How big should the page file be?

[Kingston]

YMMV

just popped in to completely agree with this.

[DevonB]

Major Geeks has a pretty good article and a section on when and how you should set the page file, here:

http://www.theeldergeek.com/paging_file.htm

If you follw through it, they advise what you can or *might* want to do if you have RAM above 512MB, etc.

I disagree with parts of it. Obviously I disagree with the 'never turn off the paging file' bit out of experience. I CERTAINLY diagree with leaving dynamic page file siing intact! LAST thing I need is in the middle of a recording that my machine 'decides' it needs to resize the page file and impact my performance! No thanks! If you're going to set it, set min and max to the same size PERIOD. If you don't, you can get your page file fragmented, which I promise you won't see 'benefits' from that.

Devon

[seamoss]

well....I just want to say that yesterday after work i went home and took Devon's advice and set it to "no paging file" and things worked fine. i opened up a few tracks that had heavy disk streaming and heavy vsti loads and i didn't see any problems what-so-ever.

it will take a little more testing to see if there is any improvement over what is was set at before.

again, this is with a gig of ram.

also, i opened up photoshop as well as illustrator and i didn't have any problems there either.

[DevonB]

well....I just want to say that yesterday after work i went home and took Devon's advice and set it to "no paging file" and things worked fine. i opened up a few tracks that had heavy disk streaming and heavy vsti loads and i didn't see any problems what-so-ever.

it will take a little more testing to see if there is any improvement over what is was set at before.

again, this is with a gig of ram.

also, i opened up photoshop as well as illustrator and i didn't have any problems there either.

If you ever do see problems, ping me, 'eh? I like to take real user issues into consideration instead of 'well some guy told this other guy that ya, you might see problems blah blah blah.'

Devon

[flametop]

There are a few brain dead bits of software out there that dont run without a paging file (thankfully not any music based ones in my experience).

[DevonB]

There are a few brain dead bits of software out there that dont run without a paging file (thankfully not any music based ones in my experience).

I'm pretty such 3DStudio Max won't. One of the Adobe one's won't....

Devon

[HanafiH]

The swap file is best placed on any drive not containing the Windows system files. It's best to install it as the first file on a new drive (so its near the begining of the head seek as possible), and to have it at a fixed size (so it never fragments by having WIndows change its size).

You can disable the paging executive if you want. This will make windows go faster (because it won't store unused portions of the OS in swap), but it'll have almost no impact on running Audio applications (which never normally swap any way), and you'll have quite a bit less free memory as you're holding all of the OS in ram all the time.

In most PCs, the swap file significantly slows boot time, and the invocation of system code, like printer drivers, that get offloaded into swap, until needed. When used for normal audio applications, the swap file is entirely dormant.

The formal Microsoft reccomendation from size 1.5 times the installed quantity of ram, this provides enough room the page the entire oprating system and all ram, at any point in time.