peter said:
I have dedicated another partition F: with 430MB as a swap partition for
Windows XP.
This is an article I'm working on at the moment:
Suzanne asks - I just read a document that said it's best to put your
page file on a separate partition to increase performance. For example,
if I had a single hard drive that had 2 partitions the article said I
should put the page file on D: for better performance. I was wondering
what your opinion was.
*** My guess is that whoever wrote that article works at a desk job just
rehashing articles that they read on some website and doesn't actually
work on PCs for a living. Point is, if you only have a _single_ physical
hard drive you want the page file on the same partition as the data
that's accessed most often, and in most cases that's C:. This minimizes
hard drive head movement [seek time] which is best for speed. If the
pagefile was on, lets say, a second partition on your sole physical hard
drive, then the heads would have to move farther to access the pagefile
thus increasing data access time.
On the other hand, if your pagefile was located on a _second_ physical
hard drive, then yes, performance should increase [assuming it was just
as fast a drive] over having it on C: as now you have 2 sets of heads
playing with data at the same time. If you do this you still need a
small, maybe 20 meg pagefile on C: or windows may whine or even ignore
your settings or give you an warning message.
Ken B. adds some additional information on setting the size of your swap
file manually for performance reasons if you are into that:
By default, Windows sets the page file to an initial size of 1.5 times
the amount of RAM you have and a maximum of three times the amount of
RAM. But this isn't a good way to do it. The less RAM you have, the more
page file you need and vice versa; Windows default is exactly the
opposite of what's needed. Someone with 128MB of RAM will almost always
need more than 192MB of page file, and often more than 384MB. And
conversely, someone with as much as 1GB of RAM is very unlikely to need
1.5 to 3GB of page file.
The default is worse for those with little RAM; if you have at least
256MB of RAM, those Windows defaults usually don't hurt you very much
other than perhaps wasting a little disk space. But if you want to
fine-tune the swap file size yourself, you can do the following:
Right-click on My Computer, and choose Properties. Go to the Advanced
tab, then under Performance, click the Settings button. That puts you in
the Performance Options dialog box. Click on the Advanced tab there,
then under Virtual Memory click
Change. Click the Custom Settings radio button to enter your own Initial
and Maximum sizes.
How large should they you make these? Well it depends on how much RAM
you have and what
applications you run, but a good starting point is around 200MB for
Initial size. Make the Maximum very large (1500-2000MB), so you have
room to grow if you ever need it. There's no downside to having a large
maximum; if it's never used, it doesn't hurt you in any way.
You can also monitor your page file usage to give you a better idea of
how much *your* system and *your* applications use. That will give you
information to better fine-tune its size to meet your requirements. Go
to:
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_p.htm
and download MVP Bill James's Page File Monitor.
*** Please note that this article is for tweakers ie it's NOT a "fix it"
type article ie for regular use going with the default XP pagefile setup
is fine and will give you no hassles.
