Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Zak33
It's a GAME SAVE.. or in ARMA2's case it's hundreds of square miles of russia ;) or in Lineage2 case it's in hundreds of square miles of dungeon and dragons ;)
But what I DO know is that games reload from hard drive in MANY cases every time.
Speaking of which, on top of the cooling upgrade, new storage, etc, for my computer I need to buy ARMA2.... thank you for reminding me. Will I ever have a pay day that I don't pretty much spend the day I get it?
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
shaithis
There are some tasks that push the swapfile way past the RAM size........doubling the RAM only delays the inevitable.
I presume that your swap file is larger than your RAM them, effectively giving you more than the 12GB you would have by doubling your RAM.
Of course, doubling the RAM delays the inevatable, but using HDD instead of more RAM delays everything since RAM's a bit faster ;)
Of course, if you prefer applications to use the HDD that has a randon access time 1000 times slower than your RAM, that is up to you.
I will mention however that I have 8GB RAM, no swapfile and also virtualise a lot.
Guess what. No crashing. Maybe you virtualise more than me but then you should buy more RAM.
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bugbait
Such as? I'm sure there are many examples, but how many of them appear in "normal" operation for the majority of general users?
EDIT: In general office, browsing, and gaming (the majority of the use on my home desktop) I've run out of memory once (8Gig physical, no swap file) while using Vista Ultimate x64. This was due to a memory leak on a nearly installed application. Once it was removed the memory usage returned to normal.
Sure, you loose the logging and memory dump facilities when you switch the swap file off but I never look at them anyway. The only time my OS crashes is when a new driver is installed (thanks ATI) or during my overclocking testing.
For critical or server use the swap file should never be turned off. For general, non-critical use (arguably most home users) the swap file only serves to reduce performance if you have ample physical RAM.
Exactily. Except having the page file turned on should not affect performance until a the physical memory limit is approached.
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
badass
Exactily. Except having the page file turned on should not affect performance until a the physical memory limit is approached.
That is certainly the case on a Mac - you can see how many bytes have been written and read to the swap file. If you don't come close to filling your RAM, nothing gets swapped out, hence there is zero performance hit having it enabled - it's just a last resort.
On a Windows PC, I'm not so sure of the details these days.
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
badass
Exactily. Except having the page file turned on should not affect performance until a the physical memory limit is approached.
Yes and no.
The LAST thing you want is to pay for the pagefile (any disk IO is a performance 'cost') at the 11th hour, when app A suddenly say heap alloc me 1024meg. You want it to be gradually written.
Due to the nature of hard disks its hard to do this perfectally asynchronously. One of the nice things about windows is its still 'not bad' when your about 3 times beyound your RAM. At the moment i've been doing this a lot on my 64bit Vista main dev box.
The downside of this is there are many times when the pagination will have been completely un-necessary.
Now one of my tricks for service style apps, keeping the middlewhere responsive is to tweak the allocation of physical memory for the process. If i had the time, i'd write a little utitlity for helping people do this.
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
In XP you used to be able to set some registry flags to minimise page file use, don't know about more recent OSen though.
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
badass
I presume that your swap file is larger than your RAM them, effectively giving you more than the 12GB you would have by doubling your RAM.
Of course, doubling the RAM delays the inevatable, but using HDD instead of more RAM delays everything since RAM's a bit faster ;)
Of course, if you prefer applications to use the HDD that has a randon access time 1000 times slower than your RAM, that is up to you.
I will mention however that I have 8GB RAM, no swapfile and also virtualise a lot.
Guess what. No crashing. Maybe you virtualise more than me but then you should buy more RAM.
Its a matter of worth. How often do I 'need' that extra RAM? How often does the swapping out cause me delays? Not often, hense I am happy to have my swapfile enabled for those occurances.
And guess what? No crashing with the swapfile enabled either.....
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
TheAnimus
Yes and no.
The LAST thing you want is to pay for the pagefile (any disk IO is a performance 'cost') at the 11th hour, when app A suddenly say heap alloc me 1024meg. You want it to be gradually written.
Due to the nature of hard disks its hard to do this perfectally asynchronously. One of the nice things about windows is its still 'not bad' when your about 3 times beyound your RAM. At the moment i've been doing this a lot on my 64bit Vista main dev box.
The downside of this is there are many times when the pagination will have been completely un-necessary.
Now one of my tricks for service style apps, keeping the middlewhere responsive is to tweak the allocation of physical memory for the process. If i had the time, i'd write a little utitlity for helping people do this.
Simple solution to this: Another slider. Drag one way slow the system down during normal use where you have far more RAM then you need, but should you over commit it doesn't slow down as much. Have it set to the other setting when you don't take the performance hit during normal use and take a larger hit when you over commit yourself.
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
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Originally Posted by
shaithis
Its a matter of worth. How often do I 'need' that extra RAM? How often does the swapping out cause me delays? Not often, hense I am happy to have my swapfile enabled for those occurances.
Going back to the original point, how is this relevant to your average user? The page file slows the computer down and provides no benefits.
Quote:
And guess what? No crashing with the swapfile enabled either.....
No crashing - just a slower, less responsive PC.
I personally prefer no crashing and a more responsive PC but what I'd really prefer is Microsoft to sort our their out of date memory management. Has anyone there realised that RAM is less than $10/GB these days?
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
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Originally Posted by
badass
Going back to the original point, how is this relevant to your average user? The page file slows the computer down and provides no benefits.
The pagefile is useless? I will leave you to your ignorance.....you obviously cannot grasp the concept of the value of hardware and the variations in hardware usage by the plethora of different user and software requirements.
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
badass
Going back to the original point, how is this relevant to your average user? The page file slows the computer down and provides no benefits.
Did you ignore my last post?
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
shaithis
The pagefile is useless? I will leave you to your ignorance.....you obviously cannot grasp the concept of the value of hardware and the variations in hardware usage by the plethora of different user and software requirements.
I said for the average user. If you cannor grasp the difference between an average user and a praticularily heavy user like yourself then you are more narrow minded than I first thought.
Let me make this simple for you.
If a user never needs to use more than 95% of their physical RAM, there should be NO performance hit related to pagefile usage. I don't have a problem with a performance hit when it's needed.
It seems you can't understand something that simple.
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
TheAnimus
Did you ignore my last post?
How could I? I quoted it and replied directly. http://forums.hexus.net/operating-sy...ml#post1756998
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
badass
Going back to the original point, how is this relevant to your average user? The page file slows the computer down and provides no benefits.
I haven't seen anything that shows conclusively that having a page file is detrimental to the performance of your PC. In fact, I’m of the opinion that having a PF is a good idea and should help not hinder the performance of your PC.
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
Quote:
Originally Posted by
badass
My point was, how could you claim its of no befenit.
You could argue that its of little benefit to 99% of use cases, now we have people buying 4gig o ram laptops for $350!
But it is of some benefit, that much is irefutable.
Re: Long ago I turned off my Pagefile
May I interrupt the discussion to put your attention to something else ?
As we all know very well, no matter what we dicuss here, there is always someone for and someone against it.
Watching inconclusive discussions like this, I don't get how people can try so hard to justify something, that is not 100% waterproof.
If a feature of an OS is so essential, then why do we have the option to turn it off in the first place ?
If it's so life saving, then why do people report in many forums to have switched off the swap file long time ago and never looked back ?
Those who like it, please use it as much as you want .. but don't claim to know the definite solution for EVER owner of a PC.
Besides this, the discussion about a topic like this one makes me realize that it's not always about usefulness.
We all have an emotional feeling towards our PC, some people more - some less.
If I know there is something major happening without my consent, i.e. hard drive trashing, then I demand to have influence about it.
Or who am I .. the slave of my system now ?
Again, for those who still try to argue about a quarter of an inch more performance (just in case there is any)
--> I rather have control over what my PC is doing than allowing my PC to have control over me.