Waiting for reply from Carl Fenley

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sherwin Dubren
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Sherwin Dubren

Hi Carl,
Maybe you missed my last reply. If so, I will repost it here for you:

To answer your last question:

My swap area is spread over two disk drives, as follows -

C: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 591 MB avail. Drive 0
(Primary Partition)
D: 150 MB initial, 150 MB max, 150 MB avail. Drive 0
E: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 369 MB avail. Drive 0

F: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 1440 MB avail. Drive 1
G: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 1828 MB avail. Drive 1
H: 150 MB initial, 150 MB max, 269 MB avail. Drive 1
(System logical drive)

total swap area allocated for all drives - 1100 MB
Drive 0 is 1.56 GB
Drive 1 is 5.35 GB

Sherwin
 
Sherwin said:
Hi Carl,
Maybe you missed my last reply. If so, I will repost it here for
you:

To answer your last question:

My swap area is spread over two disk drives, as follows -

C: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 591 MB avail. Drive
0 (Primary Partition)
D: 150 MB initial, 150 MB max, 150 MB avail. Drive
0 E: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 369 MB avail.
Drive 0

F: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 1440 MB avail. Drive
1 G: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 1828 MB avail.
Drive 1 H: 150 MB initial, 150 MB max, 269 MB avail.
Drive 1 (System logical drive)

total swap area allocated for all drives - 1100
MB Drive 0 is 1.56 GB
Drive 1 is 5.35 GB
Click to expand...

I looked back and saw that your post did show up just fine. I've been
neck-deep in Small Business Server 2003 this weekend, so I probably missed
it.

First... Is there any possible way your can get rid of all those partitions
and reinstall? I believe that alone would work wonders... but, we'll work
with what we have for now.

As a general rule, the pagefile size should be 2.5 times RAM. Also, as a
general rule for multi-drive systems, the pagefile should be placed on the
most-used partition of the least used drive, assuming your drives are
located on separate controllers (i.e. IDE-0 & IDE-1).

For example, if volume C is the most used partition on physical Drive 0,
then I would create specify a virtual memory initial and maximize size of
240MB on volume C. I would then get rid of all the others. I don't believe
they are necessary.

- carl
 
Sherwin said:
Hi Carl,
Maybe you missed my last reply. If so, I will repost it here for you:

To answer your last question:

My swap area is spread over two disk drives, as follows -

C: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 591 MB avail. Drive 0
(Primary Partition)
D: 150 MB initial, 150 MB max, 150 MB avail. Drive 0
E: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 369 MB avail. Drive 0

F: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 1440 MB avail. Drive 1
G: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 1828 MB avail. Drive 1
H: 150 MB initial, 150 MB max, 269 MB avail. Drive 1
(System logical drive)

total swap area allocated for all drives - 1100 MB
Drive 0 is 1.56 GB
Drive 1 is 5.35 GB

Sherwin
Click to expand...

Sherwin, I mostly agree w/ Carl, but the RAM x 2.5 recommendation is a
little dated. How much physical RAM do you have in the machine.

Also, to Carl's point, having multiple pagefiles on a single physical
drive can actually degrade performance.

hth
 
Well I ain't Carl, but lemme tell you you've got the screwiest swap file
allocation I've ever heard of. I'm not gonna ask why its like it is, I
really don't wanna know.

Put the swap file on your F drive, all of it. 1100 initial, 1100 max. Get
rid of all those other swap file fragments.
 
Ricardo M. Urbano - W2K/NT4 MVP said:
Sherwin, I mostly agree w/ Carl, but the RAM x 2.5 recommendation is a
little dated. How much physical RAM do you have in the machine.
Click to expand...

96 Meg.
 
I made the changes suggested. Eliminated all the swap areas except for
those on logical drive F:. I specified an arbitrary value of 300 MB initial and
300 MB max. This can possibly be tweaked for improved performance, but at this
point I can say the performance is somewhat improved, but not dramatically so.
This slow response problem seems to
have been worse and then a little better at times in the past. I try to
keep the cookies and internet cash clean, but perhaps my configuration is
more sensitive to these issues. I just hope it stays like it is now, and
gets no worse. I originally spread out my swap areas because I thought
it would be better matched to programs actually running on those logical
drives. That was just an assumption on my part. The whole subject of
swap areas has always been a mystery to me, although I do understand the
basic reason for having them.

Sherwin D.
 
Sherwin said:
96 Meg.
Click to expand...

Sherwin,

I agree with Ricardo, perhaps a 240MB pagefile isn't enough for your system.
My pagefile is just over 3X the size of my physical memory, and the last
time something was actually paged to it was weeks ago when I was doing some
heavy photo editing tasks.

I'm working on the assumption that you aren't using your 166MHz, 96MB system
to do create and edit 24-bit graphic art in Photoshop. Seriously, spanning
your swap file over multiple partitions is no good.

Pick one partition, create a 300MB pagefile there, and make sure each
physical disk is on its own IDE controller (IRQ14 and IRQ15), assuming we're
not talking about a laptop, and slave the CD-ROM off the least used drive.

If you REALLY want to improve performance of that system, and there is no
reason you MUST be using Windows 2000, then pick up a cheap copy of Windows
98 or ME off E-Bay or from a friend, fdisk and reformat those disks, and
install the OS. Use 'msconfig' for a selective startup and never install IE
6 unless it is absolutely required for something you are doing.

Good Luck,

- carl
 
Sherwin said:
I made the changes suggested. Eliminated all the swap areas except for
those on logical drive F:. I specified an arbitrary value of 300 MB initial and
300 MB max. This can possibly be tweaked for improved performance, but at this
point I can say the performance is somewhat improved, but not dramatically so.
This slow response problem seems to
have been worse and then a little better at times in the past. I try to
keep the cookies and internet cash clean, but perhaps my configuration is
more sensitive to these issues. I just hope it stays like it is now, and
gets no worse. I originally spread out my swap areas because I thought
it would be better matched to programs actually running on those logical
drives. That was just an assumption on my part. The whole subject of
swap areas has always been a mystery to me, although I do understand the
basic reason for having them.

Sherwin D.
Click to expand...

Sherwin, if you're still watching this thread, another performance
killer, particularly on older systems, is a fragmented pagefile, which
you most assuredly have. The built in defragger in W2K cannot defrag
the pagefile, so depending on how important this performance thing is to
you, you may want to shell out some $ for a good commercial defragger.

The 2 most popular ones are arguably:

PerfectDisk - www.raxco.com
DiskKeeper - www.execsoft.com

They don't cost that much and if you are running NTFS, you'll also want
to defrag the MFT, which these 2 can do, and that can also significantly
improve performance.

BTW, when I said the RAM x 2.5 recommendation is dated, I meant that
most modern machines have much more RAM than 96, to RAm x 2.5 is usually
excessive in those situations; however, on your machine, it is probably
the minimum you should use.

Also, this may be in direct contradiction to CT, but w/ multiple hard
drive volumes (drive letters) on more than 1 physical drive (as you
have), you'd want to split your pagefile between the boot volume (where
W2K is installed), and the most used drive letter on the other physical
drive.

If you don't have enough roon on your boot volume for an appropriately
sized pagefile, I would not recommend putting it on another drive letter
on the same physical drive because that will cause the OS to move the
drive heads unnecessarily between the OS and the pagefile. Instead, put
the smallest one you can get away with (typically about 5MB) on the boot
volume, and the rest on your most used drive letter of the other
physical drive.

GL!!
 
I have a side question.
If you say dividing you hard drive into 4 partitions degrades
performance.
They why does other say the opposite. I think even axcel tips say
diving a hard drive into
More partitions is better.

(Mine is divided into 4 partitions because I use more than one
operating system).
 
Hi Ricardo,

I have been using the Norton Speed Disk to defrag and compress my drives.

I am also running with the FAT32 file system, because I want the DOS
compatibility.

What do think would be an optimal size swap size for my 96 MB of ram?

What is the purpose of the very small swap area on my boot volume? Why not
put
ALL the swap on the other physical drive?

Sherwin Dubren
 
See inline...


Sherwin said:
Hi Ricardo,

I have been using the Norton Speed Disk to defrag and compress my drives.

I am also running with the FAT32 file system, because I want the DOS
compatibility.

What do think would be an optimal size swap size for my 96 MB of ram?
Click to expand...

Optimal is different for every user and how they use their machine. I
would say that a good place to start is RAM x 2 (192MB). Then open
perfmon and track your pagefile usage and see if it ever comes close to
that max. You can then adjust up or down. Each time you change the
size of your pagefile, make sure to defrag it. SD can do that online.
What is the purpose of the very small swap area on my boot volume? Why not
put
ALL the swap on the other physical drive?
Click to expand...

The suggestion to put a small pagefile on the boot volume was only if it
did not have enough space for a properly sized pagefile on the boot
volume. The reason for this is that you optimally want at least part of
the pagefile on the boot volume since the hard drive heads usually spend
most of their time in that drive letter anyway. If you are going to
have to put a sizeable pagefile on another drive letter on the same
physical drive as the boot volume only because there isn't enough space
on the boot volume for the size pagefile you want, you want to make it
as small as possible so that it's minimally used. Why? Because then
the OS will thrash the hard drive heads between the 2 pagefiles on the
same physical drive. You just don't want to have multiple pagefiles on
the same physical drive. You need a minimally sized one on the boot
volume, however, if you want certain recovery options turned on like
small memory dumping, sending administrative alerts, and/or writing a
BSOD to the event log.

hope that's a little clearer ;->
 
Brian said:
I have a side question.
If you say dividing you hard drive into 4 partitions degrades
performance.
They why does other say the opposite. I think even axcel tips say
diving a hard drive into
More partitions is better.

(Mine is divided into 4 partitions because I use more than one
operating system).
Click to expand...

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that multiple partitions in and of themselves
are bad. I was just talking about the implications of multiple
partitions on one physical drive as it relates to pagefile
configuration.

I do believe that the partitioning recommendation is from back in the
day for older/slower hard drives. I could be wrong, but I don't think
it's that relevant anymore. Plus, remember, at one time, there used to
be a 2GB limit for partitions!! And before that, 512MB!
 
Ricardo M. Urbano - W2K/NT4 MVP said:
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that multiple partitions in and of themselves
are bad. I was just talking about the implications of multiple
partitions on one physical drive as it relates to pagefile
configuration.

I do believe that the partitioning recommendation is from back in the
day for older/slower hard drives. I could be wrong, but I don't think
it's that relevant anymore. Plus, remember, at one time, there used to
be a 2GB limit for partitions!! And before that, 512MB!
Click to expand...

And before that ... 32 MB. A limitation that existed in DOS as late as
version 3.x. And before that we had FAT12 where 16MB was the maximum size of
a partition. And before that ... I still have a copy of a print Ad offering
an IBM 10MB (that's megabytes, NOT gigabytes) hard disk for a mere four
thousand dollars $USD 4,000.00. A real bargain at the time seeing as how a
5MB drive was priced at two-thousand-five-hundred dollars ($USD 2,500.00).
 
Colon said:
And before that ... 32 MB. A limitation that existed in DOS as late as
version 3.x. And before that we had FAT12 where 16MB was the maximum size of
a partition. And before that ... I still have a copy of a print Ad offering
an IBM 10MB (that's megabytes, NOT gigabytes) hard disk for a mere four
thousand dollars $USD 4,000.00. A real bargain at the time seeing as how a
5MB drive was priced at two-thousand-five-hundred dollars ($USD 2,500.00).
Click to expand...

I hope that ad was suitably preserved and framed! That's a keeper!!
 
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