Howard, the other rules of thumb I left out have to do w/ multiple drive
systems. I did so because I was trying to keep it simple and I assumed
you only had 1 physical drive.
1) Spread the pagefile over as many spindles/drive heads as possible
(for simultaneous/parallel reads/writes). Here, hardware RAID
considerations come into play, but it is rarely worth it to stripe a
pagefile unless performance is of the utmost importance
2) Configure the pagefile on the busiest partition of the least active
drive(s).
In your case, I would say you have several practical and easy options.
First off, I do think the MS recommendation of RAM x 1.5 is way too much
for your system, but that is ultimately up to you to decide. Perfmon
can help you determine how big your pagefile should be, but I would bet
that RAM+12 would even be overkill for you.
Anyway, using the rules of thumb above and assuming your OS is on the
3rd physical drive, you could split the pagefile evenly over the 1st and
2nd harddrives, which is closest to your 5th scenario. The other option
would be to split it 3 ways across all 3 hard drives. The benefit of
having another hard drive in the mix *might* be slightly offset by the
that 3rd drive being a busy one. If you do use the 3rd drive, put it on
%SystemDrive%=J:
Another consideration would be to use faster drives for the pagefile.
If your system is typical in that you added drives to expand and your
1st drive is 5 years old and your 2nd and 3rd drives are 15K SCSI
drives, you might want to leave the 1st one out.
There is no cut and dry answer for these situations; just guidelines and
an understanding of why these guidelines exist to help you come up w/
the best solutuion for your particular system. As far as links or
references, the collective "CW" I refer to comes from time in the
trenches and more or less represents the overall opinion of most of the
folks in this newsgroups who have been tweaking pagefiles, have been
reading whitepapers, and have an understanding of HD's I/O processes.
GL!
Howard said:
Here's related question.
I have 3 hard drives.
Over time, I have migrated the main OS from C, by re-installing on the 2nd
drive in G and then in J on the 3rd drive.
Currently, G is the main system, but by year's end, I will be shifting to J.
Until earlier this week, I had 384MB of memory, so I had a 576MB fixed size
pagefile on C, as I assumed that it would be better to have an unfragmented
pagefile and to have it on a physical drive other than the one my most used
OS resides.
I am in the process of doubling the memory to 768MB, so I have to decide on
where/how to locate the page file.
Following MSFT recommendations, the page file should be 1052MB.
I do not currently have enough room left on the first hard drive to locate
the pagefile entirely on the first hard drive, which has partitions C and D.
Also, does C have to have any pagefile, since that is the boot drive?
1. I could likely move stuff off of the D drive to another physical drive,
then repartition the first hard drive to make room for a contiguous pagefile
in C or D.
2. I could likely move stuff off of the D drive to another physical drive,
to make room for a contiguous pagefile in D, without repartitioning the 1st
hard drive.
3. I could put the page file in F on the 2nd hard drive,
4. I could put the page file on the 3rd hard drive, in other than J.
5. I could leave 576MB of the pagefile on C and make another 576MB segment
on, say, F on the 2nd hard drive.
It would seem that choices 3 and 5 would negatively impact booting to an OS
on the 2nd hard drive.
Putting pagefile on 3rd hard drive would negatively impact OS in J on 3rd
hard drive, which would be the main OS by year's end.
Choice 5 is the easiest to do. Do I assume correctly that the segment on C
would be used before the segment on F, no matter which OS I booted to?
Recommendations?
Pointers to articles on this subject?
