I have 32 bit Vista 4GB RAM Core2Duo, and am seeing a good deal of hard faults in the Windows Performance Monitor, I don't know how much this is affecting RAM operations with Studio One, and want to optimize it the best I can. So my question for today is how should I configure this? Right now I let Windows manage a page file, should I adjust this? I only have one internal HDD, and am using a 2 GB SD card with Readyboost as well. Thanks for your help in advance!

Best to let Windows manage it. I always have. Be sure it's set for Best Performance on Visuals and priority is given to Background Services if you use ASIO.
By default Vista is a CPU eater by itself is what I've heard.

Dunno if this is relevant but:



Anyways, I always set a fixed page file. Stops it getting fragmented. In your case, I'd start by setting it up as a 6Gb fixed size, and see how that goes.
Before you do, though, I'd also suggest you defrag your drive with something decent like the demo of Vopt.

If you still think your page faults are excessive, you could try raising the size of it afterwards, but if you change the fixed size, find something to defrag it.

Partially related: move the page file to a different (physical) drive than the one that contains the OS. This allows for more parallel performance.

[2c]

Yeah I know, that's why I mentioned I have only one internal drive, and my machine it a mini-sized PC with no slot for another internal drive.

Remove readyboost.
Your SD card is way too f**king slow for a pagefile.
There is no reason, performance or otherwise, to use readyboost, unless you're on a laptop with no secondary HDD and have a REALLY fast flash drive.

Cool, thanks for the tip, I'll pull it.

I've stopped using a pagefile since I upgraded my RAM to 1GB.

High Five

The process I follow is to remove any existing pagefile, defrag the PC to make contiguous space, then create a new fixed size page file so that it's not fragmented in any way.

There are various arguments for the optimal size and probably not worth going into here, but good to make it pretty big in size. MS recommends something like 2.5 times the size of RAM but to me that's a very backwards concept - this would cause you to have a smaller pagefile for a smaller amount of RAM. A couple of GB in size is probably good.

If you have an old HD laying around, try installing that in your PC and *only* use it for the pagefile. Doesn't matter if it's a tiny drive - if it's only got the pagefile on it then you don't need to worry about it filling up if the pagefile is fixed size.

Have never seen MS say 2.5. I however have seen 1.5 from MS many years ago. You'll be limited to same size as memory on a 4GB 32 bit system, at least from prior experience. However, you can set a page file per drive you have in your system.

As for no page file, you can try. Some programs still require you to have SOME page file there to even operate. Some programs will give you out of memory errors if you have no page file at all very quick, whereas if you have a page file, you never see the message (saw that with Stylus RMX back in the day, for example.) After that, I started using a page file again.

Devon

You're right - it is 1.5. I just looked it up in the Windows help file.

defaults work fine

The only thing you can configure for swap is the space allocation, which is pointless, because the ideal size of swap space is generally "more" (within limits, but you shouldn't ever have to run out of it) and all the automatic management does is make sure it doesn't grow unreasonably large in relation to the free space on disk. In practice there is a minimum limit though: if the swap space isn't at least slightly larger than the physical RAM (eg at least 1.5 to 2 times or so), then the memory manager will have to go through a lot of pointless shuffling in order to actually use the swap for anything. You definitely don't want that to happen (similar considerations actually apply for disabling swap completely, even if you had a ridiculous amount of RAM).

If you want to do something, you could move the swap to whichever disk has least I/O otherwise. Note that in some cases this might be the system disk, say if you have two disks and you are streaming heavy sample libraries from the other one.

As others have pointed out, you should probably forget the Readyboost. It's not terribly good idea to begin with.

If you haven't done it already, the single biggest performance booster in Vista (and Win7) is to disable SuperFetch service which was a truly retarded idea from whoever managed to pitch it into the operating system. Once it's disable, you should no longer observe the system loading random crap into memory "since it might be needed soon" and trashing your disk caches in the process (which generally means the system performance goes down the drain).

Oh and if you have a half-decent GPU I'd advice against disabling Aero; since Aero caches window contents it can reduce CPU spent on redrawing the same stuff multiple times. It doesn't really help that Vista's GDI performance is abyssal. The only gotcha is that if your GPU is very slow, the overhead of running Aero might be larger than any benefits.

Have you ever heard of "tuning myths"...?

http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/2009/12/why-you-shou ld-not-disable-superfetch-in-windows-7/

http://blog.tune-up.com/myth-buster/myth-busted-why-disablin g-superfetch-on-vista-and-windows-7-is-a-bad-idea/