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.
[ Up ] [ 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 ]
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