Locating the Page File
In spite of the
name 'virtual memory' the paging file is really just a chunk of
reserved hard drive space where data may be written and retrieved as
needed. Since the paging file and operating system files are by
default located on the same drive, concurrent access to both
locations is impossible. One or the other has to wait, slowing down
overall system performance. What can you do to minimize the delay?
If your system only has one hard drive the best option is to pack
the motherboard with as much RAM as possible to minimize paging file
accesses.
If the operating
system has more than one hard drive, place the paging file on a
drive which does not contain the operating system files. A step up
from placing the paging file on a separate drive is to place it on a
dedicated drive. Even if you don't have a drive to dedicate solely
to the paging file, placing it on a different drive that contains
files which are not accessed frequently will help the performance
issue.
If more than two
hard drives are available, the paging file can be split among
different drives. The more drives that are available to split the
paging file across, the better the performance increase. Even though
it's outside the scope of this article, paging files should not be
placed on fault-tolerant drives because of the way data is written
to them. It looks like 'the more paging files the better' corollary
is applicable, and to a point that is true, with one major
exception. Do not place more than one paging file on multiple
partitions on a single physical hard disk. Performance will decrease
because the drive heads perform sequential accesses to different
locations on the drive rather than pulling the information from one
contiguous location.
Finally, the
temptation is always great when you have a RAM packed machine to
totally eliminate the page file. Don't do it. By design, some
components in Windows XP require the presence of a page file, even
if they never use it for its intended purpose. You'll likely receive
out of memory type errors if you eliminate all page files. Feel free
to set the page file to the required minimum (2MB) if you have
sufficient RAM, secure in the knowledge that XP won't access the
page file unless it's absolutely needed, but again - don't eliminate
it totally.
Page File Articles Series
[
Paging File ] [Locating the
Page File ] [
Sizing the Page File ] [
Physically Setting Page File Size ]
[
Page Files and Fragmentation ] [
Defragmenting the Page File ]
[
Paging File Performance Monitoring ]
|
