Swap files

"~misfit~" wrote in message
...
That's true. It must be at least a year or two since I've seen a new
ATA66
drive for sale. I was replying more to someone else's comment that
ATA100
is
"30% faster", which is fairly misleading.

FreshDiagnose Ver.5.80 HDD Benchmarks.

Drive C: ATA133
Drive D: ATA66

Both on an ATA100 controller;

C: Ave. write speed: 16.2 Mb/s
Ave. read speed: 18.9 Mb/s

D: Ave. write speed: 9.1 Mb/s
Ave. read speed: 11.1 Mb/s

Don't be telling me there's no difference between ATA66 and higher.

I have a few points to make here. First, I didn't say "there's no difference
between ATA66 and higher". I said most current drives can't saturate ATA66,
and going to a faster interface makes minimal difference. Second, the point
Stacey made was a fair one - no company has been selling new ATA66 drives
for quite a while now. That means that in general ATA66 drives are going to
be slower than ATA100 or better. But that is nothing to do with the
interface - just that the ATA66 drives are older so tend to be slower.
Third, showing the benchmarks for two drives, one ATA66 and another ATA100
proves nothing. I have no doubt I could find an ATA66 drive, and an ATA100
drive of about the same age (but slower due to other reasons) and use a
benchmark tool to show that the ATA100 drive is slower than the ATA66 drive.
That, like your test, would prove nothing other that one particular drive is
faster than another particular drive (on my particular machine). Fourth, if
you actually took the time to look at the results and think about them,
rather than just seeing that one number was bigger than another and jumping
to your conclusion, you will have noticed that even the ATA100 drive is well
below ATA33 speed (the number refers to how many megabytes the interface is
capable of transferring per second - eg. ATA33 can transfer 33 megabytes).
I'm afraid that has just proved my point - I said most drives can't saturate
ATA66 - you have show a drive that can't even saturate ATA33.

Gareth

"Neogenesis" wrote in message
...
I have Win ME and Win 2000 server on the same system. i have 3 hard drives
and wondering if i was using windows 2000, where did i place the swap
files?

Does it matter if i place it on a Fat partition or a NTFS partition?

Window ME FAT HD 1 UDMA 100 Primary
Personal Files FAT HD 2 UDMA 66 Slave
Windows 2000 NTFS HD 3 UDMA 66 Primary


I know it's better to place the swamp files on another which is not
running
the OS, so i guess HD 3.
If NTFS is better then i could re partition HD 2 half FAT and half NTFS.


Wing li


I don't even use a swap file on XP Pro! In 4 months of using 512mb and no
swap, I've had the grand total of ONE out of memory error (and that was on
the very shoddily ported Grand theft auto 3). I'm not arrogant enough to
think that any other problems I might have had are not related to this, I
just can't think of any.

The bottom line is this: Swap files are EVIL! I remember how when using Win
98 I upgraded from 64 to 128 to 256mb. Each time I thought that would be
enough, I'll rarely hit the swap file. And on each occasion Windows would
create a swap file just by booting up! Aaaaaarrrrghghhhhh! And fixed size
files are no better, it still drives me mad to watch the light flickering
perpetually.

I'm sure there's a good technical reason for it, maybe Windows is just
pre-empting my future needs by swapping everything out at every opportunity.
But there is no feckin need!

STOP IT WINDOWS, STOP IT NOW!!!!

"Li'l ol' me" wrote in message
...
I'm sure there's a good technical reason for it, maybe Windows is just
pre-empting my future needs by swapping everything out at every
opportunity.

There is indeed a good technical reason to use a swap file (at least in
vaguely smart versions of Windows, including XP). And you're pretty close to
the mark by suggesting that Windows is looking into the future a bit. When
an application starts, it typically allocates more RAM than it actually
needs to begin with. This is pretty standard practice, because if you load
an application, theres every chance that you will do something inside that
application that needs more memory. Applications typically use about 2/3 of
the memory they allocate. The other third or so is there for future use.
Windows XP realises this happens, and will assign that as-of-yet unused
memory to virtual memory. If the application wants to make use of it in the
future, it is swapped in to actual RAM. It's not a real swap though, since
there is nothing actually stored in the memory yet, so there is no
performance penalty (no thrashing). The system works pretty well -
applications get to reserve the extra bit of memory, there is no performance
penalty if and when they come to use it, and you don't waste physical RAM by
storing this extra memory there.

Disabling the swap file isn't a great idea. It means you will waste a fair
bit of your physical RAM by storing this extra allocated memory (ie.
nothing). That means less physical memory is available for other
applications. I also find it very strange when people say it is evil because
it hurts performance, and the hdd light flashes all the time etc. Well, that
only happens if you actually use the swap file. If you are hitting the swap
file enough to cause thrashing then the solution is more RAM, not to disable
the swap file. As you say, disabling the swap file means you have the
possibility of getting out of memory errors. I really don't understand the
philosophy behind that. Surely having the performance penalty of hitting the
hard drive is a better alternative than getting out of memory errors? And
it's not like having a swap file is hurting your performance when you have
spare physical RAM - it only comes into play when you run out.

Gareth

~misfit~ wrote:


"Gareth Church" wrote in message
...
"Stacey" wrote in message
...
Another interesting myth that has popped up in this discussion is
that ATA100 is faster than ATA66. Well, yes, the interface is faster,
but
the
drives that are attatched to them aren't (well they may be, but the
interface speed is no indication).

But ussually the ATA100 drives are newer/larger/faster than ATA66
drives
but
agree neither saturates the ata66 format..

That's true. It must be at least a year or two since I've seen a new
ATA66 drive for sale. I was replying more to someone else's comment that
ATA100
is
"30% faster", which is fairly misleading.

FreshDiagnose Ver.5.80 HDD Benchmarks.

Drive C: ATA133
Drive D: ATA66

Both on an ATA100 controller;

C: Ave. write speed: 16.2 Mb/s
Ave. read speed: 18.9 Mb/s

D: Ave. write speed: 9.1 Mb/s
Ave. read speed: 11.1 Mb/s


What ata 100 drive only moves 16MBs? This is a single ATA 100 WD 80gig, not
even considered that fast a drive..

[root@friend sbin]# /sbin/hdparm -t -T /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.29 seconds =441.38 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.38 seconds = 46.38 MB/sec


Are you using a Via chipset? :-)
--

Stacey

Li'l ol' me wrote:



I'm sure there's a good technical reason for it, maybe Windows is just
pre-empting my future needs by swapping everything out at every
opportunity. But there is no feckin need!



Some older apps freak if there is no swap. If you have enough ram it's not
going to use the swap unless it needs to. There is no good reason to
disable the swap file..

--

Stacey

I'm sure there's a good technical reason for it, maybe Windows is just
pre-empting my future needs by swapping everything out at every
opportunity. But there is no feckin need!



Some older apps freak if there is no swap. If you have enough ram it's not
going to use the swap unless it needs to. There is no good reason to
disable the swap file..

In Win 9x systems (don't know about NT-based ones) you have the option of
Conservative Swap File Usage. Can't remember all the ins and outs of it, but
it basically means that Windows will endevour to not use the swap file
unless it has to. It works fine if you have enough RAM to not need the swap
file much. A google for the phrase will tell you more.