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Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?

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40hz:
I'm have 1.5 Gb physical RAM and I'm running without a pagefile except for very special circumstances. I haven't run into any problems to date (knock wood!). I also can't say I've seen any significant performance boost not having a pagefile, but I have a pretty fast box to begin with so maybe I just don't notice it.

FF3 is well-behaved, FF2 was a real bloody mess after more than just a few hours... after 8 hours of having facebook more or less constantly running in the background, as well as opening and closing various forum tabs, and checking news from RSS feeds (at least a couple of times an hour on a regular day), FF2 by itself would usually end up consuming 1.3+ gigs of ram :p
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Interesting! I keep FF2 open from when I boot to when I shut down and I never ran into that. I've got a ton of add-ons active and Sage RSS Reader is permanently open. My FF2 memory usage fluctuates between 135 and 200 Mb no matter what. Does Facebook (which I don't use) have something to do with that?

wreckedcarzz:
Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
Will I get a speed improvement with this?
-masu (July 06, 2008, 06:20 AM)
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In my experiences, if you have 2GB of RAM you should be fine. If your playing Crysis on that 2GB of RAM, your screwed ;D (personal experience)
(BTW, on Vista I have never gotten a "low memory" error message, but AERO will disable itself until next reboot... a pain IMO)

You probably can't expect to run a couple of vmware OSes, photoshop, premiere, visual studio, folding@home, firefox2-after-12-hours and a 3D shooter at the same time with 2 gigs of ram and no paging file... ;) 8) :P
-f0dder (July 06, 2008, 09:05 PM)
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EDIT: Photoshop, VS, D2OL (similar to F@H), FF3 after 24+ hours no closing, and Sauerbraten... no PF. Hehehe.

f0dder:
Interesting! I keep FF2 open from when I boot to when I shut down and I never ran into that. I've got a ton of add-ons active and Sage RSS Reader is permanently open. My FF2 memory usage fluctuates between 135 and 200 Mb no matter what. Does Facebook (which I don't use) have something to do with that?-40hz (July 06, 2008, 10:54 PM)
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Facebook is definitely very ill-behaved :) - after several hours of use, it could take up to 30-40 seconds from clicking a link in facebook until the page was loaded... and that with full browser freeze until the loading was done. The browser would also generally be affected, things like opening new tabs would be pretty slow etc.

But the optimized JavaScript engine and the lovely new memory allocator (as well as lots of fixed leaks and improved garbage collection) in FF3 has taken care of most of this. Sure, After 12+ hours of use, the memory usage can creep to 300+ megabytes. But facebook no longer slows to a crawl. Also, on FF2 right after a clean boot, opening new tabs would become slowly but steadily (and noticeably) slower - when clicking 10+ forum notify emails, opening the last tabs (or just new blank tabs with ctrl+t) could take perhaps up to ~300ms or more. FF3 has also fixed this.

lanux128:
not bad, interchanging Excel spreadsheet with Firefox (10+ tabs) for over a couple of hours, WinAmp in the background and full complement of apps in the sytray. no visible speed improvements but yet again no errors, and thankfully no hard-disk grinding. hmm, maybe i'll just load Gothic 3 and see how it goes. j/k, of course.. ;)

justice:
you might find this useful:

Disable Paging File  Disable the Paging File  Negative  Warning

Myth - "Disabling the Paging File improves performance."

Reality - "You gain no performance improvement by turning off the Paging File. When certain applications start, they allocate a huge amount of memory (hundreds of megabytes typically set aside in virtual memory) even though they might not use it. If no paging file (pagefile.sys) is present, a memory-hogging application can quickly use a large chunk of RAM. Even worse, just a few such programs can bring a machine loaded with memory to a halt. Some applications (e.g., Adobe Photoshop) will display warnings on startup if no paging file is present." - Source

"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 Windows OS 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." - Source-http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/XPMyths.html
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actually after reading that it doesn't bring that much to the discussion but at least it has sources, and for completeness..

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