Re: Swapping even when turned off?

From: StringFellow Hawk (Star_Fleet_Admiral_Q(NOSPAM)_at_(SPAMNOT)hotmail.com)
Date: 11/16/04 

Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 20:07:12 -0500

Hint - you may have completed an "OS" course at the "local" university -
hurray for you, but I seriously doubt your professor was able to teach the
proprietary interworkings of WinXP or any Windows OS for that matter (unless
he/she was on the MS OS development team). Bill Gates and his team are very
protective of how "their" "proprietary" software - especially OS's are
concerned and tend to not let anyone know how it works - even their own
application developers are not privied to that information.
P.S. I've got 4GB of RAM, with 2GB swap files on each of two physical hard
drives - so what, I've used 2GB on each of two 400GB drives - a mere spec
compared with the vast amount of space available.
Bottom Line - just let the OS do what Bill and company designed it to do -
you may know how an OS would work in a Perfect World, but we don't have a
perfect world, so neither is the OS - it was designed and implemented by
imperfect humans. 

-- 
StringFellow Hawk
"Dom, Give me Turbos"
"Phlip" <Phlip@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BBDC6026-2368-4DA9-9AB4-430624F759FE@microsoft.com...
> >> You know almost absolutely nothing. <<
> What makes you think I know nothing of this?
> I just finished an Operating Systems course at university, so I know
whereof
> I speak. Of course you had no way of knowing that, but there's no reason
for
> you to assume I'm just some computer-illiterate moron who should blindly
> trust all of Microsoft's suggestions for how my computer should run.
>
> >> If the swap was on it could page out unused data. <<
> The problem is it will also page out used data. Any paging algorithm will
do
> this. Thus taking up time and disk space that could otherwise be used
> elsewhere.
> Swapping memory is used for one thing and one thing only: to free up
memory
> for other processes. But if there is less memory used than there is
avaliable
> (and this will always be the case - I'm not going to be using 1GB
> concurrantly any time soon) then there is absolutely no need to swap out
any
> pages at all, they can all be held resident with no ill effects
whatsoever.
> Swapping them out would free memory, but that memory would not be used,
and
> it would only waste HDD time and space, and would cause unneccary delays
and
> page faults when the page needs to be read back in again.
>
> Oh, and I have checked the peak memory usage, and even after a long time
of
> activity and with all the programs open that I usually do the sum of all
the
> "Peak Memory Usage" values in task manager still doesn't reach the 1GB
mark,
> so even if they were all at there peak together I wouldn't run out of
> memory...
>
> If XP's paging algorithm was clever enough to not swap pages out when it
was
> unneccesary (when there is already about 70% memory free for example) then
I
> wouldn't have any problems with leaving swap space turned on. But it
isn't,
> so I do.
>
> "David  Candy" wrote:
>
> > You can't turn off swapping in XP. All you've done is remove a major
part of the swap space forcing system critical code and data to be paged
into places like the registry files and exe files (and unused code). If the
swap was on it could page out unused data. Not to mention that you are
loosing cache space. Fonts will probably also be swapping into their files.
> >
> > What on earth would prompt someone to turn off the swap file. Unless you
think you know more than the designers. But you don't. You know almost
absolutely nothing. Use your computer - it is what it's there for.
> >
> > -- 
> > ----------------------------------------------------------
> > http://www.uscricket.com
> > "Phlip" <Phlip@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:82BE4D2C-4F6B-4AF5-938C-1F50433A8853@microsoft.com...
> > > (sorry if this thread appears twice, by net connection's acting up a
little
> > > today)
> > >
> > > I have 1GB of RAM, more than I'm ever going to use, so I thought I'd
turn
> > > off the swap file on the hard drive - there'd be no need for it.
However,
> > > Task Manager still reports that my Pagefile usage is over 250MB! More
> > > disturbingly, the Processes list still reports that everything's page
> > > faulting, as much as it did when I still had a swap file.
> > > So I thought maybe Windows can't survive without a swap file (for
whatever
> > > stupid reason) so I created a small swapfile on the hard drive, with
min and
> > > max both on 2MB. Unfortunately, despite the max being 2MB it still
allocates
> > > 1.5GB (being the reccomended size, being 1.5x my main memory size)...
> > >
> > > Does anyone know why either of these are happening?
> >

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