brady,
I knew that was true of the term "memory", but didn't know that included the term "RAM", so I shall have to edit my mental dictionary.
What happens with a "non-intensive" apps, as you described before, if the pagefile is turned off? Does it have to retain that extra data on the harddrive and require accessing the drive when it is needed? If that is the case, then these non-intensive apps would effect performance more than the intensive ones would.
Brady is right, I have been running XP, Vista, and now 7 without any pagefile.sys with 4GB of RAM.
"In modern operating systems, including Windows, application programs and many system processes always reference memory using virtual memory addresses which are automatically translated to real (RAM) addresses by the hardware. Only core parts of the operating system kernel bypass this address translation and use real memory addresses directly. All processes (e.g. application executables) running under 32 bit Windows gets virtual memory addresses (a Virtual Address Space) going from 0 to 4,294,967,295 (2*32-1 = 4 GB), no matter how much RAM is actually installed on the computer. In the default configuration, 2 GB of this virtual address space are designated for each process' private use and the other 2 GB are shared between all processes and the operating system. RAM is a limited resource, whereas virtual memory is, for most practical purposes, unlimited. There can be a large number of processes each with its own 2 GB of private virtual address space. When the memory in use by all the existing processes exceeds the amount of RAM available, the operating system will move pages (4 KB pieces) of one or more virtual address spaces to the computer's hard disk, thus freeing that RAM frame for other uses. In Windows systems, these "paged out" pages are stored in one or more files called pagefile.sys in the root of a partition. Virtual Memory is always in use, even when the memory required by all running processes does not exceed the amount of RAM installed on the system."
Let Windows manage it and stop wasting your time fiddling with it.
I just have internet explorer and world of warcraft running atm. Currently using 3.77GB of my RAM. I could get by with just 4GB but I like to do more then this at times (like run 2 or 3 instances of world of warcraft).
Right now if I had a pagefile world of warcraft would be lagging considerably due to the excessive IO usage of my HDD and needless bandwidth wasted to my RAM. Windows doesn't wait till your at 99% of RAM usage it starts pageing earlier then that. And I consistently keep my RAM above 90% usage.
I did very extensive testing comparing Quake 4 and some other games running with and without a pagefile. Quake 4 on one monitor, internet explorer on the second monitor. Win XP SP2 and 2GB of ram. pagefile not only dropped my FPS by about 10-20% it also caused this crazy stuttering which is what happens when the systems I/O subsystem gets backed up with useless small random read/writes. turned off the page file and kept my memory near 98% used and all was fine. This si when I went and bought a 4GB ram kit and left pagefile disabled forever.
Writing in 4kb blocks you say... whats the HDD's worst performance parametric? Oh yeah random writing of 4kb blocks... nice. Not only are we using a slower medium we are using its worst possible state. And I am talking like 5mb/s on the best of drives (if that high even) unless your using SSD or a massive raid array.
And to top it off those IO requests get higher priority so your HDD's cache and IO queue's get filled up with this useless data. Any usage of the drive in this way for no reason is simply unnacceptable and a complete waste of system resources.
Last edited by BunBun; 06 Feb 2010 at 02:53.
Then buy more RAM, and reinstate the page file. I'll be putting in another 4GB DDR3 kit in my gaming system very soon.
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