Re: eliminating the swap file
- From: "BillW50" <BillW50@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2009 09:42:26 -0500
In news:%23x01z5oFKHA.3816@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
John John - MVP typed on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:07:46 -0300:
Tracey wrote:
I have a naive question: Is it possible to configure Windows 2000
Pro to run without a swap file or move/redirect the swap file to ram
(C: is a FAT32 partition if it matters)?
Windows 2000 does not run without a pagefile, if you try to disable
the pagefile the system will give you a nag screen and create a 20MB
temporary pagefile (temppf.sys) in the System32 folder, the file will
be deleted the next time the system boots.
That could be John, I wouldn't know. All I know is creating a 20MB
pagefile and throwing into a RAMDisk seems to keep Windows 2000 happy
enough with only one nag screen at boot. Even increasing the swapfile
over 200MB doesn't change this.
You can move the pagefile to any other disk or drive but you will have
to carefully consider the move, moving the pagefile to another
partition on the same disk as Windows or on a disk that is in a slave
relationship to the Windows disk may result in a performance hit and
is usually not a good idea.
Well the believers in defragging help improves performance (I never seen
any noticeable improvements myself since IDE drives came along which
replaced MFM drives) believe keeping the pagefile off on another
partition help keeps fragmentation in better check. Thus improves
performance.
So theoretically keeping the pagefile on another partition or another
drive that shares the same data path (i.e. master and slave), and/or
plus having the head having to move far to another partition should
decrease performance.
Although Microsoft and the hardware manufactures knows about these
bottlenecks and has taken steps to prevent these problems. Thus we have
write delays and caches to solve these problems. So in the real world
with modern hardware and enough RAM, I am not sure you would ever see a
problem.
I only ask because the dialog box states that the minimum allowable
swap file size is 2MB (as opposed to 0MB which is what I was
thinking). This may be a {very very} bad idea (due to functional
design), but I
just thought I would ask (see issue below).
Any insight on this subject will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Tracey
I am running with 2GB of ram (which appears to be only half used
with a swap file).
What kind of applications are you running? Quite possibly the RAM
isn't being used because there is no need for it.
I was thinking that the computer could/should run faster/fastest if I
upgraded ram to 4 GB and eliminated the swap file so all "memory"
activity would actually take place in ram.
That is almost always a very bad idea! This is an idea that is often
advanced by well meaning individuals who unfortunately don't usually
understand the Windows NT memory management mechanism so they view the
pagefile as an evil presence. Few of them understand how the private
2GB flat address space that each process has available is mapped, they
fail to realize that without a pagefile the processes address space
can actually cause a very large amount of RAM to go completely unused
and wasted.
John
I disagree! Running Windows XP with only 512MB or less and Windows with
256MB or less RAM without a pagefile is almost always a bad idea. And I
have experimented a lot without or with a very small pagefile on both XP
and 2000. There are three big reasons why I'm interested in running
without one.
1) I have a lot of SSD drives and the smallest is only 4GB in size. And
a swapfile eats up a lot of this space. And Asus sets the pagefile at
200MB to tame it down on a stock 4G SSD XP machine.
2) Writing a lot to a SSD decreases the longevity of the drive. So all
unnecessary writing is a bad idea. And a swapfile is one of the biggest
offenders.
3) I also sometimes use Microsoft's EWF. Which buffers all writes to an
OS drive and writes nothing to the actual drive. So write count drops to
zero! The OS doesn't care because it thinks it is all being written to
the drive (so does everything else). This is a neat idea since it is
like having a read-only Windows drive and no virus or malware can live
once the power is turned off.
The write buffer can only hold 512MB worth (I don't know if this can be
changed). Once it gets full, Windows becomes unstable and locks up.
Using it with a swapfile fills this space up very quickly and I am lucky
if I can run 20 minutes or more. Turning off the swapfile I can often
run 20 hours or more and I still haven't used up half of the 512MB.
Now back to what you were saying John. Well the real test is actually
doing it and not just talking about it. And I monitor the memory use and
I find Windows 2000/XP runs well until the free memory drops to under
200MB with a tiny or no swapfile. And I can tell you for me at least
with 2GB of RAM (even with XP), it is virtually impossible for the free
memory to drop this low.
--
Bill
Windows XP Home SP3 (5.1.2600)
Asus EEE PC 702G8 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: eliminating the swap file
- From: John John - MVP
- Re: eliminating the swap file
- References:
- Re: eliminating the swap file
- From: John John - MVP
- Re: eliminating the swap file
- Prev by Date: Re: server reboots periodically - BugCheck 50
- Next by Date: Re: Partitioning a new 500 GB IDE hard drive
- Previous by thread: Re: eliminating the swap file
- Next by thread: Re: eliminating the swap file
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
Loading
