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."

Comments

swap file vs. paging file

[LordNimon]

I can't read the article now because it's slashdotted, but is there a difference between the swap file and the paging file in Linux? Does Linux even have a paging file?

Re:swap file vs. paging file

[DNS-and-BIND]

Solaris can use a swap partition or a swap file on disk. You can even add more swap space while Solaris is running using mkswap. Had to do that a few times...running Solaris does not mean that your developers know how to create scalable software...

Re:Defrag first, man.

[The Snowman]

One of the biggest performance helps is to keep the paging file from being fragmented, and I'm not talking about three or four fragments.

The best way to avoid fragmenting the swap file is a method I learned a long time ago, and the author mentions in his article but doesn't talk about much: keeping it on a separate partition. Sure, NTFS doesn't have a swap partition type like Linux does, but I keep a 2 gig partition with a fixed-size swap file on my WinXP box. Set the registry key to ignore "out of space" warnings for that drive, remove read privileges from everybody to that drive, and you basically have an invisible, un-fragmentable swap file that is invincible to user stupidity (I share my computer with my wife, so that last point is important. She does not have Administrator privileges on my box).

Re:One of the first paragraphs made me stop readin

[RatBastard]

Turn off virtual memory and see how many MS apps suddenly stop working at all. And we're not talking memory pigs, either. Some screen savers don't run without virtual memory running, no matter how much RAM you have. It's really stupid.

MS invented everything

[couch_warrior]

It is always amusing to me to read how M$ "invented" technologies that were in common use by other operating systems while Bill Gates was still wearing diapers. Both paging and swapping were used on IBM mainframes dating back to the mid 1960's. What windoze (and linux for that matter) could REALLY use is the ability to deterministically dedicate portions of system resources to particular processes.
Back when a 1 MIP, 1MB machine cost $1M, operators became highly skilled at managing workloads. Today everyone just throws oodles of RAM and disk at servers and lets the chips fall where they may , so to speak. It wouldn't be a bad idea to actually put a little thought into matching workloads with machine resources, and pro-actively matching them up by deliberate choice(For example - our company is running a prime-time ad at 9pm that features our URL, maybe that's a good time to shut down the normal file backup that happens then). Chaos theory is not always a good load balancer. But what am I saying, that's as outrageous as asking kids to put their money in the bank instead of buying video games...