you can't. That is *never* a good idea.

Mike

Mike, I can assure you that I am doing on the machine I am using right
now and have been for a long time with no problems.

John.

 

[ray]

someone asked if moving the pagefile to a second drive would be better...

and now I am asking if putting it on a usb flashdrive would be even better?

No - because USB is slow.

 

[John]

That is a bad idea and in most cases counterproductive.

John John

Explain please.

John.

 

[carl feredeck]

If USB is slow why then does vista have READYBOOST?

Something fishy is going on here

 

[Mike]

Mike wrote:
Mike, I can assure you that I am doing on the machine I am using right now
and have been for a long time with no problems.

Then you must have a *lot* of RAM and not doing much with the computer.
You will always get better performance with paging than without. Windows
is desgined that way.

Mike

 

[John]

Then you must have a *lot* of RAM and not doing much with the computer.
You will always get better performance with paging than without.
Windows is desgined that way.

Mike

I wouldn't 1.5Gb is a lot of RAM would you.

John.

 

[John John]

Explain please.

The page file will only be used "if" and "when" needed. Without a
pagefile you are in fact not allowing the release of RAM by paging,
hence "if" and "when" RAM is needed and if all is allocated none will be
available because Windows will not be able to release it by paging it
out. You are in fact *reducing* the available RAM to the tasks at hand.

The only reason that you have not experienced any problems or memory
shortages is because you have too much RAM for what you normally do with
your computer. Open applications that demand lots of RAM like large
cross-linked spreadsheets or do video editing and you will soon get out
of memory error messages. Furthermore, with the use of the pagefile
along with large amounts of physical RAM, demanding applications can be
written to use and be made to believe that they have 4GB of available
RAM for their use. Without a pagefile that amount is seriously
curtailed to 2GB. The blanket statement that "you can do without a
pagefile" cannot be made because requirements are different for all users.

Having an unused pagefile hurts nothing and slows nothing down, not
having a needed pagefile will cause the computer to crash unless you
close open files and shutdown applications to make necessary RAM
available to the active processes that need it. In fact, this is one of
the duties of the Memory Manager, why should users have to close
applications and files when the Memory Manager can simply and easily
page them out? And why should users then have to restart applications
and reopen files when the Memory Manager can quickly retrieve them from
the pagefile?

John

 

[Bob I]

Because it "seemed" like a good idea. You may want to review some of the
post release testing before you "buy into the idea" and spend money on a
memory stick.

 

[Terry R.]

Explain please.

The page file will only be used "if" and "when" needed. Without a
pagefile you are in fact not allowing the release of RAM by paging,
hence "if" and "when" RAM is needed and if all is allocated none will be
available because Windows will not be able to release it by paging it
out. You are in fact *reducing* the available RAM to the tasks at hand.

The only reason that you have not experienced any problems or memory
shortages is because you have too much RAM for what you normally do with
your computer. Open applications that demand lots of RAM like large
cross-linked spreadsheets or do video editing and you will soon get out
of memory error messages. Furthermore, with the use of the pagefile
along with large amounts of physical RAM, demanding applications can be
written to use and be made to believe that they have 4GB of available
RAM for their use. Without a pagefile that amount is seriously
curtailed to 2GB. The blanket statement that "you can do without a
pagefile" cannot be made because requirements are different for all users.

Having an unused pagefile hurts nothing and slows nothing down, not
having a needed pagefile will cause the computer to crash unless you
close open files and shutdown applications to make necessary RAM
available to the active processes that need it. In fact, this is one of
the duties of the Memory Manager, why should users have to close
applications and files when the Memory Manager can simply and easily
page them out? And why should users then have to restart applications
and reopen files when the Memory Manager can quickly retrieve them from
the pagefile?

John
[/QUOTE]

I've never seen a pagefile being used "if" it was needed. Whether a
workstation has 256 meg of RAM or 4 gig, the pagefile is always used by
Windows. For light to medium duty users with a lot of RAM, a
performance gain can be seen w/o a pagefile, but obviously the reasons
you stated come into play.

--
Terry R.

***Reply Note***
Anti-spam measures are included in my email address.
Delete NOSPAM from the email address after clicking Reply.

 

[John John]

The page file will only be used "if" and "when" needed. Without a
pagefile you are in fact not allowing the release of RAM by paging,
hence "if" and "when" RAM is needed and if all is allocated none will
be available because Windows will not be able to release it by paging
it out. You are in fact *reducing* the available RAM to the tasks at
hand.

The only reason that you have not experienced any problems or memory
shortages is because you have too much RAM for what you normally do
with your computer. Open applications that demand lots of RAM like
large cross-linked spreadsheets or do video editing and you will soon
get out of memory error messages. Furthermore, with the use of the
pagefile along with large amounts of physical RAM, demanding
applications can be written to use and be made to believe that they
have 4GB of available RAM for their use. Without a pagefile that
amount is seriously curtailed to 2GB. The blanket statement that "you
can do without a pagefile" cannot be made because requirements are
different for all users.

Having an unused pagefile hurts nothing and slows nothing down, not
having a needed pagefile will cause the computer to crash unless you
close open files and shutdown applications to make necessary RAM
available to the active processes that need it. In fact, this is one
of the duties of the Memory Manager, why should users have to close
applications and files when the Memory Manager can simply and easily
page them out? And why should users then have to restart applications
and reopen files when the Memory Manager can quickly retrieve them
from the pagefile?

John

I've never seen a pagefile being used "if" it was needed. Whether a
workstation has 256 meg of RAM or 4 gig, the pagefile is always used by
Windows. For light to medium duty users with a lot of RAM, a
performance gain can be seen w/o a pagefile, but obviously the reasons
you stated come into play.[/QUOTE]

Yes, the pagefile is always in use, but the usage is minimal when
adequate amounts of RAM is installed in the computer. "If" and "when"
needed means when additional RAM is needed for new processes, then
something has to give, either the working sets are trimmed and paged out
or either you shut/close things to free up RAM.

John

 

[Ron Martell]

I wouldn't 1.5Gb is a lot of RAM would you.

John.

What you are doing is to force Windows to use physical RAM to fulfill
the memory requirements of the unused portions of memory allocation
requests.

By design Windows must allocate memory space to satisfy all of the
memory allocation requests that are issued by Windows components,
device drivers, application programs, etc. And also by design pretty
well everything asks for memory allocations that are larger than what
they usually need.

Under normal circumstances (normal = where there is a page file)
Windows handles this by allocating RAM only to those portions of the
requests that are actually used and by mapping the unused portions to
locations in the page file.

And these unused portions can amount to a considerable total. For
example on my system at present Windows Task Manager reports PF Usage
as 597 mb, but the actual valid memory content that has been moved to
the page file totals only 79 mb. So there is a total of 518 mb of
"phantom" page file usage, most if not all of which would represent
the unused portions of memory allocation requests.

Hope this explains the situation.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2008)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."

 

[Ron Martell]

I've never seen a pagefile being used "if" it was needed. Whether a
workstation has 256 meg of RAM or 4 gig, the pagefile is always used by
Windows. For light to medium duty users with a lot of RAM, a
performance gain can be seen w/o a pagefile, but obviously the reasons
you stated come into play.

See my reply to John. Most of the "PF Usage" reported by Task
Manager represents unused portions of memory allocation requests.

To see how much actual valid memory content has been moved to the page
file you need a special utility such as
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2008)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."

 

[Ron Martell]

someone asked if moving the pagefile to a second drive would be better...

and now I am asking if putting it on a usb flashdrive would be even better?

No. Windows XP does not support the use of a page file on a removable
drive because of the potentially disastrous consequences that might
occur if the removable drive were removed and then Windows needed to
move some of the page file content back into RAM.

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2008)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."

 

[Ron Martell]

If USB is slow why then does vista have READYBOOST?

Something fishy is going on here

Vista READYBOOST uses a USB device to create a mirrored copy of the
Vista page file. The page file still exists on the hard drive and
both copies are maintained. All data written to the page file *must*
be written to both places and therefore READYBOOST provides no
performance advantage for this aspect.

Where READYBOOST does provide a gain is when memory content needs to
be loaded back into RAM from the page file. Then the needed item(s)
can be loaded from the READYBOOST device with a substantial
performance gain over reading them from the hard drive. Because the
two locations are identical in content, reading from the READYBOOST
device does not jeopardize system integrity in any way.

Hope this explains the situation.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2008)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."

 

[R. McCarty]

The transfer rates to "Any" USB peripheral would be significantly
lower than any mass storage devices in the PC. On it's best day
a USB device is going to be hard pressed to reach/exceed a data
transfer rate of 28-30 Megabytes-per-Second. You would likely
see rates of an internal drive in excess of 60-90 Megabytes so
even if it was feasible to put the Pagefile on a USB device the loss
in performance would be very noticeable.