Author Topic: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file? (Read 64,485 times)

f0dder · « **Reply #25 on:** July 07, 2008, 04:40 PM »

tomos: it simply refuses to run without, even though you have plenty of RAM? Interesting... and what a silly limitation to impose

y0himba · « **Reply #26 on:** July 07, 2008, 04:55 PM »

I have been without a page file for 24 hours now. Specs: Intel Q6600 Quad Core, 4GB DDR3 1033, Vista Business 32bit. Only difference I see is less drive chatter. Other than that, nothing.

No difference at all actually.

masu · « **Reply #27 on:** July 07, 2008, 05:02 PM »

Quote

nly difference I see is less drive chatter.

which is a big plus

tomos · « **Reply #28 on:** July 07, 2008, 07:43 PM »

Quote from: f0dder on July 07, 2008, 04:40 PM

tomos: it simply refuses to run without, even though you have plenty of RAM? Interesting... and what a silly limitation to impose

could it be to do with fact it was released in 1999 when they probably couldnt imagine people using it on computers with 2 gigabyites ... and if they could, they probably presumed I would have upgraded by now ...

I dug this out

Quote from: tomos on August 12, 2007, 05:18 PM

from the Photoshop 5.5 help:-
When your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation, Adobe Photoshop uses a proprietary virtual memory technology, also called the scratch disks. Virtual memory is disk space used for storing data during a work session when the amount of RAM is insufficient. (This scratch disk space is not a Windows swap file or Mac OS virtual memory, but is used only when working in Photoshop.)
...
The amount of free space on the scratch disk must be greater than or equal to the amount of RAM you have allocated to Photoshop. To ensure good performance, Photoshop writes the entire RAM contents to the scratch disks during idle times. If the scratch disks run out of free space, Photoshop quits taking additional RAM—regardless of what you have allocated to the program. This means that if you’ve allocated 60 MB to Photoshop [1999 standards ] but you have only 10 MB of free space on your scratch disk, Photoshop will use only 10 MB of RAM.

f0dder · « **Reply #29 on:** July 07, 2008, 08:12 PM »

Heh, especially considering they have their own "proprietary virtual memory technology", it's even more silly it won't run without a windows pagefile

tomos · « **Reply #30 on:** July 07, 2008, 08:28 PM »

Quote from: f0dder on July 07, 2008, 08:12 PM

Heh, especially considering they have their own "proprietary virtual memory technology", it's even more silly it won't run without a windows pagefile

absolutely

lanux128 · « **Reply #31 on:** July 08, 2008, 01:52 AM »

a question for f0dder: now that i've disabled the swap file, can i safely delete the pagefile.sys file? i have enough hard disk space so i want to delete just to see if Windows creates the file again.

nudone · « **Reply #32 on:** July 08, 2008, 08:28 AM »

i've turned the swap file back on (system managed).

err, it appears that my operating system isn't actually any quicker when the page file is disabled so i was just kidding myself. i'm going to leave the page file on now and just forget about it.

f0dder · « **Reply #33 on:** July 08, 2008, 01:41 PM »

lanux128: yup, you can safely delete pagefile.sys without any problems, once you've turned it off.

nudone: it's pretty hard to benchmark the effects... especially if you have a lot of RAM and fast harddrives. I still feel better knowing that windows won't do any useless paging even if I can't feel much of a difference on my current machine... back when I only had 1 gig of RAM, more paging was done, and I had a slow(er) harddrive - I believe I could feel the difference there, under certain load scenarios. But I have no idea how you'd go about benchmarking a thing like this. (Sure, you can watch the pagefile usage statistics and draw graphs etc., but that doesn't tell you much about how much "perceived sluggishness" there is, unless the stats are really bad).

nudone · « **Reply #34 on:** July 08, 2008, 02:00 PM »

i would have left it turned off but i had a bluescreen and then when the machine came back on skype had forgotten all the settings - so, maybe skype is crap and likes the pagefile. just making wild assumtions.

f0dder · « **Reply #35 on:** July 08, 2008, 02:17 PM »

Quote from: nudone on July 08, 2008, 02:00 PM

i would have left it turned off but i had a bluescreen and then when the machine came back on skype had forgotten all the settings - so, maybe skype is crap and likes the pagefile. just making wild assumtions.

Hmm, sounds weird - can't see how the two things should be related. The only thing a pagefile can help you with during a BSOD is getting a minidump, which you can use for diagnostics... does skype store config in the registry or ini/xml/whatever?

Deozaan · « **Reply #36 on:** July 08, 2008, 07:18 PM »

So I disabled my Pagefile a few days ago when I found this thread, but when I bring up the Task Manager and look at the Performance tab, it shows that my pagefile is at about 50% used (999MB).

Is this because I haven't manually deleted Pagefile.sys?

f0dder · « **Reply #37 on:** July 08, 2008, 09:20 PM »

Quote from: Deozaan on July 08, 2008, 07:18 PM

So I disabled my Pagefile a few days ago when I found this thread, but when I bring up the Task Manager and look at the Performance tab, it shows that my pagefile is at about 50% used (999MB).

Is this because I haven't manually deleted Pagefile.sys?

No, it's because task manager uses imprecise wording

It should be named "Commit charge" (or just "Commit" as Process Explorer calls it short). The WP entry is also a bit imprecise since it assumes there will always be pagefiles, but hey

kimmchii · « **Reply #38 on:** July 11, 2008, 04:22 AM »

Quote from: f0dder on July 06, 2008, 01:00 PM

The problem with pagefile on windows is that it tends to page out stuff even when it doesn't need to.

exactly, thats why i run without a pagefile for more than 2 years already.

lanux128 · « **Reply #39 on:** July 14, 2008, 12:51 AM »

i just noticed that prolonged usage with Microsoft Office throws up an "low memory error" but Windows doesn't actually crashes. maybe it has something with 'undo' buffer.

f0dder · « **Reply #40 on:** July 14, 2008, 12:56 AM »

Quote from: lanux128 on July 14, 2008, 12:51 AM

i just noticed that prolonged usage with Microsoft Office throws up an "low memory error" but Windows doesn't actually crashes. maybe it has something with 'undo' buffer.

Interesting! Which version of Office, how much memory? Does your total available memory drop way low, what is Office's memory consumption like, etc.?

lanux128 · « **Reply #41 on:** July 14, 2008, 01:02 AM »

i'm using Office 2007 with 2GB of RAM. i hadn't thought of firing up Process Explorer to monitor the mem usage but normally Office is quite light-footed on this dual-core 2GB system.

Deozaan · « **Reply #42 on:** August 16, 2008, 04:54 PM »

When I disabled my pagefile from this thread, I didn't notice any speed difference with my computer. Which is a cool thing.

But shortly after I disabled it, I started getting out of memory errors in Internet Explorer on Google related pages (Google Reader, iGoogle, Gmail, etc.). I also installed a VM with Vista so I enabled the pagefile again to allow the VistaVM to run with more memory.

Since enabling my pagefile again, the out of memory issues for Google sites in IE still happen (which I think means they're unrelated), I've gotten one pagefile related BSOD and also my computer just seems slower because I really notice when it has to restore the paged memory from the hdd.

masu · « **Reply #43 on:** August 16, 2008, 05:06 PM »

How much RAM do you have?
I wouldn't do this If I had less than 2 GB Ram

Deozaan · « **Reply #44 on:** August 16, 2008, 06:07 PM »

Quote from: masu on August 16, 2008, 05:06 PM

How much RAM do you have?
I wouldn't do this If I had less than 2 GB Ram

2GB in XP Pro SP3

f0dder · « **Reply #45 on:** August 17, 2008, 06:52 PM »

Deozaan: weird, I ran 32bit XPSP2 with 2 gigs and no pagefile for years without problems - except for one or two games where I had to temporarily re-enable the pagefile.

As for system running slower after re-enabling pagefile, grab sysinternals' "contig" tool as see if the file is fragmented or not.

Deozaan · « **Reply #46 on:** August 17, 2008, 08:27 PM »

Quote from: f0dder on August 17, 2008, 06:52 PM

Deozaan: weird, I ran 32bit XPSP2 with 2 gigs and no pagefile for years without problems - except for one or two games where I had to temporarily re-enable the pagefile.

As for system running slower after re-enabling pagefile, grab sysinternals' "contig" tool as see if the file is fragmented or not.

Well, like I said, I'm still getting the out of memory errors in IE for Google sites even with the pagefile enabled again, so I'm not sure if that's related.

As for contig, it just tells me "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process."

And by the way. Don't try to use Unlocker on the pagefile or your computer will BSOD.

Shades · « **Reply #47 on:** August 17, 2008, 09:32 PM »

Don't you have the option to defrag your swap file when you reboot your system? Because that is more or less the only time you are able to defrag it using Windows.

tomos · « **Reply #48 on:** August 17, 2008, 09:40 PM »

Deozaan,
I have used the JKDefrag gui from:-
http://www.emro.nl/freeware/
which in turn uses PageDefrag from Sysinternals to defrag the file on reboot
Cant do any harm to defrag it anyways even if you cant check it

btw, when you re-enabled it was it in exactly the same way it was previously enabled?

y0himba · « **Reply #49 on:** August 17, 2008, 10:14 PM »

I have noticed one application that doesn't like a disabled swap file, "Twhirl".