Windows Virtual memory question

How do you increase your virtual memory?

Sometimes when I'm gaming on one of my pc's I get a message that its increasing my virtual memory.

What does this mean and how can I increase it?

 

Control Panel>System>Advanced Tab>Performance Settings>Advanced Tab

and you should see it there.

 

And it is a good idea to set it's minimum/ maximum value the same. Generally 2x the amount of RAM you have installed.

 

multiple drives?

How do you find the best settings are for when you have multiple drives, or multiple partitions on the same drive?
On the same drive set, I usually have c:\ be pretty much just windows and utilitities. This is a "small" partition of 30 gigs. I install things like games and whatnot, to d:\ and have another drive I use for mass storage, things like music, etc.

You only need a paging file for the c:\ technically, but is there any benefit from having a paging file set on the other drives, especially d:\ which is really just a partition of the same drive c:\ is on?

I'm tired, to much rumcake from christmas yesterday.

 

It's better to have the Paging file on another drive if possible. Even if you don't have another drive, it's better to put it on a different partition.

Putting it in another drive, reduces overhead when the operating system drive is being read etc which increases in slight performance.

Putting it on another partition/drive also reduces fragmentation.

 

How to set performance options in Windows XP

 

Hi,
I have my paging files in a different partition but I have always been advices to keep it in the next one up from your OS partition so the HD head doesnt have to travel too far to find it or it can slow reading times down and wear on HD.
But I am not that tech minded to know if this is right or not.
I use the size of my ram to 1.5 times its size.

 

I personally think it seems to boost performance to break the paging file up between multiple drives..* Not drive letters, but physical drives..

Say you have 2 40gb drives, put 512mb on each..

I have 512mb of ram in my main system and manaully set my paging file to 1.5gb. It never pops up and warns me that it needs to increase the size of it.

 

The way to improve pagination performance is to have the hdd file on a differnt HDD to the one you're loading the program/data off.

That means say you're worried about page file performance of matlab, which is running on drive mapped as D, you would get better performance with it on a drive called C.

As for a differn't partition, oposed to drive, it helps fragmentation, speed it will ONLY help if its on a seperate head.

 

Having the pagefile just on a separate partition but on the same physical drive would actually slow things down.

If you have one drive it is best to permanent (min and max the same), contiguous paging file that is slightly larger than what you normally need and moving it to the outer tracks of the hard disk as that is where it is fastest

If you have 2 drives then place the pagefile on the HDD without the OS and on it's own controller. If it is on the same controller they cannot be read from t the same time so it would be useless. And yes having the pagefile on more then one drive is useful too as Windows will use the pagefile from the disk with the least activity.

 

Give that man a cookie.

It's the best way, but with picky 80-wire cables I can't run the 2 HDD on separate channels and still have the 2 opticals running as slaves. Need a minitower.

I can't see any logic in setting a max=min paging file size, just set a decent minimum size and a much bigger max, space is cheap. And you want minimum head travel, so if it's got to be on the same drive as your programs, put it in with them.

Illogical. The more RAM you have, the smaller the paging file needs to be. The value needed depends on how you work, software you use. Use the monitoring to check.

A better (and more logical) link than the MS one.

 

Well regardless if you set them the same or not because in Windows XP you cannot have a true permanent paging file. Even if you set a permanent paging file, Windows XP will automatically generate more virtual memory when it runs out of memory; by adding a dynamic component to the permanent paging file. In short, when you create a "permanent" paging file in Windows XP, you are actually creating a semi-permanent (min and max different) paging file. So it is best to create min and max to be the same but make this a high enough number so Windows does not create a dynamic part as it will use any available space on the hard disk. So it will always be fragmented badly so it would reduce performance.

So the best thing you can do si create a permanent page file (min and max the same) but set it high enough that your emmeory requirements do not exceed the size of it as this will reduce performance. But don't make the paging file too large. Make it just enough for your requirements. It is also best to have a contiginous paging file which is another reason to amke it permanent.

That was the rule of thumb back in the Windows 3.1 days where there was little memory. Today many people have 1Gb of RAm and in that case setting a 1.5GB paging file would be stupid. The point of buying more memory is so you do not use virtual memory. Why amke it bigger when you add more RAM?

 

if you have a gig of ram you'll quite likely find you can disable page file alltogether with no problems (depends on what you run).

Remeber with page file what it is that fills it. Resources, DLL's and dependancys tend to be a very small part of it (enless their been modified, but thats a differn't topic). Differnt controller, well it really depends on performance issues things such as write cache. In the old days (okay this was on scsi, so differn't paradigm to ide) i found that i could get perfectably exceptable performance just by making sure the page file had its own head (partition, carefully set). This gave a much better performance than just letting windows NT4 do its thing. But iirc its more intelegant now, and trys to do this on its own (why page file drive gets much more fragmented).

So keep it away from the resource drive for best performance!

 

what i found about winxp is that during the older versions u can disable the virtual memory complately. now u can't. u have to have virtual memory no matter how big your system physical ram is. I mean if u have 2GB of ram what is the likelihood of using it up? and by allowing such feature, windows have really high tendency to use the damn slow virtual memory for paging. god damn the microsoft people.

 

That is incorrect. NT was designed with the assumption that everything in memory has a backing store on disk. Anything modified in memory needs a backing store and that pretty much has to be the pagefile. If you have a lot of memory you would not be using the pagefile much anyway so leaving it enabled but a small size is recommended