page file on SSD

[max789]

Hi, all

Finally took the plunge and got an SSD as the boot drive. Manually aligned partition and freshly installed Windows XP.

After googling and researching, there seems to be conflicting views on how best to handle the page file.

Four possibilities:
(1) Put the page file on the SSD and let Windows manage its size (thus, variable);
(2) Put the page file on the SSD and use a fixed size;
(3) Put the page file on a Ramdisk, which is faster than any SSD, or
(4) Put the page file at the start of the mechanical hard disk used for storage.

I'd appreciate it if fellow forum members could share your experience on this detail.

Thanks!

 

[Makaveli]

Why are you still using windows XP?

 

[max789]

Budgetary reasons.

 

[Numenorean]

Uhhhh.....

A page file is used when you run out of RAM. If you put a page file in a RAM disk....you're going to use the page file more often because you're wasting RAM. You will basically just slow your system down for no reason by putting the page file in a RAM disk.

 

[max789]

Uhhhh.....

A page file is used when you run out of RAM. If you put a page file in a RAM disk....you're going to use the page file more often because you're wasting RAM. You will basically just slow your system down for no reason by putting the page file in a RAM disk.

I use a Ramdisk program which "recovers" the invisible RAM (about 1GB out of 4GB) under Windows XP 32-bit, and can put the page file there if necessary.

 

[Rubycon]

Let the OS manage your page file. Playing around with settings is highly susceptible to placebo as far as any difference they make. (most of the time the real changes will be worse!)

 

[postmortemIA]

combo of (2) (4) imo, some software needs page file, regardless of amount of ram that you have. you can have more than one page file. making small page drive on ssd will limit number of writes and in most cases is adequate.

 

[Veliko]

My advice would be to put the page file on the SSD and don't fix the size of it. Just let the OS handle it.

 

[Zebo]

Hi, all

Finally took the plunge and got an SSD as the boot drive. Manually aligned partition and freshly installed Windows XP.

After googling and researching, there seems to be conflicting views on how best to handle the page file.

Four possibilities:
(1) Put the page file on the SSD and let Windows manage its size (thus, variable);
(2) Put the page file on the SSD and use a fixed size;
(3) Put the page file on a Ramdisk, which is faster than any SSD, or
(4) Put the page file at the start of the mechanical hard disk used for storage.

I'd appreciate it if fellow forum members could share your experience on this detail.

Thanks!

I don't use a page file. I don't like how windows writes stuff to disk that in background and takes it out of memory. YMMV.


Anyway here is a good SSD optimization guidewhich will cover your concerns
http://thessdreview.com/optimization-guides/the-ssd-optimization-guide-2/

 

[semo]

My advice would be to put the page file on the SSD and don't fix the size of it. Just let the OS handle it.

And upgrade from XP already!

 

[Nothinman]

Budgetary reasons.

Should've factored in a Win7 upgrade disc before the SSD. You could be using a non-EOL'd OS and have access to all of your memory.

As for the pagefile, just leave it alone and let the system manage it. Unless your commit charge is constantly at the limit or over the amount of physical memory that you have you're not using it much if at all. If you're really low on space on the SSD move it to a mechanical drive and leave a small one on the system drive so you can get kernel dumps on BSOD.

 

[1cito]

Anyway here is a good SSD optimization guidewhich will cover your concerns
http://thessdreview.com/optimization-guides/the-ssd-optimization-guide-2/

Nice read. Thank you for the link.

 

[nkeney]

The problem with allowing the OS to handle the pagefile, particularly on an SSD, is the default size of the pagefile. I know on Windows 7 that the OS for some reason defaults the size of the pagefile to the size of your physical RAM. For example, if you have 8GB of RAM then you'll have an 8GB page file. On a 80-120GB SSD, that's a ton of wasted space. I am unsure if Windows XP is like Windows 7 when it comes to default size.

I have 12GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD, so I just created a static pagefile of 1GB in size instead of letting it default to 12GB. I didn't want to turn it off completely, but I at least limited the size. I might try turning it off all together, but I wanted to try shrinking it first to see how programs run.

You can always try disabling it and if you see issues in some programs then turn it back on. If you do want to turn it off though, you'd better have a decent amount of RAM available.

 

[Veliko]

Regardless of how much RAM you have you should just let Windows handle the swap file by itself. Setting it to a low amount results in a performance hit if an application or Windows needs to exceed that amount.

 

[Nothinman]

The problem with allowing the OS to handle the pagefile, particularly on an SSD, is the default size of the pagefile. I know on Windows 7 that the OS for some reason defaults the size of the pagefile to the size of your physical RAM. For example, if you have 8GB of RAM then you'll have an 8GB page file. On a 80-120GB SSD, that's a ton of wasted space. I am unsure if Windows XP is like Windows 7 when it comes to default size.

I have 12GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD, so I just created a static pagefile of 1GB in size instead of letting it default to 12GB. I didn't want to turn it off completely, but I at least limited the size. I might try turning it off all together, but I wanted to try shrinking it first to see how programs run.

You can always try disabling it and if you see issues in some programs then turn it back on. If you do want to turn it off though, you'd better have a decent amount of RAM available.

Reducing the minimum size shouldn't be an issue as long as you don't go too small. Ideally one would use perfmon to graph their memory usage over time and size it accordingly, but most aren't willing to put the time or effort into it.

 

[Krynj]

I disabled my page file. I have 16GB of RAM, so a 16GB page file was taking up too much space on my 80GB (74GB formatted) SSD. I figured 16GB will be enough RAM, but if I ever need to turn the page file back on, I'm not going to make it any larger than 4GB.

 

[john3850]

I use a Ramdisk program which "recovers" the invisible RAM (about 1GB out of 4GB) under Windows XP 32-bit, and can put the page file there if necessary.

The last time I was forced to use a Ramdisk program was on a pentium 60 with a intel
overdrive cpu @200mhz and 384 memory with 2x3dfx.

I would set a pagefile @512 on the SSD and 1024 on the storage disk.

 

[Zebo]

I disabled my page file. I have 16GB of RAM, so a 16GB page file was taking up too much space on my 80GB (74GB formatted) SSD. I figured 16GB will be enough RAM, but if I ever need to turn the page file back on, I'm not going to make it any larger than 4GB.

I've disabled it since 2000 pro days. Some people say programs need it but I have found none yet. Run with only 6GB.

What I do notice with 4GB free and not touching Firefox that's in the background for an hour with 25 tabs open the OS will cache it to disk and slow down when going back to Firefox when page file is on. No Thanks.

 

[nkeney]

Regardless of how much RAM you have you should just let Windows handle the swap file by itself. Setting it to a low amount results in a performance hit if an application or Windows needs to exceed that amount.

Well, if you have 12-16GB of RAM and you let Windows handle the swap and the SSD is only 120GB in size then you will have a 12-16GB swap file which is 10-15% of total drive space. That's an awful lot of wasted space for a swap file they is hardly going to be used.

If you only have 4GB of RAM then yeah, I'd leave it. If you have 8GB or more the swap file starts getting really big. Remember, the original poster is asking from an SSD perspective. The SSD itself is going to be so fast that if, and it's a big if, there is any performance degradation from having a smaller swap file I have not notice any. However, I have quite a bit of RAM at 12GB which is hardly ever full.

 

[nkeney]

One thing I wouldn't do is put the swap file on a mechanical drive. To me, you would just be doing your SSD experience a disservice as you'd be re-introducing the slow mechanical drive back into the OS stream. The whole point of getting the SSD is to increase speed and responsiveness.

 

[Nothinman]

One thing I wouldn't do is put the swap file on a mechanical drive. To me, you would just be doing your SSD experience a disservice as you'd be re-introducing the slow mechanical drive back into the OS stream. The whole point of getting the SSD is to increase speed and responsiveness.

But as long as you have enough memory for your workload the pagefile usage will be near zero so it won't matter anyway.

 

[jjmIII]

(2) Put the page file on the SSD and use a fixed size;

I always fixed the PF in XP. Didn't we all used to do that to cut down fragging our spindle drives? If you were on Win7, I'd go choice (1).

 

[Nothinman]

I always fixed the PF in XP. Didn't we all used to do that to cut down fragging our spindle drives? If you were on Win7, I'd go choice (1).

And it was just as pointless back then as it is now. The pagefile only ever shrinks on reboot so as long as you don't make it anemic and have enough memory it'll never have to grow and thus never affect fragmentation. Not that fragmentation is really an issue either...

 

[deimos3428]

The pagefile doesn't improve performance; putting it on an SSD wastes the most expensive storage media in your system. Buy enough RAM that you don't need a pagefile at all, and/or put one on a spindle disk if you feel they're really necessary.

 

[Lazlo Panaflex]

FYI, I recently had a static pagefile set to 2GB min/max (Win XP Pro). After reading this thread, I then let the system manage the file, and the size jumped to ~3300 max, (2MB min). Which is interesting, because I have 4GB RAM. No discernable difference in performance. This is on a spindle drve, btw.

FWIW, the only issue I had in the past with a small static page file (<500MB) was that the system threw a low virtual memory warning after running Doom 3. Setting it to ~1 GB made everything copacetic again.

Edit: I always thought that Windows required a page file and didn't play nice if one wasn't enabled. But, I guess that really isn't the case now if you have lots of RAM (and the fact that Microsoft still lets you disable it outright.)