Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Flying Fox, Ryu Connor
Microsoft wrote:Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
•Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
•Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
•Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
Are there any concerns regarding the Hibernate file and SSDs?
No, hiberfile.sys is written to and read from sequentially and in large chunks, and thus can be placed on either HDDs or SSDs.
Diplomacy42 wrote:you should not leave the swap file on, not because of SSDs but because you don't use it.
Flying Fox wrote:Diplomacy42 wrote:The OS always uses it. Please don't choke it.you should not leave the swap file on, not because of SSDs but because you don't use it.
Captain Ned wrote:Flying Fox wrote:Diplomacy42 wrote:The OS always uses it. Please don't choke it.you should not leave the swap file on, not because of SSDs but because you don't use it.
One of the pernicious Windows myths (disabling it) that has been around since pagefile.sys came about and has been wrong since the moment it was first proposed.
Ryu Connor wrote:Manually resizing the pagefile.sys is explained here by Mark Russinovich.
Windows does not need a disk based page file if you have enough ram to cover your peak memory usage.
Because Windows pages to disk long before it exhausts main memory, you will see a performance boost by disabling the disk page file. It wont be much, because Windows is quite intelligent about what it pages to disk, but ram is always faster than a HDD.
Is some cases after you disable the page file you will have to manually delete the .sys file to recover the hard disk space. (If windows lets you delete this file, you have already disabled its use.)
I have been running my main machine for three years with no page file; no ill effects. (6GB ram)
MrHostile wrote:So. if eny of you knows how to tourn off completly swap file i tryed on start,right click on my computer,properties,advanced system settings,under performance settings,advanced,under virtual memory change on all my drives is no paging file but on aida64 is stil showing that i use swap file i got 6GB of ram and when i use 2GB aida64 shows that i use 2GB swap file and 4GB swap file is free. how to torn off that swap file completly ????
Captain Ned wrote:MS needs to find & hire him/her now. I've relied on his SysInternals stuff for years to do the things I want Windows to do (and I 99% know that it can do) but I just can't find the way.
Ryu Connor wrote:Captain Ned wrote:MS needs to find & hire him/her now. I've relied on his SysInternals stuff for years to do the things I want Windows to do (and I 99% know that it can do) but I just can't find the way.
He's been an employee of Microsoft since 2006.
just brew it! wrote:They even still distribute his BSOD screensaver.
Ryu Connor wrote:He's been an employee of Microsoft since 2006.
PenGun wrote:In Lunix you can just turn swap off, or not turn it on in the install more usually. I have not used it in years, I do have 12G RAM and never use it all up in Linux, maybe 8G is the most I see.
The Linux 2.6 kernel added a new kernel parameter called swappiness to let administrators tweak the way Linux swaps. It is a number from 0 to 100. In essence, higher values lead to more pages being swapped, and lower values lead to more applications being kept in memory, even if they are idle. Kernel maintainer Andrew Morton has said that he runs his desktop machines with a swappiness of 100, stating that "My point is that decreasing the tendency of the kernel to swap stuff out is wrong. You really don't want hundreds of megabytes of BloatyApp's untouched memory floating about in the machine. Get it out on the disk, use the memory for something useful."
The Egg wrote:The one general rule about virtual memory is that the experts will never give you a straight answer. Most of the information you'll find is outdated by 10 years, and doesn't account for systems with more than 2GB of RAM. Everything else is just opinions based on no testing whatsoever.
Some feel having no paging file results in better performance, but in general, having a paging file means Windows can write pages on the modified list (which represent pages that aren’t being accessed actively but have not been saved to disk) out to the paging file, thus making that memory available for more useful purposes (processes or file cache). So while there may be some workloads that perform better with no paging file, in general having one will mean more usable memory being available to the system (never mind that Windows won’t be able to write kernel crash dumps without a paging file sized large enough to hold them).
madlemming wrote:The majority of OS devs recommend you leave paging up to the OS. Yes, good, that's the best thing to do for most users.
Ryu Connor wrote:The Egg wrote:The one general rule about virtual memory is that the experts will never give you a straight answer. Most of the information you'll find is outdated by 10 years, and doesn't account for systems with more than 2GB of RAM. Everything else is just opinions based on no testing whatsoever.
Yes, they do give you a straight answer. This very thread has links to those very people.
The information is not outdated by 10 years, not that age really matters. The purpose of swap hasn't changed in decades.
Just as with the previous two statements the information is based on empirical data, not just peoples opinions.
Patently bad information like this is detrimental to the quality of discussion on these forums. It is particularly egregious when made directly after resource links were put in this very thread before you posted.