XP Paging File HELP!!!

[NietzscheRCN]

I have my paging file set to be 256MB. Windows will randomly increase it to 1536MB on restart. I go through the system profile and it says set to 256MB. Same with the registry. I am stumped on what this is. I would guess it has something to do with an application interacting with the OS, but I can not figure out how to trace it. The task manager constantly shows the PF using 175-200MB of RAM. I have 1GB of system memory that usually stays around 256-300MB used. How can the paging file increase itself, especially when I have so much headroom left in physical memory.

PLEASE HELP!!!

 

[n0cmonkey]

Buy a bigger hard drive man. You can get over one hundred gigabytes for under $100USD.

 

[NietzscheRCN]

I have a raid configuration with 72 Gigs and a 400 Gig storage. I do not think that is the issue. I didn't mention harddrives anywhere in my post anyways. My problem is windows resizing the paging file when it is at a set size.

 

[NietzscheRCN]

Anyone have a clue?

 

[Crusty]

Why do you have the page file set so small?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: NietzscheRCN
I have a raid configuration with 72 Gigs and a 400 Gig storage. I do not think that is the issue. I didn't mention harddrives anywhere in my post anyways. My problem is windows resizing the paging file when it is at a set size.

My point was, with the price of storage today, why bother?

 

[ViRGE]

How much RAM do you have? The minimum size for the page file is going to be however much RAM you have.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
How much RAM do you have? The minimum size for the page file is going to be however much RAM you have.

1GB.

 

[KoolDrew]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: NietzscheRCN
I have a raid configuration with 72 Gigs and a 400 Gig storage. I do not think that is the issue. I didn't mention harddrives anywhere in my post anyways. My problem is windows resizing the paging file when it is at a set size.

My point was, with the price of storage today, why bother?

I agree. With that much disk space how does it make any difference? Just set it System Managed and forget about it.

 

[NietzscheRCN]

I have my reasons for wanting it the way it is. I don't think my system settings should really matter so much. If you disagree with them then that is your perogative. I am merely trying to find out why this is happening. The fact that I can have that much space taken up by the paging file is meaningless to the matter at hand. I need to know why it is happening. If you can shed light on this and only this please let me know.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: NietzscheRCN
I have my reasons for wanting it the way it is. I don't think my system settings should really matter so much. If you disagree with them then that is your prerogative. I am merely trying to find out why this is happening. The fact that I can have that much space taken up by the paging file is meaningless to the matter at hand. I need to know why it is happening. If you can shed light on this and only this please let me know.

Unless I'm wrong, the total pagefile space can't be smaller than the amount of RAM you have. If that's the case, then by setting it to 256MB you're angering Windows, and it's resetting the pagefile to the default size of 1.5x the system RAM size.

 

[Nothinman]

I have my reasons for wanting it the way it is.

And they're probably wrong, unless you've written any OSes lately.

Unless I'm wrong, the total pagefile space can't be smaller than the amount of RAM you have

That shouldn't matter, it's recommended to leave it at least 1x the size of phsyical memory but it's not a requirement AFAIK.

 

[Bozo]

If you right click on My Computer, select Properties>Advanced>Startup and Recovery. Check to make sure you are not selected for a complete memory dump. I believe this would cause Windows to resize the Page File.

Bozo

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Bozo
If you right click on My Computer, select Properties>Advanced>Startup and Recovery. Check to make sure you are not selected for a complete memory dump. I believe this would cause Windows to resize the Page File.

Bozo

Beat me to it.. Yep. If you have complete memory dump on then the page file has to be 64k + size of physical memory (minimum). Windows will expand the page file to account for this even if you've fixed a smaller size.

Bill

 

[NietzscheRCN]

I have the memory dump turned off. The point of having more system memory is to get away with as little paging file as possible. Memory is ALOT faster. Windows shouldn't care about how I set it. My paging file never, and I mean never goes above 200MB. It all started after installing Visual Studio and Office 2003. I was told this shouldn't matter, but if you can find a corelation then let me know.

 

[Nothinman]

If you're using the PFUsage gauge in taskmgr to see how much pagefile usage there is, you should realize that it's not terribly accurate and the number is generally a lot higher than what actually on-disk pagefile space is in use.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: NietzscheRCN
I have the memory dump turned off. The point of having more system memory is to get away with as little paging file as possible. Memory is ALOT faster. Windows shouldn't care about how I set it. My paging file never, and I mean never goes above 200MB. It all started after installing Visual Studio and Office 2003. I was told this shouldn't matter, but if you can find a corelation then let me know.

Hmmmmmmmmm that is weird, I can't account for what your seeing in that case. For what it's worth, the size of the file does not indicate how much Windows is currently using. From your config, odds are your doing little if any paging.

Bill

 

[NietzscheRCN]

Thanks for all the help, I am just going to reformat everything and create a partition for the paging file like I should have done in the first place.

 

[Nothinman]

Putting the pagefile on a dedicated partition on the same physical drive as everything else is stupid.

 

[KoolDrew]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Putting the pagefile on a dedicated partition on the same physical drive as everything else is stupid.

Exactly. All it will do is increase seek times when acessing the pagefile. Leave it on your root partition System Managed. For the majority of users they won't gain anything from messing around with the pagefile.