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Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?

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masu:
Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
Will I get a speed improvement with this?

f0dder:
If you have enough RAM, you likely won't feel much of a speed difference - windows does tend to page out stuff even when not strictly necessary, though, so you can save some disk access. I've personally run without pagefile since I got 1gig of memory, but you really need 2gig to do it without problems. These days I have 8 gigs, so running with pagefile seems pointless ;)

Btw you can only disable the pagefile if you run XP or newer, win2k can't.

masu:
I have 2GB Ram and Windows XP. I have now disable the Swap File. It seems so that the PC runs a little bit smoother. ;)

Carol Haynes:
You shouldn't have no swap file at all - and you should have a small swap file on the windows drive (64Mb minimum). Without a 64Mb swap file on the OS partition you won't be able to use any debugging messages from Windows when there is a problem. In order to trace system faults Windows needs to produce a 'mini-dump' and can't do that without at least a 64Mb Pagefile.sys on C: (or whichever drive windows is installed to).

I have 2Gb of memory for Windows XP Pro and use a PageFile on a separate drive. I work on the principle that windows is fairly optimised to use RAM if possible but it doesn't hurt to have idle applications sitting on the swap file. If you only have RAM everything has to sit in memory. Certainly if you use large apps like PhotoShop etc. you would be disadvantaged with no pagefile - especially if you want to run multiple large apps.

If you want to get rid of the swap file you need to run your machine lean and mean. Get rid of everything form the system tray and only load it when you need it. Don't use loads of Explorer addins - once they load they take up memory even if you don't use them. If they are idle they are precisely the sort of stuff that gets swapped and quite correctly.

f0dder:
Not everybody needs minidumps, though - especially considering most users don't know how to diagnose them. And they only happen on BSODs anyway, so on a well-working computer... you're not even going to see them. Dunno if you need a 64meg pagefile for that though, a minidump itself is only 64kbyte (128kbyte for 64bit windows).

The problem with pagefile on windows is that it tends to page out stuff even when it doesn't need to. I go by the principle that unused RAM is wasted RAM, while windows seems to prefer trimming working sets even when there's still plenty of free RAM - and this means paging stuff out to disk. Paging out and reading back in is slow.

With one gigabyte RAM, I had to re-enable pagefile temporarily every now and then, I had a few games that would crash otherwise. But with 2 gigs and up, I've never faced an out-of-memory situation, even though I've been running a lot of fairly memory-hungry applications at the same time (visual studio, vmware, et cetera).

How much or how little performance you gain by disabling the pagefile might be a bit of a religious issue - the system "feels a bit smoother", but nothing I can quantize, really. But knowing that I get less disk writes is a nice feeling.

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