pagefile, to be or not to be. long reading (users with >1GB RAM)

Most of the books are based on the memory management in nt and 2000, In xp it is diffrent.
In NT/2000, disable page file will not have an effect, it will just create a new one. But in XP it will run without one, but some roumors said that it create a hidden pagefile in about 22mb size for some operations but I haven't found it yet.
And none of the "how memory stuff work" say what hapens if you have no page file. And all "¿how ?" base their explenations how memory is moved around on a system that have a pagefile.
I forgot to mention that i did get error messages when running with no page file. But there where in form of these yellow popups that windows spam a new installed system with, and I just ignored them and have disable all these yellow popup and I live happy.
Am I just lucky to never had any problems when running without pagefile?

Just one more notice, I installed windows in 3 dec 2002 and have never reinstalled it since then. Just some repairs have ben made, putting missing and corrupt back through my paralell linux install. Have changed motherboard during this time too. And windows run fast and don't have this "slow need to reinstall" fell that most system have. I got my 1gig ram in spring 2003 and removed page file 2-4weeks after.
 
condac said:
Just one more notice, I installed windows in 3 dec 2002 and have never reinstalled it since then. Just some repairs have ben made, putting missing and corrupt back through my paralell linux install. Have changed motherboard during this time too. And windows run fast and don't have this "slow need to reinstall" fell that most system have. I got my 1gig ram in spring 2003 and removed page file 2-4weeks after.
Click to expand...
Oh, well in that case you MUST know what your talking about. Why didn't you say that in the first place? :rolleyes:
 
condac said:
Most of the books are based on the memory management in nt and 2000, In xp it is diffrent.
In NT/2000, disable page file will not have an effect, it will just create a new one. But in XP it will run without one, but some roumors said that it create a hidden pagefile in about 22mb size for some operations but I haven't found it yet.
And none of the "how memory stuff work" say what hapens if you have no page file. And all "¿how ?" base their explenations how memory is moved around on a system that have a pagefile.
I forgot to mention that i did get error messages when running with no page file. But there where in form of these yellow popups that windows spam a new installed system with, and I just ignored them and have disable all these yellow popup and I live happy.
Am I just lucky to never had any problems when running without pagefile?

Just one more notice, I installed windows in 3 dec 2002 and have never reinstalled it since then. Just some repairs have ben made, putting missing and corrupt back through my paralell linux install. Have changed motherboard during this time too. And windows run fast and don't have this "slow need to reinstall" fell that most system have. I got my 1gig ram in spring 2003 and removed page file 2-4weeks after.
Click to expand...

I am not one to flame...but read the damned books instead of talking out your ass...please! I went to barnes and nobles and read the books! It mentioned 2000, XP, and 2003...not NT 4. Please re-read my post.

I seem to think my posts are invisible or those who don't want to hear it, it doesn't register. :rolleyes:
 
From my experience, disabling the pagefile has exactly one benefit, but you need a lot of RAM to see this specific benefit. Windows' file cache is apparently very aggressive, so if you're doing a lot of disk I/O (and I don't mean "playing mp3s and browsing the web") then there's no way for private data to get paged out to disk. So it stays in physical memory.

I have noticed that disabling the pagefile on my workstation substantially improves system responsivity when doing a full multithreaded build of my current project. It's something that takes roughly 30 minutes on a Dual 3ghz Xeon with 2GB RAM. Without the page file, Outlook comes up pretty quick (it was minimized, I'm not referring to starting it from scratch). With a page file, it is very slow and the disk grinds away even more.

Anyway this is an empirical observation with a hypothesis as a possible explanation. It is not necessarily the exactly correct explanation.

And as always ... This post is made "AS IS" without warranties, and confers no rights.
 
rolo said:
From my experience, disabling the pagefile has exactly one benefit, but you need a lot of RAM to see this specific benefit. Windows' file cache is apparently very aggressive, so if you're doing a lot of disk I/O (and I don't mean "playing mp3s and browsing the web") then there's no way for private data to get paged out to disk. So it stays in physical memory.

I have noticed that disabling the pagefile on my workstation substantially improves system responsivity when doing a full multithreaded build of my current project. It's something that takes roughly 30 minutes on a Dual 3ghz Xeon with 2GB RAM. Without the page file, Outlook comes up pretty quick (it was minimized, I'm not referring to starting it from scratch). With a page file, it is very slow and the disk grinds away even more.

Anyway this is an empirical observation with a hypothesis as a possible explanation. It is not necessarily the exactly correct explanation.

And as always ... This post is made "AS IS" without warranties, and confers no rights.
Click to expand...
That's because when something is minimized it's paged out. (This is the one part of the VMM I wish could be better.) The reasoning goes, if it's minimized the user isn't using it, so the ram could be put to better use. (If you don't want it paged out, just leave it as a small window) So when you maximize it, it's get paged back in.

This post is made "AS IS" without warranties, and confers no rights.
 
I'm going to post my last post in this thread now if you don't mind.
I run without pagefile. In my system the way I work it is faster to run without pagefile due to lots of background apps that i constantly is switching between.
I have read all your links, it was good reading but it don't seems to be right because according to all that it is not posible or good to run without pagefile. Well I'm doing it and i love it. You can never make me put my pagefile back, unless BF3 needs more than 2gig ram.
And how can you tell me that it is not smart to run without pagefile when it have worked for 2 years now. Well that is in my mind you having wrong.
This is my last word, if you dont like it i might read this thread and put some other words in it later.
 
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