Swap file size nowadays?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jane Spencer
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J

Jane Spencer

What is the recommendation for swap file size nowadays?
Does the 1.5 times the amount of physical RAM recommendation still stand
with todays big servers.
I have windows 2003 servers in a cluster with 4GB RAM. Do I really need a
10GB page file?
Thanks
Jane
 
Jane said:
What is the recommendation for swap file size nowadays?
Does the 1.5 times the amount of physical RAM recommendation still stand
with todays big servers.
I have windows 2003 servers in a cluster with 4GB RAM. Do I really need a
10GB page file?
Thanks
Jane
Click to expand...

The standard is still 1.5 to 2 times RAM for systems with only a
a "little" bit of RAM. For a server today, a "little bit" of
RAM is 1 GB. However, for systems with lots of RAM, just use
RAM+12, to the max of 4 GB. If you have more than 4 GB, then put
additional page files on other partitions until you satisfy the
RAM + 12 minimum.

When you have more than 1 GB of RAM, I suggest you simply monitor
your page file usage for a while and see how much you need. If
empirical max usage is X, then I suggest you set you page file to
1.5(X) - to a max of 4 GB.


All in all, hard drive space is so cheap these days that I can't
understand why page file space continues to be an issue with
anybody. Just give your system lots of cheap page file space -
and set min and max for each page size to the same value so that
fragmentation issues are minimized.
 
Many thanks, i'll do the monitoring.

Rob Stow said:
The standard is still 1.5 to 2 times RAM for systems with only a a
"little" bit of RAM. For a server today, a "little bit" of RAM is 1 GB.
However, for systems with lots of RAM, just use RAM+12, to the max of 4
GB. If you have more than 4 GB, then put additional page files on other
partitions until you satisfy the RAM + 12 minimum.

When you have more than 1 GB of RAM, I suggest you simply monitor your
page file usage for a while and see how much you need. If empirical max
usage is X, then I suggest you set you page file to
1.5(X) - to a max of 4 GB.


All in all, hard drive space is so cheap these days that I can't
understand why page file space continues to be an issue with anybody.
Just give your system lots of cheap page file space - and set min and max
for each page size to the same value so that fragmentation issues are
minimized.
Click to expand...
 
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