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Main Area and Open Discussion => Living Room => Topic started by: kyrathaba on August 25, 2011, 08:59 PM
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I installed RAMdisk driver-level utility and configured it for 2 GB. Re-running NovaBench, my benchmark score rose from 382 to 425. The computer seems to handle noticeably snappier, though perhaps that is merely my expectations affecting my perceptions. Has anyone else used RAMdisk (http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk), or something similar. Your results?
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I'm showing RAM Transfer Speed (Hardware) of 2890 Mb/sec. Is that good for these system specs?
Pentium DualCoreE5300 2.60GHz @ 2.6 GHz
MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3
6GB System RAM
Intel(R) G45/G43 Express Chipset
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Sounds rather interesting, gonna download it and see how my machine takes it...it could do with a swift kick up the ass, and this might just be the answer (Seeing as I'm on a machine with 1GB of DDR2 and a 3.2Ghz single core processor and can't afford anything better lol)
Will see!
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Be advised, I watched several YouTube videos on installing, and apparently it's quite critical that you disable your Page File entirely before installing Ramdisk and configuring it (disable Windows automatic handling of Page File size, and manually set it to 0). Also, it was recommended, by consensus that you not check any of the checkboxes under the Options tab when you run the RamDisk configuration utility for the first time.
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Stephen, another thing you could do is figure out which Windows services can be changed from Automatic to either Manual or Disabled. Services can noticeably affect boot-up time and hog RAM. Tweaking services, while requiring care (definitely set a System Restore point first), could definitely improve your experience on 1GB of RAM. I've also read that Win7 Aero is a RAM-hog.
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On the other hand, if you only have 1 GB RAM, you might be better off NOT creating a RAMdisk. My impression is that a RAM disk works best in addition to sufficient normal RAM, but I'm no expert. I'll let others comment.
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There's a user manual (http://memory.dataram.com/__documents/file/Dataram_User_Manual_35.pdf) available for RamDisk (http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk).
The Driver has been written to WDM standards and creates a low-level disk object that Windows
Device Manager and Disk Management are able to "see" and manage. You can partition, format,
mount a volume, and assign multiple drive letters to RAMDisk (but only if you would know how to
do those things with a regular disk, RAMDisk does not do it for you).
Upon successful Start of the RAMDisk, a kernel level driver (RAMDisk.sys) is loaded into the
Windows/System32/drivers folder. This driver will be available to Windows each time RAMDisk
starts. It is removed when RAMDisk is stopped.
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I used this RamDisk for awhile on my Vista64 PC. It has 8 GB ram. I only used it to run Firefox portable. If the HD was busy FF(was 3.6 I was using then but it's the same now) is a dog loading up.
I discarded contents on system shutdown. On startup I used an XCopy script I found on the web to copy the Firefox portable folder into the RamDisk.
It loaded quickly I'll say that. But with Chromium I don't need a RamDisk for quick loading. I use FF as my secondary browser now.
If anyone wants to run FF portable out of this RamDisk I'm pretty sure this is the page I used as a guide:
http://www.wikihow.com/Speed-Up-Firefox-by-Running-It-In-RAM
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I have never used it and I do not see much use for it. In effect, it takes away some memory from Windows manager and dedicates it to a single purpose. It is now your task to select what to use the memory for. If you did not put anything there, I doubt it had any effect.
If your computer feels snapier, it could be due to to the disabled swap. With lots of memory, the swap is useless and it is one less thing Windows must manage.
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Maybe not as much fun as using a ramdisk but I think I get the same results by having Firefox (3.6 with lots of extensions) load in at startup and then minimise itself - so it's ready and waiting. The next important part is to keep FF open all day, minimise if need be (even to the system tray) just don't close it.
Does a ramdisk offer much more than this? If so, I'll have to try it, I mean, does a ramdisk make FF faster in actual operation and not just loading up?
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As far as I know Windows really likes to manage a swap-file (pagefile.sys), no matter the amount of RAM it has available. So if you have enough, it is not a bad idea to configure the pagefile into this RAM Disk.
For the security-conscious (read: paranoid) user this has the advantage of wiping the pagefile each time the computer is turned off.
Some of the RAM Disk software is even smart enough to use RAM that is not addressable by a 32-bit O.S. (example: the not addressable part of the 4 GByte RAM in WinXP can be used by some of the RAM Disk software).
I would say that if you have more than 4 GByte of RAM on a Win7 PC, you could consider using a RAM Disk. Below that I doubt it has any (noticeable) effect.
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As far as I know Windows really likes to manage a swap-file (pagefile.sys), no matter the amount of RAM it has available. So if you have enough, it is not a bad idea to configure the pagefile into this RAM Disk.
And as a matter of fact, the original YouTube video tutorial suggested adding a Pagefile into the Ramdisk itself, which is what I did:
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Disk Cleanup seems to run much faster now.
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So you are using memory, to access memory, that's already in memory ... Why?
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A pagefiles is where the files go when Windows decides they're not needed in RAM or when your ram is full and things need to be swapped out. Putting them back in ram is working against the OS and surely will mean the right information won't go in RAM making your computer slower? Ah I'm too slow.
http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it
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So I should return pagefile management to Windows, and let it manage it on my C drive, but it's okay to leave RamDisk on E ?
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Yep
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The original YouTube video I watched suggested that allowing Windows to manage a pagefile worked against the efectiveness of the ramdisk, and suggested that disabling pagefile altogether would force the system to use the Ramdisk instead, which was supposedly faster/preferable. But I take it that this is a bad idea?
I have re-enabled Windows management of a pagefile on C drive. Will the RAMdisk still significantly benefit me?
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I would dump the ramdisk too.
And I would disable the swap if you typical memory usage on your 6GB system is less than 3GB (assuming you have 64-bit windows).
I have 8GB and swap disabled and all is perfect.
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But the RAMdisk just causes some hard drive space to be treated as extra memory, right? It isn't hurting anything, and might possible be beneficial some of the time?
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No, quite the opposite. The swap causes the hard disk to be treated as extra memory. The Ram disk does the opposite. It blocks part of your memory and allows you to treat the memory as a disk.
That is why Stoic Joker was telling you "are using memory, to access memory, that's already in memory" :).
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But the RAMdisk just causes some hard drive space to be treated as extra memory, right-kyrathaba
A ram disk causes some RAM space to be treated as a fast hard drive ;)
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I understand now (I think).
Both page file (hard disk space treated as memory) and a RAMdisk (memory space treated as some hard drive space) can be advantageous under certain conditions, right?
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Do you guys agree with the following, taken from a page on Lockergnome (http://help.lockergnome.com/general/Paging-file-RAMdisk--ftopict64696.html):
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."
"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."
Myth - "Moving the Paging File to a different partition on the same drive improves performance."
Reality - "Moving the Paging File (pagefile.sys) to a different partition on the same physical hard disk drive does not improve performance. Simply using a different partition on the same drive will result in lots more head-seeking activity, as the drive jumps between the Windows and paging file partitions. Even though moving the paging file in this case can have the positive effect of defragmenting it, the loss in I/O performance out weighs any gains. It is better to simply defragment the paging file using PageDefrag and keep maximum I/O performance by leaving the paging file where it is with a single drive setup.
Notes - However you can enhance performance by putting the paging file on a different partition and on a different physical hard disk drive. That way, Windows can handle multiple I/O requests more quickly. When the paging file is on the boot partition, Windows must perform disk reading and writing requests on both the system folder and the paging file. When the paging file is moved to a different partition and a different physical hard disk drive, there is less competition between reading and writing requests."
Myth - "Putting the Paging File on a RAMdisk improves performance."
Reality - "Putting a Paging File in a RAM drive is a ridiculous idea in theory, and almost always a performance hit when tested under real-world workloads. You can't do this unless you have plenty of RAM and if you have plenty of RAM, you aren't hitting your paging file very often in the first place! Conversely, if you don't have plenty of RAM, dedicating some of it to a RAM drive will only increase your page fault rate. Now you might say "yeah, but those additional page faults will go faster than they otherwise would because they're satisfied in RAM." True, but it is still better to not incur them in the first place. And, you will also be increasing the page faults that have to be resolved to exe's and dll's, and the paging file in RAM won't do diddly to speed those up. But thanks to the paging file in RAM, you'll have more of them. Also: the system is ALREADY caching pages in memory. Pages lost from working sets are not written out to disk immediately (or at all if they weren't modified), and even after being written out to disk, are not assigned to another process immediately. They're kept on the modified and standby page lists, respectively. The memory access behavior of most apps being what it is, you tend to access the same sets of pages over time... so if you access a page you lost from your working set recently, odds are its contents are still in memory, on one of those lists. So you don't have to go to disk for it. Committing RAM to a RAMdisk and putting a paging file on it makes fewer pages available for those lists, making that mechanism much less effective. And even for those page faults resolved to the RAMdisk paging file, you are still having to go through the disk drivers. You don't have to for page faults resolved on the standby or modified lists. Putting a paging file on a RAMdisk is a self-evidently absurd idea in theory, and actual measurement proves it to be a terrible idea in practice. Forget about it."
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Page file (swap) is advantageous when you run a lot of programs at once and the sum of the memory required by the programs is bigger than available physical memory minus memory used for other purposes. I'd say if sum of the memory required the programs > 50% of your physical RAM. It does not hurt much to leave it enabled (just in case) and a reasonable size is 2x your physical RAM. But with the amount of memory people have in their systems now, I see little need for it. Swap was invented in the old times, when memory was very expensive to allow programs to use more memory than there actually was.
Ram disk is beneficial if you need a small, super-fast hard disk for a special purpose. For example when compiling a very large project, where the compiler creates and accesses a lot of temporary files. In other cases, it hurts, because it blocks Windows from using the memory you dedicate to it. It is better to simply leave the applications running.
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What's your opinion on this:
Windows willingly swaps its own code from memory to make room for your other programs. But since Windows code is the most often used when you run your system, swapping it can slow things down. You can save swap time by making Windows lock its own kernel in RAM, as long as you have enough memory (512MB).
Note that the Registry controls all swapping of the kernel, and any erroneous alteration in the Registry can make your PC inoperable. Use the program Regedit (usually found in your Windows or WinNT folder). Click on My Computer | Local Disk (C:) | Windows | Regedit.
Expand the listings to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management in the left-hand half of the window. Highlight DisablePagingExecutive on the right-hand side. Then click on Edit | Modify and enter the value 1. Click on OK, close Regedit, and reboot your computer.
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With a habit of multitasking I frequently have 50 to 100 things going at once as I (am forced to) bounce from one project to another. So I tend to hedge my bets a bit and run a fixed size 2GB PageFile with 4GB of physical RAM on a 64-bit machine.
With that configuration and work load, I've never had any stability issues with this machine running either Vista or 7. And the machine is almost 5 years old now.
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What's your opinion on this:
Windows willingly swaps its own code from memory to make room for your other programs. But since Windows code is the most often used when you run your system, swapping it can slow things down. You can save swap time by making Windows lock its own kernel in RAM, as long as you have enough memory (512MB).
Note that the Registry controls all swapping of the kernel, and any erroneous alteration in the Registry can make your PC inoperable. Use the program Regedit (usually found in your Windows or WinNT folder). Click on My Computer | Local Disk (C:) | Windows | Regedit.
Expand the listings to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management in the left-hand half of the window. Highlight DisablePagingExecutive on the right-hand side. Then click on Edit | Modify and enter the value 1. Click on OK, close Regedit, and reboot your computer.
-kyrathaba
Seemed like a nice tweak back in the 2k days, but I haven't used it in years.
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Right now, here's what I've got:
I have 6 GB RAM installed on this Win7 Home Premium 64-bit machine. I have a 1.5 GB RAMdisk installed, but I'm allowing Windows to manage the pagefile. I've tweaked the registry to force Windows to keep it's kernel solely in RAM (no reads from disk).
Before doing any of these steps, I've created a restore point each time and I backed up my registry before applying the tweak.
Do you think I'm in good shape?
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No, but have fun 8) Peace!
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So, vlastimil, you think I need to ditch the RAMdisk altogether?
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Indeed, unless you need it for a special purpose to solve a particular problem.
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I'm with vlastimil
Also keeping the kernel trapped in memory is about as effective as having all of the shift managers at a burger joint all show-up for the same shift. They'll all just be tripping over each-other because they are not all needed at any one given time.
Windows is actually really good at memory management. So it's best to just leave it be, so it can do its thing.
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Okay, thanks guys.
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I've got a Minecraft server running in a VM on a RAMdisk. There's lots reading and writing of terrain data, especially with multiple players connected, so the RAMdisk can really speed things up. :Thmbsup:
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I moved the Windows TEMP directory to the ramdisk via the Windows environment variable. I would think surely that makes sense, in that it will automatically ditch unneeded temp files when I reboot. Although, considering that I don't make heavy use of my machine, I'm leaning toward not using the RAMdisk at all.
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Maybe not as much fun as using a ramdisk but I think I get the same results by having Firefox (3.6 with lots of extensions) load in at startup and then minimise itself - so it's ready and waiting. The next important part is to keep FF open all day, minimise if need be (even to the system tray) just don't close it.
Does a ramdisk offer much more than this? If so, I'll have to try it, I mean, does a ramdisk make FF faster in actual operation and not just loading up?
-nudone
Depends on your setup. If you are on a 32 bit system with more ram than Windows can directly utilize then the RadDisk may be able to handle stuff like browser cache without writing to disk or "costing" you anything of system ram. But it's probably not worth doing just for that. I don't like to leave a bulky app sitting idle. If you have a zillion FF extensions to do everything then your method is preferable. I didn't really run that many other than to maintain stuff related to the browser like uploading bookmarks, checking for dead bookmarks etc.. with Chromium I only have 4 extensions installed. The bookmark checker is disabled until I run it manually. I don't need all the maintenance extensions that I did with FF. I'm only running AdBlock, LastPass and SpeedDial.
One other side-effect of running FF out of RamDisk is you let sites put on whatever cookies they want. When you close the disk, discard everything. No cookie filters, hunting for tracking cookies, and all that bother. Just use a password tool to login to sites.
I got rid of my RamDisk as soon as I got with Chromium. So for me it wasn't worth the bother. I couldn't think of any other real need to carry it around.
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Myth - "Putting the Paging File on a RAMdisk improves performance."
Reality - "Putting a Paging File in a RAM drive is a ridiculous idea in theory, and almost always a performance hit when tested under real-world workloads. You can't do this unless you have plenty of RAM and if you have plenty of RAM, you aren't hitting your paging file very often in the first place! Conversely, if you don't have plenty of RAM, dedicating some of it to a RAM drive will only increase your page fault rate. Now you might say "yeah, but those additional page faults will go faster than they otherwise would because they're satisfied in RAM." True, but it is still better to not incur them in the first place. And, you will also be increasing the page faults that have to be resolved to exe's and dll's, and the paging file in RAM won't do diddly to speed those up. But thanks to the paging file in RAM, you'll have more of them. Also: the system is ALREADY caching pages in memory. Pages lost from working sets are not written out to disk immediately (or at all if they weren't modified), and even after being written out to disk, are not assigned to another process immediately. They're kept on the modified and standby page lists, respectively. The memory access behavior of most apps being what it is, you tend to access the same sets of pages over time... so if you access a page you lost from your working set recently, odds are its contents are still in memory, on one of those lists. So you don't have to go to disk for it. Committing RAM to a RAMdisk and putting a paging file on it makes fewer pages available for those lists, making that mechanism much less effective. And even for those page faults resolved to the RAMdisk paging file, you are still having to go through the disk drivers. You don't have to for page faults resolved on the standby or modified lists. Putting a paging file on a RAMdisk is a self-evidently absurd idea in theory, and actual measurement proves it to be a terrible idea in practice. Forget about it."
This has to be one of the most over-worked tech topics on the internet.
It always happens when somebody learns what the pagefile does (or the swap partition on Linux) and what a RAMdisk is, puts two and two together and comes up with five.
Okay, YES having a page file in memory IS IN THEORY faster than having it on disk, but in real-world use, it is NOT faster than just using that same chunk of memory as... memory and leaving your pagefile on the disk.
Every argument around this topic ends up arguing for a snake eating it's tail.
Ram disk is beneficial if you need a small, super-fast hard disk for a special purpose. For example when compiling a very large project, where the compiler creates and accesses a lot of temporary files. In other cases, it hurts, because it blocks Windows from using the memory you dedicate to it. It is better to simply leave the applications running.
I actually like this idea, good point Vlastimil. :Thmbsup:
I don't doubt that there are actual usage scenarios where a managed RAM disk is a good idea, and the software in question seems like an easy way to set up and manage that.
As for your benchmark results, Kyrathaba, that's probably the THEORY portion of the argument actually working, but while memory requirements are still low, when it would be expected to.
I would put it to the test and do some things that traditionally force Windows to use up a lot of RAM and hit the pagefile on your system.
Heavy surfing with lots of tabs and all extensions enabled, then firing up Photoshop and doing some processor-intense editing, lots of blurs and transparency, edit some HTML in Word, then switch between the applications.
Then you'll REALLY see how it's doing.
I'd be curious as to the results...
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I don't use office tools but I've heard rumors some won't run without a page file. If you really don't want a page file on your HD and have more ram than Windows can access normally then it may be useful to stick the page file in the ram disk. But I don't use office tools anyway. Seems like a simpler solution would be to write the software so that it doesn't insist on memory it doesn't need.
For cutting down on disk thrashing and you have such excess ram on a 32 bit machine then it may be easier just to dedicate some to a disk cache.
Another special case, which may help regardless of the bitness of the OS may be use of some script tool or batch that insists on seeking in disk files to get data on every access. Putting the data file in ram might be useful especially if nobody can figure out the script. :)
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What's your opinion on this:
*snip* DisablePagingExecutive *snip*
-kyrathaba
Not sure if the memory manager honors the settings these days, or how big an effect it has - but it was a huge advantage for me back in the Win2k days. Without the setting, after quitting a game I'd have a lot of page-in activity before my system was usable again. With the setting, much less.
After I got enough memory (the WinXP days and ever since), I've turned off pagefile.sys entirely, so the setting would be superfluous. And I don't agree that better performance from turning off the paging file is a myth, even with plenty free memory Windows tends to trim process working sets a bit aggressively - at least it definitely did so in the XP era, might be better at 'wasting' memory with Vista and Win7.
I prefer chugging enough memory in my system and not worry about the pagefile - but it's only an option if you can always having enough physical memory available.
Fixed size pagefile is a bit silly, by the way. Set it to a large-ish minimum size to avoid fragmentation, but why set a fixed upper size? (OK, the one reason I can think of is shutting down a runaway leaking 64bit process before it fills your drive... but that's about it).
I don't use office tools but I've heard rumors some won't run without a page file.-MilesAhead
Not true for office2000, 2003 or 2007.
As for RAM drives... as mentioned previously, putting your pagefile on a ramdrive is utterly moronic - don't do it. They can be nice for other purposes, though. I keep my %TEMP% there, and apart from a few badly designed installers and the stupid way Flash caches videos, it works very decently. Putting my firefox profile there also made the fox a lot less sluggish (but of course you have to have a backup scheme if you don't want to lose stuff on a power outage).
Oh, and then there's specialized use cases like compiling Boost or grepping through huge codebases :)
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Fixed size pagefile is a bit silly, by the way. Set it to a large-ish minimum size to avoid fragmentation, but why set a fixed upper size? (OK, the one reason I can think of is shutting down a runaway leaking 64bit process before it fills your drive... but that's about it).
Setting the maximum guarantees it won't be fragmented. I've removed page file, defragmented the disk. Then enabled paging with min=max. Months afterward checking the page file for fragmentation shows it never needs to be defragmented. Zero maintenance.
On my 8 GB machine paging is disabled. On my 2 GB machine I have a 4 GB page file just because I got one out of memory error in 4 years running no swap due to having a dozen Chromium tabs open while doing a video mux. No swap is the best swap unless you have to use some memory hog app. I prefer lightweight processes unless I'm getting some kick-ass performance that justifies the bulk.
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Fixed size pagefile is a bit silly, by the way. Set it to a large-ish minimum size to avoid fragmentation, but why set a fixed upper size? (OK, the one reason I can think of is shutting down a runaway leaking 64bit process before it fills your drive... but that's about it).
Setting the maximum guarantees it won't be fragmented. I've removed page file, defragmented the disk. Then enabled paging with min=max. Months afterward checking the page file for fragmentation shows it never needs to be defragmented. Zero maintenance.-MilesAhead
Setting the pagefile to a reasonable minimum size means you'll never get fragmentation under normal working conditions, but if you should need the extra swap... however unlikely... it'll be available rather than your application running OOM. If you've got little enough memory (or extreme enough applications) that you need swap, that seems to be far the superior solution to me.
And even if you do get into the extreme situation and it causes fragmentation... so what? Once system is back to normal memory usage, the file will be shrunk and you're back to your minimal-size file in one fragment.
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Fixed size pagefile is a bit silly, by the way. Set it to a large-ish minimum size to avoid fragmentation, but why set a fixed upper size? (OK, the one reason I can think of is shutting down a runaway leaking 64bit process before it fills your drive... but that's about it).
Setting the maximum guarantees it won't be fragmented. I've removed page file, defragmented the disk. Then enabled paging with min=max. Months afterward checking the page file for fragmentation shows it never needs to be defragmented. Zero maintenance.-MilesAhead
Setting the pagefile to a reasonable minimum size means you'll never get fragmentation under normal working conditions, but if you should need the extra swap... however unlikely... it'll be available rather than your application running OOM. If you've got little enough memory (or extreme enough applications) that you need swap, that seems to be far the superior solution to me.
And even if you do get into the extreme situation and it causes fragmentation... so what? Once system is back to normal memory usage, the file will be shrunk and you're back to your minimal-size file in one fragment.
-f0dder
Run your machine your way. This has worked for me across many machines across many years. No maintenance no crash. The "so what" is having to reboot the machine and defrag the page file for no reason that I can think of. If you really think "so what" then just let Windows manipulate the page file in the first place. No stress. :)
In fact I only got OOM because I ran a brute force script to load pages in Chromium to refresh favicons(at that time Chromium lost favicons on nearly every snapshot update.)
Now that I have Bookmark Sentry extension I may as well disable the pager. But it doesn't seem to hurt anything so I guess I'll say "so what." :)
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Run your machine your way. This has worked for me across many machines across many years. No maintenance no crash. The "so what" is having to reboot the machine and defrag the page file for no reason that I can think of. If you really think "so what" then just let Windows manipulate the page file in the first place. No stress. :)-MilesAhead
1) I can't remember if windows will only shrink the paging file on shutdown, you might be right on that point... but you're going to do that in due time. Can't really see why you'd reboot just for the shrinking?
2) you don't need to defrag - when the pagefile is shrunk to minsize, the additional extent(s) are simply removed, and you're back to your 1-fragment file.
I really don't understand the reasoning behind setting a fixed size. Either you have a ludicrously large pagefile, or you acknowledge you can run OOM. IMHO it's pure logic to set a minsize to "somewhat more than you expect to see (and have measured) under normal use", and without maxsize (or a "sanity limited" maxsize if you must) - you get the best of both worlds:
1) no fragmentation under normal working conditions
2) perhaps fragmentation, but temporary so (without needing a defrag), instead of running OOM.
So, is there a flaw in my reasoning? Or are you just sticking to "that's the way I've always done it, because I read on some tech site that's it's the thing to do"? :P
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Run your machine your way. This has worked for me across many machines across many years. No maintenance no crash. The "so what" is having to reboot the machine and defrag the page file for no reason that I can think of. If you really think "so what" then just let Windows manipulate the page file in the first place. No stress. :)-MilesAhead
1) I can't remember if windows will only shrink the paging file on shutdown, you might be right on that point... but you're going to do that in due time. Can't really see why you'd reboot just for the shrinking?
2) you don't need to defrag - when the pagefile is shrunk to minsize, the additional extent(s) are simply removed, and you're back to your 1-fragment file.
I really don't understand the reasoning behind setting a fixed size. Either you have a ludicrously large pagefile, or you acknowledge you can run OOM. IMHO it's pure logic to set a minsize to "somewhat more than you expect to see (and have measured) under normal use", and without maxsize (or a "sanity limited" maxsize if you must) - you get the best of both worlds:
1) no fragmentation under normal working conditions
2) perhaps fragmentation, but temporary so (without needing a defrag), instead of running OOM.
So, is there a flaw in my reasoning? Or are you just sticking to "that's the way I've always done it, because I read on some tech site that's it's the thing to do"? :P
-f0dder
If the page file size never even approaches the minimum what's the point of having a larger maximum? I can see if people run memory hogs like giant spread sheets. But for my usage there's no need for it.
It's my experience that people argue about swap more than they actually use it.
I only have 2 GB ram on this machine and ran for 4 years with no swap. So why should I subscribe to your formula? On my side I have about 16 years of experience with my method. On your side I have theory.
A better solution all around is a swap partition a la Linux. You definitely do no fragment your system partition. If the emergency case arises you can set it to create swap file(s) dynamically if needed. I had Linux running on a 486 with a fast EIDE drive and a slow SCSI drive. The fast drive the swap was much faster. But by setting the swap "round robin" to the swap partitions on each drive I got smoother performance. The speed of the system was the same but the EIDE Linux was running on didn't thrash.
The Windows options are almost laughable. Everything is squeezed through the straw of a file system. They could fix it but they don't care.
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Aiyy!! Yet another swap argument! Anyone know where I can get a copy of the MS official press release with the conventional wisdom that one must always run swap?
otoh I might get bagged for posting (c) material.
(http://smileys.smilchat.net/emoticon/jokes/fous/debile.gif)
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The minimum system controlled pagefile size is 1.5x physical. So for me having 4GB of RAM in my x64 box at home, it was grabbing 6GB of drive space just for the pagefile. Which I found rather annoying (especially if it set to clear on shutdown). So not wanting to run completely without I just cut it back to a fixed 2GB size ... Which has as of yet to cause any OOM issues.
I really just got tired of trying to follow and formulate an opinion on the 0 PF safety debacle and just - said the hell with it - split the difference.
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If the page file size never even approaches the minimum what's the point of having a larger maximum? I can see if people run memory hogs like giant spread sheets. But for my usage there's no need for it.-MilesAhead
If you never go over the minimum, no space wasted, no harm done. If you run into a once-in-a-blue-moon situation where you need the memory, you'll probably be happy your application (or production server? :)) doesn't crash.
It's my experience that people argue about swap more than they actually use it.-MilesAhead
Yep, and you see a lot of old crap regurgitated over and over, with either the "ZOMG SET TO A MAX SIZE TO AVOID FRAGMENTATION!" or some weird magic formulas that probably made sense 15 years ago when they were first invented, but... yeah.
I only have 2 GB ram on this machine and ran for 4 years with no swap.-MilesAhead
I did that back with 1gig of ram (which was a bit low when gaming), but after I upgraded to 2gig (and then all the upgrades after that) without a hitch. But running pagefile-less isn't something I'd advise to everybody.
So why should I subscribe to your formula? On my side I have about 16 years of experience with my method. On your side I have theory.-MilesAhead
Because the theory makes sense? :) - or perhaps you can point out a flaw in the theory? There might be some scenario I haven't though of... but at least there's none of those magic voodoo numbers.
A better solution all around is a swap partition a la Linux.-MilesAhead
Don't see the point of those fixed size partitions these day, really - for the same reasons as my arguments against the fixed-size windows paging file. There were technical reasons for it back in the olden days, but Linux has supported file-based swap for a while now.
The Windows options are almost laughable. Everything is squeezed through the straw of a file system. They could fix it but they don't care.-MilesAhead
How is the file system a straw? As long as your paging file isn't fragmented, there's no I/O difference between file swap and partition swap... and I bet you'd be hard pressed to measure the computational overhead between handling writes to a file vs. to a partition even on many years old hardware.
Now, paging options might aren't as comprehensive on Windows, that's for sure. But that's how it always is with Windows: it caters to the majority :)
I really just got tired of trying to follow and formulate an opinion on the 0 PF safety debacle and just - said the hell with it - split the difference.-Stoic Joker
The most reasonable advise I've seen by a techie the last few years was "don't blindly follow advise, measure your needs". I still don't see the obsession with with fixed size, though :)
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I dunno. I like the idea of not having a pagefile. I have a second internal hd, it's 2TB, so I made a small(ish) partition and gave it a 9GB fixed-size pagefile.
Set it and forget it. I cant go wrong (famous last words lol).
The one time I disabled the page file, I did have some problems with a couple of graphics programmes, that I presume were related to it's absence, so I went back to it. In fairness that was with 2GB ram - now have 8 so could try it again, but it'll be down my list a bit...
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The one time I disabled the page file, I did have some problems with a couple of graphics programmes, that I presume were related to it's absence, so I went back to it. In fairness that was with 2GB ram - now have 8 so could try it again, but it'll be down my list a bit...-tomos
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a few crappy shoddy programs that depend on having a pagefile present, even if there's no real reason for it as long as you have enough RAM.
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I prefer chugging enough memory in my system and not worry about the pagefile - but it's only an option if you can always having enough physical memory available.
It sounds, then, like I could easily get by with no swap file. I have 6 GB RAM, and run pretty light in terms of both the number of simultaneously running apps I use, and the heftiness of those apps in terms of memory usage. About the heaviest app I use is Firefox, and I've got it under control with Firemin.
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My RAM usage usually stays between 30-35%.
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Dunno...maybe I'm just lazy (or stupid) but starting with XP I just set a fixed pagefile size to the maximum amount the system automatically determines when it's allowed to manage memory. And I have never experienced an OOM situation doing it that way.
As Stoic pointed out earlier, Windows is actually very good at managing it's memory space. So unless you have some very unusual requirements, most tech voodoo and deviation from the basics seldom nets a benefit worth pursuing. And with an operating system as locked down (and with so many undocumented subsystems) as Windows, it's not like you can always know what your mucking around with system and low level settings will do.
To me, life is far too short to bother with most of that unless I need to fix something that's broken. And most times, throwing in some additional RAM accomplishes the same thing faster and better anyway.
Ramdisks are another story. I use them (on servers) for rapidly updating temporary file caches and logs. But that's not something most people (except engineers or graphics pros) would ever need to worry about on a workstation. My feeling is that if you really do have a legitimate use for a ramdisk, you already know when, where, and why you need to set one up.
The people who do America's Test Kitchen and Cooks magazinehave a philosophy I apply to much of the system tweaking I do. They're always asking." What does the extra work get you?" When Cooks publishes a recipe, they try out every variation (ex: 'milk heated' vs 'at room temperature' -or- should you use plain yogurt or sour cream) they can get their hands on. When they're done (they once tried 35 different recipe variations for sugar cookies!) they can tell you exactly what matters and what doesn't. What's a legitimate concern, and what's just old-wives tales.
Some of the most interesting and beneficial comments come when they find something fussy and persnickety that does make a difference. Because at that point, it becomes necessary to decide if it's worth the extra time and money. One recipe called for some extra steps and a seasonally hard to find ingredient. Their conclusion? It was the best recipe - but not really worth it for the added expense and inconvenience it entailed. The runner-up recipe gave the taste testers 99% of what the ideal recipe did - but with considerably less work and fussing. Conclusion: go with the runner-up for most occasions.
I approach system tweaks and optimization the same way.
In my field of business there's a saying: The first 90% of a project consumes 90% of the budget. The last 10% of the project consumes and additional 90% of the original budget.
I found that to be pretty much the case. ;D
Just my tuppence. :Thmbsup:
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Don't see the point of those fixed size partitions these day, really - for the same reasons as my arguments against the fixed-size windows paging file. There were technical reasons for it back in the olden days, but Linux has supported file-based swap for a while now.
It supported file based swap when I was using it. It's just that partition based is more efficient. Read how it works with partition based swap before making assumptions.
I notice your post is filled with implications such as "blindly follow" etc.
So your remedy is to blindly follow you instead of my 16 years of experiences using and watching my systems? Tsk tsk. Debate tactics rather than argument.
btw I took swap off. I don't need it now that I have Bookmark Sentry to fix my Chromium bookmarks. :)
In these arguments everyone ignores usage. People who have 20 windows open constantly are going to use more ram than people like me who have a couple open and close what's not needed. I don't run 20 Tabs in Chromium. The usual for me is 3. "What's best" shouldn't even be asked until you ask "how to you use your system?" Otherwise it's just tail chasing.
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In my field of business there's a saying: The first 90% of a project consumes 90% of the budget. The last 10% of the project consumes and additional 90% of the original budget.
I found that to be pretty much the case.
-40hz
Yepper, that sounds about right to me too. ;)
I just spent the better part of this week doing an SBS2000 to Server 2008 std migration. which included a decades worth of tax & accounting software.
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Don't see the point of those fixed size partitions these day, really - for the same reasons as my arguments against the fixed-size windows paging file. There were technical reasons for it back in the olden days, but Linux has supported file-based swap for a while now.
It supported file based swap when I was using it. It's just that partition based is more efficient. Read how it works with partition based swap before making assumptions.-MilesAhead
Care to back that up with facts, for recent kernel versions? :). Same as with Windows: allocate a intelligently sized swap file, and it won't fragment. As for access, here's from LKML (https://lkml.org/lkml/2005/7/7/3269):> 3. Does creating the swapfile on a journaled filesystem (e.g. ext3 or
> reiser) incur a significant performance hit?
None at all. The kernel generates a map of swap offset -> disk blocks at
swapon time and from then on uses that map to perform swap I/O directly
against the underlying disk queue, bypassing all caching, metadata and
filesystem code.
(The question is a bit different, but the implications are the same).
I notice your post is filled with implications such as "blindly follow" etc.
So your remedy is to blindly follow you instead of my 16 years of experiences using and watching my systems? Tsk tsk. Debate tactics rather than argument.-MilesAhead
It's a piece of opinion - take it for what you like. IMHO it's got good arguments going for it, and it's worked fine on my laptop (which doesn't have endless amount of memory) for years. The fixed-size argument is something I've seen regurgitated for years, and I don't agree with it - so obviously I'm going to object when I see it given as as a suggestion to others.
"What's best" shouldn't even be asked until you ask "how to you use your system?" Otherwise it's just tail chasing.-MilesAhead
Indeed. And while YOU might not run out of memory, you can't really know about other people's usage patterns... and thus suggesting that setting a maxsize isn't really a good idea.
PS: the one argument for swap partitions I can think of, is if you want to control the physical location on disk for access time reasons... but if you're about to do that, then you have a server with severe memory problems, and should be investing in more RAM, seriously. And just as a preemptive snarky comment safeguard: system pagefile != database scratch areas.
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Linux has supported file-based swap for a while now.
Hold the phone!
What's that?... File based swap?
(startpage-google-yippy-duckduckgo)
You mean like this?
http://blog.mypapit.net/2007/07/how-to-add-linux-swap-file-if-you-dont-have-swap-partition.html
That's awesome! :Thmbsup:
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For record, I have swap turned off on 8GB system and I guess I'll be fine for a couple of years.
Fixed size swap: good if you are like me and constantly have all hard drives 99.9% full (I cannot help myself :-\ ).
Unlimited swap size: if it happens that Windows needs a swap size of more than 2x your physical memory, it will be extremely sluggish, practically unusable. In my opinion, it is better when an app crashes due to unavailable memory than waiting 5 minutes until Windows swaps-in the task manager so you can kill it yourself.
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@f0dder, I think it's pretty much a distinction without a difference. Again we are back to usage. If some dude loads up his 10 GB spread sheet once every six months and thereby forgets to account for it in settings due to the infrequency, it could conceivably crap out on him. Your settings may safeguard in that case. But I never use 10 GB spread sheets. So I don't see the advantage of guarding against what's never going to happen. I don't loan my PC out for others to use.
For me, min=max when using swap at all is more than sufficient.
I'm not about to load Linux to gather stats. If they improved swap file that's fine but by the very nature of file systems I would tend to guess the partition swap is a lot closer to the low level calculations that file systems use to manage the files. Therefore it's awfully likely there's another layer on top of that for the file system that's not there for the partition management. t's pretty much who owns how many blocks on the partition where. Can't get much simpler. One virtue of running a slow 486 with 12 Mhz bus was that any optimizations could be felt viscerally. I didn't have to run a benchmark. The machine was so slow I could see and feel the difference in responsiveness. Also watching the disk LED. Partition was noticeably faster. I ran comparisons when setting up my swap scheme(and yes I ran them forward then back to disallow any file system caching).
Swap Partition placement does make a difference. Since my 2 physical drives had such a speed and size disparity I was prevented from doing all swap on the non Linux drive. But I put the swap partition on the fast disk hosting Linux between the 2 partitions I used for Linux file system. Tended to swap back to center rather than making wide swings to fetch. Not much thrashing at all esp. with supplemental swap on the other physical drive. Also I did have settings if the universe changed and I had some giga-unimaginable memory requirement, a swap file was created on the fast disk.
But either method would work. Right now I'm back to running no swap since I tend to use light weight processes. Resource meter tends to show this machine running with almost a GB of memory on Stand-by. I don't think it's going to crash loading Firefox if I already have Chromium open.
But, if someone used either method I don't think they'd notice the difference. All I can tell you is in all these years of running swap min=max whenever I check it with PageDefrag it shows one big chunk. Like years after I set it up that way. Once I got a PC with 2 GB then I got away from swap altogether. My 8 GB machine sure doesn't need it for my use.
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If they improved swap file that's fine but by the very nature of file systems I would tend to guess the partition swap is a lot closer to the low level calculations that file systems use to manage the files. Therefore it's awfully likely there's another layer on top of that for the file system that's not there for the partition management.
-MilesAhead
Actually, swap in Linux is a lot more accessible and tweakable than it is in Windows. And better documented. If you have multiple swap spaces you can prioritize which gets used first. You can temporarily or permanently tweak what set of conditions triggers a swap ("swappiness"). You can also very easily enable or completely disable swap from the command line. I tend to do that on machines with a lot of RAM. I'll enable swap only if I'm doing something that needs it. Then I'll disable it afterwards.
Good two part article on it here (http://www.ideaexcursion.com/2009/01/29/all-about-linux-swap-part-1-introduction/). Part-1 gives the main details. Part-2 gets into tweaking.
You can also temporarily or permanently swap to either a swap partition - or a swap file on a regular partition. That comes in handy if you ever discover you didn't create a big enough swap partition for your requirements. A swap file fixes the problem very nicely until you around to resizing some partitions (also easy to do in Linux) to give you a bigger space if you prefer to keep swap on its own partition.
Yessir! Swap is a whole 'nother beast on Linux. :Thmbsup:
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If they improved swap file that's fine but by the very nature of file systems I would tend to guess the partition swap is a lot closer to the low level calculations that file systems use to manage the files. Therefore it's awfully likely there's another layer on top of that for the file system that's not there for the partition management.
-MilesAhead
Actually, swap in Linux is a lot more accessible and tweakable than it is in Windows. And better documented. If you have multiple swap spaces you can prioritize which gets used first. You can temporarily or permanently tweak what set of conditions triggers a swap ("swappiness"). You can also very easily enable or completely disable swap from the command line. I tend to do that on machines with a lot of RAM. I'll enable swap only if I'm doing something that needs it. Then I'll disable it afterwards.
Good two part article on it here (http://www.ideaexcursion.com/2009/01/29/all-about-linux-swap-part-1-introduction/). Part-1 gives the main details. Part-2 gets into tweaking.
You can also temporarily or permanently swap to either a swap partition - or a swap file on a regular partition. That comes in handy if you ever discover you didn't create a big enough swap partition for your requirements. A swap file fixes the problem very nicely until you around to resizing some partitions (also easy to do in Linux) to give you a bigger space if you prefer to keep swap on its own partition.
Yessir! Swap is a whole 'nother beast on Linux. :Thmbsup:
-40hz
I know. See my previous posts esp. the one with "round robin" in the text.
It's almost unbelievable Windows has done nothing in all these years regarding swap.
Maybe those guys from DEC quit and nobody else at Redmond has the talent.
I wonder if anyone has info on Windows 7 prefetch vs. swap? I have a feeling it does stuff like swap stuff out so it can prefetch stuff on the preferred list in. It would be interesting to know if setting page file max would have any effect. It might be more conservative if it knew there was a limit other than free disk space? Probably no way to know for sure.
But those type of tweaks was what made Linux an adventure. What killed it for me was the editors. The only thing Windows-ee was Kylix ide editor. It just got distracting trying to remember how to navigate in Emacs. And the help was weird. Kind of needs total immersion to really do it well. I always had the Windows partition crutch. Pretty much had to as some devices I had to initialize with Windows. Then once warm I could boot Linux and use 'em. :)
Even today if I ask about a Linux editor that feels like a Windows editor I get the same suggestions I tried then. Word processors when I want a text editor. The ones I found with Windows type hotkeys tended to be configured in lisp or python. Just kept me from thinking about what I was typing because I had to think how to type what I was typing.
But it was fun.
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It's almost unbelievable Windows has done nothing in all these years regarding swap.
-MilesAhead
Oh...I wouldn't be surprised if they did. They're probably just not sharing it.
In some respects I can understand why. In a well designed system, the system itself should take care of that without the user needing to get involved. And considering the number of Windows users who aren't "technical" (one of the drawbacks of being The Desktop of the Masses), maybe it's better that it's been dumbed-down at the user level.
And in all fairness, you can either view the ability to screw around with swap as a feature of Linux. Or proof positive that it wasn't implemented properly to begin with - hence the need for its tweakability.
Once again it's: [glass half empty | glass half full] depending on who's doing the talking. 8)
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With systems these days having so much memory any user will struggle to find a way to actually take advantage of it, I don't see the point in having Microsoft wasting their time improving the "tweakability" of the swap file, frankly. And Windows does an excellent job managing the swap with the default settings, or at least that's my experience.
I guess having the perfect swap setup is quickly approaching the snake oil status, pretty much like all the optimization tricks that no longer bring quantifiable benefits today. Unless you're OCD about it *ahem*
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I guess having the perfect swap setup is quickly approaching the snake oil status, pretty much like all the optimization tricks that no longer bring quantifiable benefits today.
-Lashiec
Well said! And likely very true too. :Thmbsup:
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Ram disk is so Win98 anyway.
(http://smileys.smilchat.net/emoticon/computer/virus.gif)
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I guess having the perfect swap setup is quickly approaching the snake oil status, pretty much like all the optimization tricks that no longer bring quantifiable benefits today.
-Lashiec
Well said! And likely very true too. :Thmbsup:
-40hz
You mean if I go to "my really damn quick PC" dot com it won't make my PC really damn quick, even though I'm running with only 7% free disk space and have 44 windows open?
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That depends on how much malware the site is going to push. More malware, higher likelihood of a Windows format+reinstall, and thus a faster computer. Until you ran out of disk space again, that is.