XP Swapfile behavior

[Augustus]

I've got an XP3200+ system with one gig DDR. It's running XP SP2, although
this behavior happens with any XP flavor. Why does Windows keep paging large
amounts to the swapfile (which is set 512 Mb min/max on mine) when the
system has over 750Meg of free RAM? On a clean boot, the swapfile starts out
at about 10-18Mb...it slowly increases over time until there's over 150Mb
paged out, all the time with over 750Mb free RAM. It stays paged out, too.
Presumably this is due to the fact that it's fixed at 512Mb. But if I let
Windows manage the swapfile, the same amount gets paged, and the drive is
thrashing continually resizing it. I don't run massive apps or have dozens
of apps and unnecessary processes running. There's got to be a major
performance hit when programs pages 20-50Meg to the swapfile instead of
system RAM. With this much RAM, why is the paging file used this much?

 

[WTC]

Personally, I do not use a swap file with 1Gb of RAM or better, I get better
performance because their is no constantly writing to the disk.

 

[WTC]

performance because their is no constantly writing to the disk.

when using applications that require large amount of virtual memory.

 

[Augustus]

Personally, I do not use a swap file with 1Gb of RAM or better, I get
better performance because their is no constantly writing to the disk.

I thought using no swapfile can cause problems, no matter how much RAM you
have.

 

[George Hester]

Yes 25MB min required. Personally I don't screw with the swap file. I just let it be and in fact the developers of NT said that.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I've got an XP3200+ system with one gig DDR. It's running XP SP2, although
this behavior happens with any XP flavor. Why does Windows keep paging large
amounts to the swapfile (which is set 512 Mb min/max on mine) when the
system has over 750Meg of free RAM? On a clean boot, the swapfile starts out
at about 10-18Mb...it slowly increases over time until there's over 150Mb
paged out, all the time with over 750Mb free RAM

What says there is anything paged to the page file? If it is Task
manager, its reports are misleading. Its so called use of page file is
only potential use - it has assigned to it pages that have been asked
for by programs but never used to potential space there rather than
lockout RAM. If you set the initial size down to say 100 or even 50
(do *not* set min and max the same though) look to see if pagefile.sys
actually gets bigger than that - you may well find Task manager
reporting amount of file in use far larger than the actual file

If it *does* expand this sounds like one of two things. Either you are
running one of the programs that purports to 'manage', 'optimise' or
'Free up' memory - get rid of them. Or possibly you are running
PhotoShop which has the very bad habit of grabbing a chunk of file to
use entirely for its own purposes.

Read up at my page www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[Alex Nichol]

Personally, I do not use a swap file with 1Gb of RAM or better, I get better
performance because their is no constantly writing to the disk.

Provided you have the possibility of a file there will be no actual
writing. But unless you have the possibility, uses like Pages that have
never been written (and never will be) will be locking out a large chunk
of RAM instead, to no purpose whatever

 

[Alexander Grigoriev]

What's called "Pagefile usage" is actually amount of committed memory
(virtual memory allocated by all apps and the kernel). The graph title is
misleading. The status string shows correct name "Commit charge". I guess
the "Pagefile" wording was chosen for a home user, because "Commit charge"
sounds cryptic. But instead, this causes questions all the time.