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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