Re: Keeping the swapfile in a separate partition

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: Ken Blake (kblake_at_this.is.an.invalid.domain)
Date: 12/26/04 

Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2004 14:05:45 -0700

In news:esYSZm46EHA.3076@TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl,
alegator <larry2002@argentina.com> typed:

> Ken, I got this answer from a friend of mine who is a Software
> Engineer at GM:

If "Software Engineer at GM" is meant to impress me, I'm sorry to
say that it doesn't. There are software engineers and there are
software engineers. Some of them know what they are talking about
and some of them don't don't. I'm impressed by knowledge, not
titles, and I'm sorry to say that your friend hasn't demonstrated
much knowledge in what he sent you.

And bear in mind that many of us here are, or have been, Software
Engineers too.

> "Hi Ale, I would really love to have a face to face chat with
> some of
> these Microsoft Engineers

First, bear in mind that I am not a Microsoft Engineer. I don't
work for Microsoft, and neither does anyone else here with the
title "Microsoft MVP." The MVP is an honorary award, given to
those who have consistently supplied correct information.

> and question them and find out how much do
> they really know, the reason you set the minimum equal to the
> maximum
> is to keep the pagefile together in one space so it dosent
> start
> looking for other space to use on the hard drive, letting a
> pagefile
> grow and shrink will fragment a hard drive like a shrapnel
> grenade not
> to mention Windows can a will make mistakes by sometimes
> placing
> pieces the paged file out side of your allotted area and the
> only way
> to fix that is to have a separate partition for the pagefile,
> Windows
> OS works like a pig the more you feed it the more it will eat,
> with
> Windows the more Ram you put in the more it will use, there are
> ways
> to restrict Windows from using to much ram and it requires very
> in-depth registry editing and knowledge of hexadecimal editing,
> if
> you make a separate partition of 4 gig and set the minimum to
> 4gig
> and the max to 4 gig you will have contained the fragmentation
> problem windows gives and plenty of room for ram to dump unused
> files to pagefile, as for the Microsoft
> Engineer, he sould of asked you many more questions before
> recommending you run a 200 mg pagefile as I wish I could have
> chatted
> with him so I can yell at him, Microsoft considers most home
> users as
> average users and will offer advice based on the average user
> in order to keep their
> asses out of hot water and they will not get into architecture
> of
> Windows because he most likely does not know architecture of
> Windows
> and to find that out you must go to their high level support
> and pay
> alot of money for that support.

I wish your friend had studied some English along with his
computer studies. His 314-word run-on sentence is very hard to
read. Moreover it is filled with inaccuracies and simple errors.
As a single example of an egregious error, he says " and plenty
of room for ram to dump unused files to pagefile." Windows does
not dump *files*, unused or not, to the page file.

Because the page file is not typically accessed sequentially,
fragmentation of the page file is not an important issue. For
more important, from a performance standpoint, is the time taken
by head movement; that's the slowest part of disk I/O. Moreover,
with your 2GB of RAM, unless you run some *very* memory-hungry
applications, it is highly unlikely that you will ever use the
page file at all.

Read "Virtual Memory in Windows XP" by MVP Alex Nichol, at
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm There's excellent information
there. 

-- 
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
Please reply to the newsgroup
> If you do setup a separate partition and decide to make it 4 
> gig the
> partition must have 15% usable space left on it as you will get 
> disk
> warnings all the time if you dont, such as 3450 megs min and 
> 3450 max,
> just go to your defragmenter  and make sue it says 15% free 
> space."
>
> "Ken Blake" <kblake@this.is.an.invalid.domain> wrote in message
> news:Oa0Uzes6EHA.3828@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
>> In news:eb3jCYs6EHA.3856@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl,
>> alegator <larry2002@argentina.com> typed:
>>
>>> Thanks everyone for their answers. I currently have 2Gb of 
>>> RAM and
>>> have the paging file assigned to a MAX and MIN values of 
>>> 4096MB. Is
>>> this fine?
>>
>>
>> No, it's almost certainly *much* more than you need. The more 
>> RAM you
>> have, the *less* page file you need. It depends on what apps 
>> you
>> run, but with as much as 2GB, you will probably hardly ever 
>> need to
>> use the page file. You should have a small initial 
>> size--perhaps
>> 100MB or 200MB--and leave the maximum large if it ever needs 
>> to
>> expand.
>>
>>> Also, when I run Diskeeper the drive map shows the paging
>>> file is segmented in two big chunks, one close to the 
>>> begnning of
>>> the drive and the other one close to the end. Is there a way 
>>> to
>>> place ALL of the paging file at the beginning of the drive, 
>>> or at
>>> the end?
>>
>>
>> It doesn't much matter, but if you made the initial size much
>> smaller, it would very likely accomplish this.
>>
>> --
>> Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
>> Please reply to the newsgroup
>>
>>
>> "Ken Blake" <kblake@this.is.an.invalid.domain>
>>> wrote in message 
>>> news:eTDDLGs6EHA.3376@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
>>>> In news:u%23aNdxr6EHA.4040@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl,
>>>> alegator <larry2002@argentina.com> typed:
>>>>
>>>>> I've read that you can increase Windows performance by 
>>>>> keeping the
>>>>> swapfile in a separate partition.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Sorry, but you've read wrong. This is not a good idea, and 
>>>> can hurt
>>>> your performance rather than improving it,. What it does is 
>>>> move
>>>> the page file to a location on the hard drive distant from 
>>>> the
>>>> other frequently-used data on the drive. The result is that 
>>>> every
>>>> time Windows needs to use the page file, the time to get to 
>>>> it and
>>>> back from it is increased. Putting the swap file on a second 
>>>> *physical*
>>>> drive is a good idea,
>>>> since it decreases head movement, but not to a second 
>>>> partition on
>>>> a single drive. A good rule of thumb is that the page file 
>>>> should
>>>> be on the most-used partition of the least-used physical 
>>>> drive. For
>>>> almost everyone with a single drive, that's C:.
>>>>
>>>> If you have enough RAM, the penalty for doing this may be 
>>>> slight,
>>>> since you won't use the page file much, but it won't help 
>>>> you.
>>>>
>>>> Also, the other problem with a separate partition like this 
>>>> is that
>>>> you run the risk of making it too small, in which case 
>>>> programs
>>>> will fail for lack of virtual memory, or too large, which is
>>>> wasteful of disk space. If you leave it on C:, it can expand 
>>>> or
>>>> contract as needed.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
>>>> Please reply to the newsgroup
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I can easily create an extended
>>>>> partition using say Partition Magic, but then how do I tell
>>>>> Windows to assign the swapfile to that new partition? 
>>>>> Thanks.

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