David

I believe you meant to put a negative somewhere in the first sentence of 
your reply. In essence the swap file will become more fragmented if you 
let windows manage it rather than the procedure you use in limiting the 
minimum and maximum size of the swap file.

Also, I believe that 4GB is way too large for a swap file. I have found 
that even though I have plenty of physical RAM, windows will still 
utilize the swap file (no matter what MS indicates to the contrary). And 
the larger the swap file size, the more windows will use it instead of 
physical RAM. The rule of thumb to double the RAM is probably good up to 
about 512MB of RAM, but if there is more physical RAM, the size of the 
swap file can be reduced to force windows to use the faster physical RAM 
before it uses the swap file. I have experimented with not having a swap 
file and everything runs fine with the exception of one program that for 
some reason requires a swap file. Also, I have one video editing program 
that requires the swap file to be less than 64MB so that windows does 
not slow the program down by using the swap file.

Tom Mayer

David Gillett wrote:
> 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 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.
>>
>>
>> David Gillett
>>
>>              
>>
>>     

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