Pagefile size...

[AndyR]

I have 1 Gig of physical memory installed and after looking around various sites I came to the conclusion that rather than let WinXP decide my pagefile size, I would set it to a minimum of 2Meg and a maximum of 1.5Gig.

I would have thought that WinXP would initially start up with a pagefile of 2 Meg and expand when needed but i would have also though that with 1 Gig physical memory, the need for the pagefile would rare. I also assumed that WinXP would favour the physical memory before the virtual memory...

But that doesn't seem to be the case.

When my system starts up, WinXP allocates the mamximum size I've set and right now it's using 262 Meg of virtual memory even though 671 Meg of physical memory is free.

So, what's the deal? Why does WinXP seem to favour slow virtual memory instead of fast physical memory and what are your recommendations for pagefile settings?

Thanks!

AMD Athlon XP3000+
1 Gig PC2700 (2x512)
2 x 120 Gig Maxtor ATA133 HD's (8 Meg Cache)
Pioneer DVR-109 16x
Sony DVD Rom
Geforce 4 4200Ti VIVO
Win XP Pro - SP1
MSI KT4-Ultra

[Elaine]

Basically XP is just preparing itself just in case it needs extra memory for performance reasons. I always set my virtual memory to a static amount which used to be 1.5 of the physical memory you have installed. However as I now have much more physical memory installed, I set the virtual memory to a static amount equal to the physical memory. That is probably even over kill, just play around with changing it a bit while watching task manager as you can probably get away with quite a bit less depending upon your needs.

[Van Nugent]

Exactly as Elaine said, a fixed virtual memory setting would work better for the whole system. If Hibernation is enabled, you'll need to set it at 1.5x the physical memory. Otherwise, a setting of 512MB to 768MB would work great for most systems.

[AndyR]

Thanks for the replies.

I still can't figure out why my system feels the need to page memory to disk even when there's plenty of free physical ram available but I've been watching things on and off with task manager and have now set the pagefile to a static value of 512 Meg.

I think the 'rule of thumb' that some websites suggest of 1.5x your physical ram really is overkill. Surely I'd end up with about a gig of the allocated space basically being wasted judging by my computers usage (unless using hibernation mode - which I don't)

Then again, life's too short to worry about such things!

[QWERTY]

I still can't figure out why my system feels the need to page memory to disk even when there's plenty of free physical ram available ....


Windows has no idea what you are going to do next or how much memory the next application you run may need. Therefore to optimize memory and insure that the next app you run will have as much as it needs, any background task that's idle for a definate period of time automatically get's paged to the harddrive.