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Comprehensive Guide to the Windows Paging File
busfahrer writes "Adrian's Rojak Pot has a nice article about the internals of the Windows paging file. It explains what a paging file is and lists the differences between a swapfile and a paging file. But first and foremost, a large part of the article deals with the various methods of optimizing the Windows paging file, thus yielding a notable performance gain for people who are not overly blessed with RAM."
OMG, you mean you didn't read the article and possibly learn something?
/. world.
Honestly, I wonder why people take the high and mighty road. The number one problem with computers is people simply don't understand them. The number one way to solve this problem is to educate the user about these little facets of the OS.
The article covers some very basic differences in plain english, and unlike the 'just to do this and leave me alone' attitude, puts the user one step closer to a positive computer experience... a tough thing in today's virus/trojan/adware
"The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly" - Touchstone,Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
How could he? 15 posts and the server is toast.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I'm not sure if Linux has a paging file, but I fail to see why the linux swapping can't be done preemptively as well. If a program loses focus, swap the memory used by it, but retain the active copy in RAM. If another program needs the RAM, release it. If the program comes back into focus, clear the swap copy. Seems like it would give the best of both worlds.
Article Text:
We have all been using the terms swapfile and paging file interchangeably. Even Microsoft invariably refers to the paging file as the swapfile and vice versa. However, the swapfile and paging file are two different entities. Although both are used to create virtual memory, there are subtle differences between the two.
The main difference lies in their names. Swapfiles operate by swapping entire processes from system memory into the swapfile. This immediately frees up memory for other applications to use.
In contrast, paging files function by moving "pages" of a program from system memory into the paging file. These pages are 4KB in size. The entire program does not get swapped wholesale into the paging file.
While swapping occurs when there is heavy demand on the system memory, paging can occur preemptively. This means that the operating system can page out parts of a program when it is minimized or left idle for some time. The memory used by the paged-out portions are not immediately released for use by other applications. Instead, they are kept on standby.
If the paged-out application is reactivated, it can instantly access the paged-out parts (which are still stored in system memory). But if another application requests for the memory space, then the system memory held by the paged-out data is released for its use. As you can see, this is really quite different from the way a swapfile works.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
The solution they came up with was to use some space on the hard disk as extra RAM. Although the hard disk is much slower than RAM, it is also much cheaper and users always have a lot more hard disk space than RAM. So, Windows was designed to create this pseudo-RAM or in Microsoft's terms - Virtual Memory, to make up for the shortfall in RAM when running memory-intensive programs.
Amazing how they manage to turn everything around as though Microsoft invented the world of computing...
Virtual memory, the term and the implementation have been around long before Microsoft came into existence.
Putting http://text.burstnet.com/* into adblock makes for a slightly less annoying experience, but there's also the fact that it's 44 freaking pages long. Probably getting paid by the site hit or something.
Do yourself a favor, give this content-lite article a miss. Make a small partition with ntfsresize, put a fixed pagefile on that partition alone. Works on every single version of windows and it's zero maintenance. Tah-dah.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
Dude, ever heard of VM/370
or maybe Multics
or, more obscure but even earlier Atlas