> In this case, change those two radio buttons for Processor Scheduling
> and Memory Usage to their opposite values, and increase the minimum
> and maximum pagefile size to both be 2 times the amount of physical
> RAM in your system.
Basing the size of the page file on the amount of installed RAM (different places
recommend 1.5x or 2x, and maybe other nubers too) is a pure Rule of Thumb based on
the assumption that the amount of installed RAM is adequate for the typicl applications
load on the machine. Which it may very well not be.
Each application has, for a given set of data (for a word processing application, for
instance, it tends to depend on the size of the document), an overall memory
requirement, and a "working set" -- a subset of that memory requirement which includes
at least 90% of the memory actively being referred to at the moment. (in the word
processing case, this would include the page you are currently editting, but not the
whole book!)
Virtual memory allows the application memory that isn't in the working set to live on
disk so that actual RAM may be used by other running applications. So "adequate
installed RAM" means big enough to hold the working sets of all of the applications that
you use at the same time. If an application's working set doesn't all fit into RAM at
once, attempts to use that application will spend much of their time dumping some part
of the working set to disk and reading in another part of the working set, leaving very
little time for actual application execution. Most users don't consider the result usable...
So: the page file, the disk space allocated for virtual memory, needs to be big enough
to accommodate the memory demands of the application mix (and not just their working
sets) 1.5x, 2x and so forth are rough estimates of how this size might relate to the
working sets of the applications (and the OS, of course).
In today's environment of large applications and cheap hard drives, you can probably
make the page file as large as Windows will let you, and not have to worry about it. And
set the minimum and maximum the same so the file doesn't constantly grow and shrink
and fragment your disk allocations.
And adding real RAM will probably help, too.
David Gillett
The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech
support at our newest website:
http://freepctech.com
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