lunarplague
Newcomer
If i turn off paging file, will it work better? or will it just work to it's max potential? or can someone just explain what teh difference between having it on and off does that would be awesome, thanks.
Remember you can't disable paging, just the page file. Often programs alloc a great deal more memory than they are ever going to actually use - if you've disabled the page file then the requested addresses will have to be assigned to physical RAM. It's a total waste. You'll then find that things like vcache also get stuck in RAM, which might be better utilised by other software. Just because you don't run out of memory doesn't mean you are using that memory efficiently.Quitch said:If you never, ever, run out of memory, then the paging file will do nothing for you, and indeed, your PC may run slower as the OS doesn't realise you're not going to run out of memory and pages stuff off to ensure there's plenty of memory for those apps you might (but won't) run later.
thop said:photoshop won't start without a pagefile. there are other apps that do the same.
Guden Oden said:Generally speaking, turning it off is dumb. It'll just make your comp behave weirdly if it runs out of memory, possibly crash, and some programs won't even start.
Diplo said:Remember you can't disable paging, just the page file. Often programs alloc a great deal more memory than they are ever going to actually use - if you've disabled the page file then the requested addresses will have to be assigned to physical RAM. It's a total waste. You'll then find that things like vcache also get stuck in RAM, which might be better utilised by other software. Just because you don't run out of memory doesn't mean you are using that memory efficiently.Quitch said:If you never, ever, run out of memory, then the paging file will do nothing for you, and indeed, your PC may run slower as the OS doesn't realise you're not going to run out of memory and pages stuff off to ensure there's plenty of memory for those apps you might (but won't) run later.
You're not understanding. Let me give you an example:Quitch said:Rubbish, memory access times are so fast that it doesn't matter even if redundant data is being held there. It would only matter in the slightest if it meant data that needed to be in RAM could no longer fit there.
Diplo said:Now you decide to play the latest and greatest 3D game, which we shall call 'Gloom 5'. For performance sake 'Gloom' tries to grab as much free memory as possible to cache it's huge allocation of textures and sounds (in order to lessen hitches). But 'Gloom' finds that VCache (file cache) is allocated 128MB of RAM, and that another 100MB is allocated to DLLs from previous programs. No problem, normally, we would just farm off this RAM to swap file, leaving physical memory free.
On top of that, for best performance, you generally want your swap drive/partition/file to be on a separate drive from the OS so that there's less disk thrashing.Dio said:I saw a complex article that explained why swap was essential and is a performance boost, no matter how much physical memory you have. Seemingly it is mathematically provable or something.
That referred to Linux, but the same thing applies to Windows. Of course, if you want decent swap performance, you need a modern (i.e. high speed) harddrive just for the swap file .
Sorry, my reading comprehension went to nil at that point... Surprised you're still awakeDio said:By "Just for the swap file" I meant "With nothing else on it."
Overkill, but <shrug>
Well, you might be correct on that particular point, though from my experience with Windows you can never discount some of the strange things it does with memory management Not sure if it's true for NT kernel, but certainly on 9x, there was always a minium value for file cache indicating that you had to keep at least some of it in memory. I would have presumed it would be better, in some circumstances, to page it to swap rather than keep it in physical RAM.Gubbi said:The file cache most certainly does not end up in your page file (or swap partition).