Pagefile Size

On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 05:29:25 GMT, (Citizen Bob)
wrote:

On Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:43:37 -0500, kony wrote:

I am running compute-intensive graphics applications that are taking
100% of the "CPU Usage" and 730 MB "MEM Usage" in the Performance
section of Task Manager.

There is no "MEM Usage" figure on the Performance tab of
Task Manager.

Yes there is.

My mistake, yes they did label the bar graph that way, but
it is actually the Commit Charge, "Total" figure. "Mem
Usage" as a term is meaningless since it doesn't tell us
what portion of real vs virtual and how it's allocated.

The Commit Charge, Total is only an instantaneous figure,
one that will easily be several hundreds of MB higher or
lower depending on what's running. Thus why I suggested you
look at the Commit Charge Peak, which is the peak amount the
"Total" figure rose to during the entire uptime of the
system/OS. Unless you'd had a rare usage during that uptime
that used an extraordinary amount of memory compared to what
you'd usually use, planning (having installed) that much
real memory plus a bit more is the desired goal.



Which figure did you mean specifically?

The one I am staring at right not. It's on the left side under the
"CPU Usage". Both are graphical representations.

Yeah, ignore the graph since it's redundant and
non-descript.



The best answer is don't put a moment's though into this
until you've added enough real memory such that your
regularly reoccuring, Commit Charge "Peak" value
during/after the demanding tasks is a lower figure (than
that real memory), ideally the figure will be significantly
lower as the remainder can be put to use as a System Cache
that substantially speeds up the system by reducing HDD
access.

At this moment, the "MEM Usage" is around 700MB and the Commit Vharge
Peak is 829328K. According to what you are saying, I should increase
the RAM from 512MB to 1GB.

Actually a little more than 1GB, but 1GB gets you most of
the benefits, IF that ~825MB peak is a common peak value for
your uses... if you routinely exceed that you'd need even
more than 1GB, or less if this computing session was
abnormally demanding compared to the usual jobs.

On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 05:33:58 GMT Too Much Ying and you will Pay With
Yang then (Citizen Bob) sent this :

On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 01:24:02 +0000, Shep© wrote:

I have a 2.4 GHz Celeron D with 512 MB RAM running Win2K/SP4.

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

Please note that I am running Win2K, not XP.

http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

HTH



--
Free Windows/PC help,
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/trouble.html
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Shep© wrote
(Citizen Bob) wrote
Shep© wrote

I have a 2.4 GHz Celeron D with 512 MB RAM running Win2K/SP4.

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

Please note that I am running Win2K, not XP.

http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

The very fundamental problem with that second one is that it perpetuates
the mindlessly silly line that the page file needs to be a minimum of 1.5 times
the size of the physical ram. That is just plain silly because when say the
amount of physical ram is doubled from say 1G to 2G, there will inevitably
be LESS need to page file space, not more.

The first one got that right.

Rod Speed wrote:

Shep© wrote
(Citizen Bob) wrote
Shep© wrote

I have a 2.4 GHz Celeron D with 512 MB RAM running Win2K/SP4.

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

Please note that I am running Win2K, not XP.

http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

The very fundamental problem with that second one is that it perpetuates
the mindlessly silly line that the page file needs to be a minimum of 1.5 times
the size of the physical ram. That is just plain silly because when say the
amount of physical ram is doubled from say 1G to 2G, there will inevitably
be LESS need to page file space, not more.

The first one got that right.

But just what is it that people are actually trying to accomplish with this
"optimization"? When stripped down to the bottom line, all they're doing is
attempting to save some HD space. That's the part that is silly.

Bob

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:13:16 +0000, Shep© wrote:

Please note that I am running Win2K, not XP.

http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

There are some items in that article that have been controversial on
this forum before.:

"Have the initial size be at least 1.5 times bigger than the amount of
physical RAM. Do NOT make the Pagefile smaller than the amount of
physical RAM you've got installed on your system."

I was advised in an earlier thread to set my initial pagefile size to
512MB, which is the size of my RAM. I was also advised to set my
maximum pagefile size to 1.5GB. I had it a lot higher but I was
running into NTFS corruption problems that went away when I lowered to
the current values of 512MB/1.5GB.

"Make its initial size as big as the maximum size. Although this will
cause the Pagefile to occupy more HD space, we do not want it to start
off small, then having to constantly grow on the HD. Writing large
files (and the Pagefile is indeed large) to the HD will cause a lot of
disk activity that will cause performance degradation. Also, since the
Pagefile only grows in increments, you will probably cause Pagefile
fragmentation, adding more overhead to the already stressed HD."

I was advised to make the maximum 1.5GB even though the initial was
512MB. I have more than ample disk space to that is not an issue.



--

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a
few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,
regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
--Ronald Reagan

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:49:59 -0800, Robert Heiling
wrote:



But just what is it that people are actually trying to accomplish with this
"optimization"? When stripped down to the bottom line, all they're doing is
attempting to save some HD space. That's the part that is silly.



What is it that you are trying to accomplish by setting a
pagefile extremely large without any reason to think it
should be that large?

If it is merely to be sure you don't run out of virtual
memory space, do you see a lot of people reporting they have
that problem? No, and it's not at all usual for them to
have set a 4GB pagefile.

IOW, you have a solution for a problem that doesn't usually
exist.

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 18:57:08 GMT, (Citizen Bob)
wrote:

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:13:16 +0000, Shep© wrote:

Please note that I am running Win2K, not XP.

http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

There are some items in that article that have been controversial on
this forum before.:

"Have the initial size be at least 1.5 times bigger than the amount of
physical RAM. Do NOT make the Pagefile smaller than the amount of
physical RAM you've got installed on your system."

I was advised in an earlier thread to set my initial pagefile size to
512MB, which is the size of my RAM. I was also advised to set my
maximum pagefile size to 1.5GB. I had it a lot higher but I was
running into NTFS corruption problems that went away when I lowered to
the current values of 512MB/1.5GB.

With 780-odd MB memory allocated as you reported earlier
(but really, you should consider the peak value not the
momentary as you did), 512MB pagefile should work. You are
continually overlooking that there is no one generic answer
that fits all systems as well as actually looking at YOUR
system usage. Don't tell us what you have the pagefile set
to, tell us what your PEAK Commit Charge is.

Remember that if you have too small a pagefile set, it won't
just slow down your use, you will see a warning message.
You could continue to have the system set to something like
a 512MB minimum (which minimizes fragmentation, contiguous
file if the disk space is available but even then, the file
itself may have fragmented access because that's how paging
works- only what's needed is read back), and a larger
maximum. You'd want your minimum large enough that your big
jobs don't exceed it, and the larger maximum is just a
failsafe should you do something very unusual. Keep in mind
that if you did such an unusual task and suddenly needed
another GB of virtual memory, you'd be sitting around for
ages waiting for the system to stop thrashing the HDD
swapping it all back and forth from disk to real memory.

You don't ever want to run jobs like that, to give you an
example I used to try to edit audio on a P2 box with 32MB in
it, several minutes would pass by waiting on the swapping to
get done. When a pair of 128MB DIMMs were added to that box
later, similar jobs took under 20 seconds.




"Make its initial size as big as the maximum size. Although this will
cause the Pagefile to occupy more HD space, we do not want it to start
off small, then having to constantly grow on the HD. Writing large
files (and the Pagefile is indeed large) to the HD will cause a lot of
disk activity that will cause performance degradation. Also, since the
Pagefile only grows in increments, you will probably cause Pagefile
fragmentation, adding more overhead to the already stressed HD."

You don't need to set initial same as max, just set initial
large enough that you don't "expect" it to ever be
exceeded... for example you could set a 1GB min and 2GB max.
Whether it would fragment past 1GB makes little difference,
because you don't want to use the system on anything that
would actually make use of an additional 1GB of virtual
memory, it is merely there for allocation purposes, not
reading and writing data.


I was advised to make the maximum 1.5GB even though the initial was
512MB. I have more than ample disk space to that is not an issue.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Robert Heiling wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Shep© wrote
(Citizen Bob) wrote
Shep© wrote

I have a 2.4 GHz Celeron D with 512 MB RAM running Win2K/SP4.

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

Please note that I am running Win2K, not XP.

http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

The very fundamental problem with that second one is that it perpetuates
the mindlessly silly line that the page file needs to be a minimum
of 1.5 times the size of the physical ram. That is just plain silly
because when say the amount of physical ram is doubled from say 1G
to 2G, there will inevitably be LESS need to page file space, not more.

The first one got that right.

But just what is it that people are actually trying to accomplish with this
"optimization"? When stripped down to the bottom line, all they're doing
is attempting to save some HD space. That's the part that is silly.

Sure, and I said that in my first post in this thread.

kony wrote:

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:49:59 -0800, Robert Heiling
wrote:

But just what is it that people are actually trying to accomplish with this
"optimization"? When stripped down to the bottom line, all they're doing is
attempting to save some HD space. That's the part that is silly.

What is it that you are trying to accomplish by setting a
pagefile extremely large without any reason to think it
should be that large?

By "extremely", you mean approximately double what some are already discussing?
What percent of a 250GB or + or even a 120GB HD is that? Are you so tight on
disk space that 2-3 GB represents a big hit? Sure! on the 10 yr old system out
in the garage with an 8 GB HD shared as dual-boot, I don't have a 4 GB pagefile,
but things have changed a lot in the past 10 years.

If it is merely to be sure you don't run out of virtual
memory space,

No. It's actually to be sure that I won't have to worry like the people are
doing here right now. The only mistake you can make is to make it too small.
There's no downside to making it "too big" other than a little bit of disk space
that isn't going to break the bank.

do you see a lot of people reporting they have
that problem? No, and it's not at all usual for them to
have set a 4GB pagefile

I see people here with a problem in making a decision and attempting to
micro-manage and outguess the OS and being presented with conflicting advice.
That's what I see.

IOW, you have a solution for a problem that doesn't usually
exist.

The existence of this discussion proves that a number of people have a problem
deciding how large (or small) their pagefile should be. It's a problem that I
don't have. I'd call that a solution, Yes.

Bob

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 12:32:22 -0800, Robert Heiling
wrote:

kony wrote:

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:49:59 -0800, Robert Heiling
wrote:

But just what is it that people are actually trying to accomplish with this
"optimization"? When stripped down to the bottom line, all they're doing is
attempting to save some HD space. That's the part that is silly.

What is it that you are trying to accomplish by setting a
pagefile extremely large without any reason to think it
should be that large?

By "extremely", you mean approximately double what some are already discussing?

Let's get more specific... How about one byte (ignoring that
it can't be set to a mere one byte difference)? What
justification do you have to set your pagefile even ONE BYTE
larger than others who have no issues with their pagefile
being undersized?


What percent of a 250GB or + or even a 120GB HD is that?

Doesn't matter.
Overkill for no reason is senseless.
IF you had reason, it'd be an entirely different matter.


Are you so tight on
disk space that 2-3 GB represents a big hit? Sure! on the 10 yr old system out
in the garage with an 8 GB HD shared as dual-boot, I don't have a 4 GB pagefile,
but things have changed a lot in the past 10 years.


So you don't really have a reason, just "I have free HDD
space." OK, if you want to be lazy about it, it's your
machine, but that's hardly a reason to advocate it.




If it is merely to be sure you don't run out of virtual
memory space,

No. It's actually to be sure that I won't have to worry like the people are
doing here right now. The only mistake you can make is to make it too small.
There's no downside to making it "too big" other than a little bit of disk space
that isn't going to break the bank.


I don't have a 4GB pagefile and am not worrying. The vast
majority of people don't either. Bob is just nuts. ;-)




do you see a lot of people reporting they have
that problem? No, and it's not at all usual for them to
have set a 4GB pagefile

I see people here with a problem in making a decision and attempting to
micro-manage and outguess the OS and being presented with conflicting advice.
That's what I see.

No, the OS has to guess because it isn't designed to
dynamically monitor and readjust. The user isn't
constrained like this, they can make an informed and
targeted decision in retrospect, or consideration of future
needs. Only so much logic can be reasonably built into the
OS, and the rest is provided by a savvy user.

It's similar to MANY different OS defaults, did you really
keep ALL of those defaults?




IOW, you have a solution for a problem that doesn't usually
exist.

The existence of this discussion proves that a number of people have a problem
deciding how large (or small) their pagefile should be. It's a problem that I
don't have. I'd call that a solution, Yes.

Actually most people never change the setting - and end up
with a much smaller pagefile than you have, never growing
even close to that size, and never have a problem.

Since it is a discussion quite specifically about what size
to make it, the answer "as big as possible" really doesn't
address anything but the OS build-in limit, which they'd
assumed at the time would be far larger than necessary else
they'd have made it even bigger (max).