Thomas Mayer directed my attention to a couple of enhancements that 
Microsoft has made in XP which modify some of what I had written.
  One thing is that if the swap file is missing or too small, XP will create 
or grow it as necessary -- even if you've turned it off or given it a small 
maximum size.  Generally, I don't like it when Microsoft decides their code 
knows better, but in this case it's the right thing to do.
  So a small swap file size will "work" after all.  Growing and shrinking 
will expose it to the risk of fragmentation, but using NTFS should minimize 
that.  (Or setting it to a large static size will, too.)

  How big your swap file needs to be doesn't depend on the amount of RAM 
installed, except that if you're close to the maximum 4GB address space of 
the CPU, Windows will never need to *use* the swap file and so you can turn 
it off.
  If Windows is making too much use of the swap file, it's not because the 
file is too big -- it's because the program mix you're running wants more 
physical RAM than you currently have.

David Gillett


On 21 Oct 2006 at 13:38, Ann Fennell wrote:

Date sent:      	Sat, 21 Oct 2006 13:38:00 -0400
Send reply to:  	PCSOFT - Personal Computer software discussion list
             	<[log in to unmask]>
From:           	Ann Fennell <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:        	Re: [PCSOFT] Swap file
To:             	[log in to unmask]

> Thank you, David - great information.  So I should allocate a swapfile
> at least as large as my RAM?  There is no way of causing it to not
> look first for swapfile space except eliminating the swapfile
> altogether?  
> 
> If the swapfile is the same size or larger than RAM, will it then not
> look unless it actually needs it?  I will have scads of unused disk
> space on new PC.  Would it be helpful to allocate a swapfile double
> the size of my RAM, so it knows there has to be enough space without
> having to go and look and reserve some? 
> 
> Thanks again,
> AnnaSummers
> 
> 
> ============================================================
> From: David Gillett <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 2006/10/19 Thu AM 11:07:33 EDT
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [PCSOFT] Swap file
> 
> On 18 Oct 2006 at 14:40, Ann Fennell wrote:
> 
> > Actually, once I get my new machine built I hope I'll have enough RAM
> > to eliminate the pagefile (or drastically reduce its size & keep it
> > just for unforseen emergencies.) 
> 
>   Eliminating the swap file should give better performance, but risks 
> encountering a hard "out of memory" condition.
> 
>   But if there is ANY swap file, every attempt to allocate memory becomes 
> first an attempt to reserve a piece of swap file to hold it.  So if you have 
> less swap file than RAM, you will hit "out of memory" as soon as the swap 
> file is fully allocated, even if more RAM is available.  So "drastically 
> reduce its size" is NOT going to work.
> 
> David Gillett
> 
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