Recommended size of swap file with 4 GB ram

[truckerking]

If you're used to linux, which I'm guessing because you called it a swap file, it should be at least the same size as the memory in your system. You can get away with less than that if you don't plan to do any memory intensive applications, like multiple VMs, graphics music or photo editing etc..

Windows depends much more heavily on the pagefile than linux does on swap. I recommend 1.5x the actual memory for a pagefile, which is what I usually set as a fixed amount immediately after installing windows. Letting windows manage the virtual memory means the pagefile will become fragmented if you later decide to use Photoshop, Nero, or VMware... or even Winrar or 7zip, which can take a huge amount of memory during file compression operations.

yes I'm using very memory intensive applications. I'm for example using Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended, VmWare Workstation and other Adobe memory intensive applications. I'm also playing pretty heavy games too. But I did a few modifications. Instead of having the swap file on the main partition(the partition with Windows and all my programs installed) I created a new partition with a size of 5 GB and use this ONLY for the swap file because if you do this the main partition does not have to work that much and the computer might be a bit faster

cool and is it working ok ?

well, I haven't got time to really test this configuration but so far it's working pretty good. I'm giong to do heavier tests later to see how its working. I went to the virtual memory options in Windows and set the drive where windows will put the swap file to the partition I created for the swap file and then I let windows manage the size of the file. But so far its working pretty good

 

[brianzion]

great job! windows would let you no if there was a problem windows 7 is so much better than vista as you experiment you will find out

 

[truckerking]

great job! windows would let you no if there was a problem windows 7 is so much better than vista as you experiment you will find out

that may be. haven't experimented with vista memory management that much so I don't know if Windows 7 is better. but I have heard that Windows 7 has a better memory management system than vista. I have actually noticed that. When I had Vista on this system Vista used more memory and more cpu power than Windows 7 does. So Windows 7 seems to be better on both memory and cpu usage. I think Windows 7 overall performs better than Vista.

 

[brianzion]

64BIT machines work very well with windows 7 im really happy with mine i will be building my own soon from the motherboard upwards and i am going to make a megga fast one thanks to the knowledge of using so many systems it may cost a bit more than a stock one but i will be rewarded knowing i made it!

 

[truckerking]

64BIT machines work very well with windows 7 im really happy with mine i will be building my own soon from the motherboard upwards and i am going to make a megga fast one thanks to the knowledge of using so many systems it may cost a bit more than a stock one but i will be rewarded knowing i made it!

that's right.

 

[brianzion]

64BIT machines work very well with windows 7 im really happy with mine i will be building my own soon from the motherboard upwards and i am going to make a megga fast one thanks to the knowledge of using so many systems it may cost a bit more than a stock one but i will be rewarded knowing i made it!

that's right.

hello hows your machine

 

[truckerking]

have made a bigger test now with the new virtual memory settings and it seems to work just fine. i can run many memory eating applications without the system feeling slow. I tested running a few diffrent programs. The programs I will list, I was running those at the same time.

1. Windows Media Player: playing a video
2. Windows Media Center: playing another video
3. Windows Live Messenger
4. Skype
5. Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended Edition: Editing a couple of pictures
6. Adobe Audition 3.0(Music editing software): editing some songs
7. OpenOffice Writer: Editing a document
8. Audacity 1.3 Beta(A free Music Editing Software, open source): Editing a couple of songs
9. VLC: playing another video
10. Spotify: Playing some music
11. Replay Music: recording music from spotify to mp3-files

And I had some folders open with some shortcuts I have placed there. So it's working pretty good. Could be a bit laggy somtimes when editing some music files and at the same time listening to music from spotify. It was the music in spotify lagging. But it wasn't much lag. So thats a setup I can recommend

 

[brianzion]

you can tell alot from task manager to

 

[brianzion]

this is a better task manager go to this link>>>>> Extensions for Windows - The Unofficial Windows Upgrade

 

[truckerking]

you can tell alot from task manager to

I know that

 

[madtownidiot]

here's a good article from the microsoft site on setting the pagefile.. Microsoft support

 

[brianzion]

helpful for other versions of windows but its not for windows 7

 

[cluberti]

To go to the OP's original post regarding paging file size on a 4GB system (CPU cores don't matter much for this sort of thing, really), it's probably useful to do some thorough testing going forward the next time you get curious. Windows does indeed do a good job of managing the paging file, but you can still do it better if you're willing to be up on it (and unlike previous versions of Windows, you don't really *need* a large paging file, in fact you can usually get away with a very small one if you're careful). I posted something previously that I come back to time and time again about how to test your virtual memory settings to see what will work best (as well as CPU usage, and I may add some disk usage perfmon steps once I get my hands on an SSD and a few more RAID setups to test with) under your workload. Windows is very conservative in it's paging file configuration, and while that may work fine, you still have the ability to push more data into RAM and keep it out of the paging file when not necessary. Technically these steps could be used for any version of Windows, but it's generally easier to do this on Win7 than it was even on Vista.

 

[brianzion]

great info thanks

 

[karlsnooks]

If I find the msdn blog on this topic, I'll post it for you. What it boils down to is to just use the Win 7 defaults. The blog post was esssential from Russonivitch (Of SysInternals fame) on paging files and his recommendation as to how to determine the optimal size of paging file for your system and the apps and load that you run. There was a length discussion there with contributors from people who had written the MS software related to paging.

 

[brianzion]

RAM, Virtual Memory, Pagefile and all that stuff

 

[karlsnooks]

Authoritative and debunks even many of the microsoft myths re virtual memory:
Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory - Mark's Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

 

[amorfati]

thanks guys. I have heard that if you have more than 3 GB ram you do not need a swap file and that you should use a fixed size for the swap file because if you let windows manage it by itself it sometimes change the size and after some time the system will become slower because windows keep changing the size of the swap file all the time. But this is maybe just for xp.

Yes for X86

 

[amorfati]

"quote" windows manage it by itself it sometimes change the size and after some time the system will become slower because windows keep changing the size of the swap file all the time.

windows doesnt change the swap file. once it is set it stays that size, it does all the calculations for you

On my third HDD have i a partiion of 50 GB, here in Belgium and the Netherlands we use 3.5 GB for swapping X ram ( i use 16 GB ram > movies and photo's) = 48 GB, and it still works fine, without freezes or BSOD's. The other place is just a hidden partion for my...its legal

 

[OldMX]

"quote" windows manage it by itself it sometimes change the size and after some time the system will become slower because windows keep changing the size of the swap file all the time.

windows doesnt change the swap file. once it is set it stays that size, it does all the calculations for you

On my third HDD have i a partiion of 50 GB, here in Belgium and the Netherlands we use 3.5 GB for swapping X ram ( i use 16 GB ram > movies and photo's) = 48 GB, and it still works fine, without freezes or BSOD's. The other place is just a hidden partion for my...its legal

48GB for pagefile is a waste of space IMO, 16GB is more than enough.