At 12:53 AM 07/24/2000 Edna Sloan wrote:
>
>. . . . I am running W98 on a 10G drive. . . I . . .
>[made] a small extended partition (D) for the swap file and
>made it FAT 16 . . . I let W98 handle the file, with min
>of 0 mb and max of ~306mb. I have 64MB of ram. . . The
>rest of the drive is the primary partition (C) with FAT 32.
>
>I have heard that one should make the max/min size of the
>swapfile the same so it won't get fragmented. . . Also with
>the 32k clusters it should run faster than the 4k of FAT32. . .
>
>I don't know any way to really test or compare this. SisSoft
>Sandra does report the D logical drive as somewhat faster. . . .
Edna:
You should set aside an entire drive volume for your swap file (the file on a hard drive that Windows uses as virtual memory). This reduces fragmentation since the swap file's clusters are permanently contiguous and no other file can intervene; furthermore, at every re-start, Windows initializes the swap file.
You should set the Minimum and Maximum settings the same size, so Windows does not monitor and re-size the file on the fly (which wastes processing time), and so other files cannot creep onto the drive volume and cause fragmentation. A 200MB fixed swap file -- and corresponding sized drive volume -- would be a good starting point for a computer with 10GB drive and 64MB RAM.
Ideally, the swap file should be on the fastest (rotational speed, seek time, throughput) hard drive placed as close to the outer cylinders as possible, for faster reads/writes.
The reason to use FAT16, is that you probably never need a swap file larger than 512MB (in its own drive volume, of course; 512MB is the smallest standard FAT32 volume size). More importantly, FAT16 is faster than FAT32. It's not the size of the clusters (since a memory page is still 4KB) but the fact that file allocation tables are implemented as linked lists, and there are many more (smaller) clusters to keep track of in FAT32. A FAT16 swap file on a 128MB to 255MB drive volume will have 4KB clusters, the same as FAT32, but with less overhead.
One thing you hear most frequently is that the fixed size of the swap file should 2-3 times the amount of RAM. This formula has no rational relationship to the amount of virtual memory you actually need. Obviously, the more RAM you have, the less likely data will be swapped to disk, provided your application use remains constant. Windows really needs 32MB to run acceptably (with one or two applications), 64MB to run properly, and 128MB to run well. When Windows has to page out to the swap file constantly, you know it's time to add RAM to your system.
If you want to determine the actual amount of virtual memory you need using SANDRA, open all the programs you could conceivably use at the same time, including their biggest data files. Open a browser and go on-line. Play Freecell. If your computer is still running fine, then whatever setting you have is good enough. If not, start Sandra and go into Windows Memory Information and check out the "Current Swap File" heading and then look for the "Free Page File" information. Subtract this from your current swap file size, and that's the amount of virtual memory you need. Then create your fixed swap file and its drive volume based on that (add a little more for latitude).
HTH.
Regards,
John Chin
P.S. This supersedes any dumb advice I have might have given on this subject over the years...
________________________________
John Q. Chin
Miami, Florida
mailto:[log in to unmask]
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