On 18 Oct 2006 at 13:11, Laurie wrote:

> Is there any advantage to having the swap file on a seperate partition?
> Does it reduce the tendency to fragment?

  Putting the swap file on a separate *drive* will tend to improve 
performance, as the read-write heads no longer have to travel back and forth 
so much.

  Putting the swap file on a separate partition will reduce fragmentation 
ONLY if you have left it at the default "let Windows manage it" 
configuration, where it will grow and shrink as needed.  I routinely 
statically allocate it to a specific size, so that doesn't happen, and so 
Windows has no need to change which disk blocks it uses.

  The obvious next question is "How big should that static size be?", and 
the traditional rule of thumb has been to calculate its size based on the 
amount of physical RAM in the machine.  That *assumes* that the amount of 
phusical RAM present reflects the needs of your OS and typical application 
load -- which it doesn't necessarily.
  In XP, the swap file has a maximum size of 4GB, which happens also to be 
the maximum physical address space of a 32-bit CPU.  That's more than enough 
for most people, and hard drive space is getting incredibly cheap.  (The 
last 200GB drive I bought cost $55.)  So for now I'd just set it to 4GB -- 
split across several drives (*) -- and not worry about whether that's more 
than is really needed.

* - I recently replaced a 40GB drive with a 300GB drive, and in the process 
found it useful to be able to pull the old drive without loding my whole 
swap file with it....

David Gillett

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