I'm pretty curios about this, at the moment:
Which are virtual memory settings on your machines?
Altough there's 1 Gb RAM here, I've obtained the better performance and stability with settings of 1536 Mb initial, 3068 Mb maximum.
Applications seems to take more time to be loaded with the same setting of 2000 Mb for both the items.
Trying to disable was like even disastrous
XP settings
I disabled the pagefile on my setup (AMD64 3000+ Giga K8NS 1Gb Corsair RAM), and it's FLYING now. Mindbogglingly faster, no stupid grinding every time I switch app/start a new app, and it's more stable too, as sometimes SFP crashed when my machine had been idle for some hours and stuff ended up paged out (and not getting paged in fast enough I figure.)
Personally I just lock the minimum & maximum sizes to be the same (usually do that on first boot after first install so that its contiguous and never changes). I really don't see the need to eliminate the pagefile completely, the biggest slowdown occurs when it has to resize the pagefile (when your min & max sizes aren't the same). For 1Gb physical RAM I've found 512Mb to work adequately with Logic, but I use 1Gb pagefile since I also do 3d rendering (and other graphics work) on my DAW.
If you remove the pagefile I believe Windows will actually recreate it (with 8Mb or something like that). Also there are some apps assume the presence of a pagefile and behave erratically without it. There are registry keys you can set (some tweak apps provide a GUI for this) that will optimize XP's usage of the pagefile (what is allowed to page to disk and when) if you're truly concerned about its impact on performance.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: valis on 2005-09-01 04:54 ]</font>
If you remove the pagefile I believe Windows will actually recreate it (with 8Mb or something like that). Also there are some apps assume the presence of a pagefile and behave erratically without it. There are registry keys you can set (some tweak apps provide a GUI for this) that will optimize XP's usage of the pagefile (what is allowed to page to disk and when) if you're truly concerned about its impact on performance.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: valis on 2005-09-01 04:54 ]</font>
I can't understand yet what's wrong here.
I runned a memtest, and RAM seems to be OK...
Considering this installation seems to be the more stable I was able to obtain, I'm in doubt if leave memory settings as they are at the moment (almost the standard settings), or try again to disable paging file after a partition imaging job.
I runned a memtest, and RAM seems to be OK...
Considering this installation seems to be the more stable I was able to obtain, I'm in doubt if leave memory settings as they are at the moment (almost the standard settings), or try again to disable paging file after a partition imaging job.
SFP + Logic/Samplitude run fine here without the pagefile. Haven't been able to push peak mem usage over 650Mb yet, but my projects tend to be pretty sparse (12-16 channels and mostly SFP plugins.) If you to terribly large 64 channel stuff, or photoshop/3D, it might be better to turn it on.
Anyway, I set mine to 0, and it's gone. No pagefile anywhere! Woohoo!
In my experience, Windows always swap stuff out to the pagefile, even if there's plenty of physical memory left. Its swap-out logic seems to be mostly time-based, i.e. anything not used for a while gets swapped out, probably to clear some memory in advance for programs that might need it in the future.
Not a bad approach, just a bit annoying when there's 500Mb of free ram left, and it has to grind like hell broke loose for a good 15-20 seconds to swap Logic back in when it has been idling for a few hours. With the pagefile off, even if it has been idle for 3 days, I can just Alt-Tab to it instantly. Stuff also loads much faster and with less disk access. I guess this might even spare some wear on the harddrives in the long run.
Seriously, it's worth trying to see if it's stable on your system.
As for the 1.5 rule, there's no real logic, it's just that pagefiles in general aren't efficient if there's signficantly more or less swap space than ram space. Usually anywhere between 0.5x to 2x the amount of physical mem will work pretty well, if you try like 8x or 16x performances usually go down noticeably.
Anyway, I set mine to 0, and it's gone. No pagefile anywhere! Woohoo!
In my experience, Windows always swap stuff out to the pagefile, even if there's plenty of physical memory left. Its swap-out logic seems to be mostly time-based, i.e. anything not used for a while gets swapped out, probably to clear some memory in advance for programs that might need it in the future.
Not a bad approach, just a bit annoying when there's 500Mb of free ram left, and it has to grind like hell broke loose for a good 15-20 seconds to swap Logic back in when it has been idling for a few hours. With the pagefile off, even if it has been idle for 3 days, I can just Alt-Tab to it instantly. Stuff also loads much faster and with less disk access. I guess this might even spare some wear on the harddrives in the long run.
Seriously, it's worth trying to see if it's stable on your system.
As for the 1.5 rule, there's no real logic, it's just that pagefiles in general aren't efficient if there's signficantly more or less swap space than ram space. Usually anywhere between 0.5x to 2x the amount of physical mem will work pretty well, if you try like 8x or 16x performances usually go down noticeably.
1.5x is just a 'rule of thumb' (and one that happens to have been around since average installed ram was 256-512Mb).
The *ideal* way to determine optimum swapfile size is to use perfmon (now "system monitor" in the mmc console) to monitor swapfile usage and what's being paged. I don't think this method is really necessary for the users here (with today's harddrive sizes & machine specs in general) but you basically check for the largest usage of the swapfile under a normal 'heavy' load for you, and set your swapfile to be about 10% larger.
The *ideal* way to determine optimum swapfile size is to use perfmon (now "system monitor" in the mmc console) to monitor swapfile usage and what's being paged. I don't think this method is really necessary for the users here (with today's harddrive sizes & machine specs in general) but you basically check for the largest usage of the swapfile under a normal 'heavy' load for you, and set your swapfile to be about 10% larger.
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Rob van Berkel
- Posts: 236
- Joined: Sun Jul 29, 2001 4:00 pm
- Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I've been running without swap now for quite some time, and it has never gotten me into trouble. The positive side of no swap it to have your programs fly. No swap, combined with tuning of the vcache (see various optimization topics) makes a huge difference for me, both in speed AND stability. (I have 1Gb memory).
As I setup my PC to dual boot from separate partitions, the lack of swapspace doesn't bother me for my office and graphics work, because that part is booted from a separate setup.
Cheers,
Rob
As I setup my PC to dual boot from separate partitions, the lack of swapspace doesn't bother me for my office and graphics work, because that part is booted from a separate setup.
Cheers,
Rob