Win 2k Swap File Size?

[Steve Sr.]

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic but I just installed Win 2K SP3 on a
P4C800-E with 1Gb of RAM. I set up a 4.0Gb partition on one of the
disks to use for the operating system. I would have thought at 4.0G
would have been more than enough for the OS and applications but when
I look at the space remaining I only have 1.6Gb remaining.

I went searching for the missing hard drive space and found it being
occupied by a 1.5Gb swap file! Does Win 2K really need this much or is
it just being greedy?

If it does I might have to drag out Partition Magic and increase the
size of the partition. I don't suppose Windows would have a utility to
do this? The rest of the drive is currently unallocated.

Thanks,

Steve

 

[daytripper]

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic but I just installed Win 2K SP3 on a
P4C800-E with 1Gb of RAM. I set up a 4.0Gb partition on one of the
disks to use for the operating system. I would have thought at 4.0G
would have been more than enough for the OS and applications but when
I look at the space remaining I only have 1.6Gb remaining.

I went searching for the missing hard drive space and found it being
occupied by a 1.5Gb swap file! Does Win 2K really need this much or is
it just being greedy?

If it does I might have to drag out Partition Magic and increase the
size of the partition. I don't suppose Windows would have a utility to
do this? The rest of the drive is currently unallocated.

Windows is being cautious, as running out of virtual address space is A Bad
Thing.

If you're that concerned about the space (which, in the era of <$2/GB of disk
is almost inconceivable to me ;-) then keep your system up for a few days,
load up your worst-case set of BloatWare with some hefty datasets, and use
Performance Monitor to check how much of the paging space is being used.

Add some safety margin to that figure, then take back control of virtual
memory size from Windows and reduce the swap file down to that new figure.

Cross fingers, point the casters towards Mecca, reboot and see how it goes.

Alternately, you can create secondary swap files on other partitions and/or
other drives and reduce the primary to something you're more comfortable
with...

/daytripper

 

[Shep©]

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic but I just installed Win 2K SP3 on a
P4C800-E with 1Gb of RAM. I set up a 4.0Gb partition on one of the
disks to use for the operating system. I would have thought at 4.0G
would have been more than enough for the OS and applications but when
I look at the space remaining I only have 1.6Gb remaining.

I went searching for the missing hard drive space and found it being
occupied by a 1.5Gb swap file! Does Win 2K really need this much or is
it just being greedy?

If it does I might have to drag out Partition Magic and increase the
size of the partition. I don't suppose Windows would have a utility to
do this? The rest of the drive is currently unallocated.

Thanks,

Steve

http://defiant.darlington.com/Software/Win2k/win2000_tricks.htm
HTH



--
Free Windows/PC help,
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/trouble.html
email shepATpartyheld.de
Free songs download,
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/8/nomessiahsmusic.htm

 

[Tim]

Steve,

In addition to Daytripper's comments.

By default the swapfile will be about 1.5 * the amount of memory you have.
The swap file on the boot disk (usually C drive) should be - as a "usual"
minimum - as large as the amount of memory you have present - if it isn't
and the system crashes, there will not be enough space for the system to
save a post mortem dump. PM dumps aren't much use to end users generaly, the
BSOD screen more often than not gives enough info on what went wrong
where... So you can simply reduce the swapfile size on C to the barest
minimum and put a recommended size swap on some other partition you
create... As already mentioned you can have multiple swap files.

4GB for a windows system partition is getting on the much too small side
these days. I use 12GB if I am being stingy. This may leave > 8GB free space
for quite a while, but who knows what software you may want to install
later, however if you need more later it is always harder to allocate the
space without using tools such as partition magic.

You can extend a partition in XP using the diskpart utility.

Open Help on the start menu and search for diskpart and in the documentation
take a squize at the extend option.

From the Help File:

Extend
Extends the volume with focus into next contiguous unallocated space. For
basic volumes, the unallocated space must be on the same disk as, and must
follow (be of higher sector offset than) the partition with focus. A dynamic
simple or spanned volume can be extended to any empty space on any dynamic
disk. Using this command, you can extend an existing volume into newly
created space.

If the partition was previously formatted with the NTFS file system, the
file system is automatically extended to occupy the larger partition. No
data loss occurs. If the partition was previously formatted with any file
system format other than NTFS, the command fails with no change to the
partition.

You cannot extend the current system or boot partitions.

Syntax
extend [size=n] [disk=n] [noerr]

Parameters
size=n
The amount of space, in megabytes (MB), to add to the current partition.
If you do not specify a size, the disk is extended to take up all of the
next contiguous unallocated space.
disk=n
The dynamic disk on which to extend the volume. An amount of space equal
to size=n is allocated on the disk. If no disk is specified, the volume is
extended on the current disk.
noerr
For scripting only. When an error is encountered, specifies that DiskPart
continue to process commands as if the error did not occur. Without the
noerr parameter, an error causes DiskPart to exit with an error code.

- Tim

 

[Darkfalz]

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic but I just installed Win 2K SP3 on a
P4C800-E with 1Gb of RAM. I set up a 4.0Gb partition on one of the
disks to use for the operating system. I would have thought at 4.0G
would have been more than enough for the OS and applications but when
I look at the space remaining I only have 1.6Gb remaining.

I went searching for the missing hard drive space and found it being
occupied by a 1.5Gb swap file! Does Win 2K really need this much or is
it just being greedy?

By default, Win 2k/XP sets a swap size of 1.5x your physical RAM. This seems
pretty illogical, since someone with a small amount of RAM would usually
need a big swapfile, and someone with a gig should ususally need a small
one, but I'm sure M$ has their reasons (I guess potentially someone with a
gig of RAM has much more to be swapped out).

Set it to 256 MB or something.

 

[Rick]

By default, Win 2k/XP sets a swap size of 1.5x your physical RAM. This seems
pretty illogical, since someone with a small amount of RAM would usually
need a big swapfile, and someone with a gig should ususally need a small
one, but I'm sure M$ has their reasons (I guess potentially someone with a
gig of RAM has much more to be swapped out).

Set it to 256 MB or something.

The minimum recommended pagefile size for Win2K/WinXP
is (physical RAM + 12MB), per Microsoft. This is regardless
of how much or how little virtual memory one might actually
need.

Rick

 

[Pief]

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic but I just installed Win 2K SP3 on a
P4C800-E with 1Gb of RAM. I set up a 4.0Gb partition on one of the
disks to use for the operating system. I would have thought at 4.0G
would have been more than enough for the OS and applications but when
I look at the space remaining I only have 1.6Gb remaining.

I went searching for the missing hard drive space and found it being
occupied by a 1.5Gb swap file! Does Win 2K really need this much or is
it just being greedy?

I see this as owing to win nt/2k/xp's design legacy. In practical terms,
its doesnt usually need all that space but the behaviour of the paging
system harks back to when 64megs was a decent amount to run an NT
workstation with. As more Ram is provided , the paging system pages more to
meet future imaginary potential memory demands -the ratios dreamed up for
these circumstances years ago and left in now to accomodate possible new
humungous applications, so it will still copy memory marked as pageable by
programs to pagefiles even if its very unlikely that it will run out of RAM
(it seems designed to duplicate Data to pagefile much before it needs to
reuse the same RAMspace)
Unfortunately the paging system isnt easy to manipulate and if you give 2k
a whole gig to run with, it will crave about the same amount of hard disk
space to perform paging duties for duplicating Ram to.

I believe the expert way to utilise large Ram, and avoid HDisk being used
for memory management, is to set Maxmem to Half the Mobos memory supply in
Boot.ini and use a ramdisk driver like Cenatek to make a big Ramdisk to
play with -this can hold a Pagefile -or scratchdisks or caches as one
sees fit.

The root drive needs a 2meg pagefile put on it to accomodate crash dumps,
which can have its max size left free on it, too accodomate awol memory
situations, while using a lightning fast pagefile of limited size on a
ramdisk.

With only 512megs I use maxmem=256 and a 220meg pagefile in Ramdisk and get
the occasional out of memory situation occuring when running oddles of apps
and a couple of big ones, but the situation has never caused a crash, the
message goes away after a quick look in taskmanager and closing an app or
two.

It appears that 2k actualy compresses data into the pagefile as some info
tools report double the space there is and my little 220meg pagefile fills
much slower than expected.

 

[daytripper]

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic but I just installed Win 2K SP3 on a
P4C800-E with 1Gb of RAM. I set up a 4.0Gb partition on one of the
disks to use for the operating system. I would have thought at 4.0G
would have been more than enough for the OS and applications but when
I look at the space remaining I only have 1.6Gb remaining.

I went searching for the missing hard drive space and found it being
occupied by a 1.5Gb swap file! Does Win 2K really need this much or is
it just being greedy?

I see this as owing to win nt/2k/xp's design legacy. In practical terms,
its doesnt usually need all that space but the behaviour of the paging
system harks back to when 64megs was a decent amount to run an NT
workstation with. As more Ram is provided , the paging system pages more to
meet future imaginary potential memory demands -the ratios dreamed up for
these circumstances years ago and left in now to accomodate possible new
humungous applications, so it will still copy memory marked as pageable by
programs to pagefiles even if its very unlikely that it will run out of RAM
(it seems designed to duplicate Data to pagefile much before it needs to
reuse the same RAMspace)
Unfortunately the paging system isnt easy to manipulate and if you give 2k
a whole gig to run with, it will crave about the same amount of hard disk
space to perform paging duties for duplicating Ram to.

I believe the expert way to utilise large Ram, and avoid HDisk being used
for memory management, is to set Maxmem to Half the Mobos memory supply in
Boot.ini and use a ramdisk driver like Cenatek to make a big Ramdisk to
play with -this can hold a Pagefile -or scratchdisks or caches as one
sees fit.

The root drive needs a 2meg pagefile put on it to accomodate crash dumps,
which can have its max size left free on it, too accodomate awol memory
situations, while using a lightning fast pagefile of limited size on a
ramdisk.

With only 512megs I use maxmem=256 and a 220meg pagefile in Ramdisk and get
the occasional out of memory situation occuring when running oddles of apps
and a couple of big ones, but the situation has never caused a crash, the
message goes away after a quick look in taskmanager and closing an app or
two.

It appears that 2k actualy compresses data into the pagefile as some info
tools report double the space there is and my little 220meg pagefile fills
much slower than expected.

Sticking a tight codec inline with the paging driver makes perfect sense if
the platform has lots of computes sitting idle during io transfers. Plenty of
shrinkware was once sold to do just that. MS was late to that party...

back to the wisdom of taking main memory away from an NT class OS, which would
raise the paging rate and then make OS and applications churn through a
software disk driver AND the page file manager to get to that same memory
space, I have three words: "that's crazy talk".

it makes more sense to keep that memory in its lowest latency state, and not
bury it under multiple layers of class and device drivers. If the system is
paging unecessarily, fix that.

/daytripper (cripes, we bust our humps to cram more, quicker and faster memory
under the hood and the first chance you rascals get you part it out! ;-)

 

[Creeping Stone]

Pief, now 'Creeping Stone' / andy Replyeth...

Sticking a tight codec inline with the paging driver makes perfect sense if
the platform has lots of computes sitting idle during io transfers. Plenty of
shrinkware was once sold to do just that. MS was late to that party...

back to the wisdom of taking main memory away from an NT class OS, which would
raise the paging rate and then make OS and applications churn through a
software disk driver AND the page file manager to get to that same memory
space, I have three words: "that's crazy talk".

Heh, you are not the first to say it man, but I think understanding is
flawed and practical experience of the setup, I bet non existant :]
-In practice, the overheads are miniscule.

it makes more sense to keep that memory in its lowest latency state, and not
bury it under multiple layers of class and device drivers. If the system is
paging unecessarily, fix that.

-much easier said than done, how do you do it? - I consider all paging on a
one gig workstation unneccessary.

/daytripper (cripes, we bust our humps to cram more, quicker and faster memory
under the hood and the first chance you rascals get you part it out! ;-)

Yeah, and we buy big memory to stop hard disk paging duties, and windows
response is to page even more.

 

[Tim]

Agree 100%.

Get raptors or ultra 320 scsi, more ram, don't frig around with tweaks or
tweak software. Save it for what does work.

Would you port and polish a ferrari yourself? Compared to an Intel P4 3GHz,
a ferrari is a model T anyway. STI hmmm, 350z hmmm

- Tim

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic but I just installed Win 2K SP3 on a
P4C800-E with 1Gb of RAM. I set up a 4.0Gb partition on one of the
disks to use for the operating system. I would have thought at 4.0G
would have been more than enough for the OS and applications but when
I look at the space remaining I only have 1.6Gb remaining.

I went searching for the missing hard drive space and found it being
occupied by a 1.5Gb swap file! Does Win 2K really need this much or is
it just being greedy?

I see this as owing to win nt/2k/xp's design legacy. In practical terms,
its doesnt usually need all that space but the behaviour of the paging
system harks back to when 64megs was a decent amount to run an NT
workstation with. As more Ram is provided , the paging system pages more to
meet future imaginary potential memory demands -the ratios dreamed up for
these circumstances years ago and left in now to accomodate possible new
humungous applications, so it will still copy memory marked as pageable by
programs to pagefiles even if its very unlikely that it will run out of RAM
(it seems designed to duplicate Data to pagefile much before it needs to
reuse the same RAMspace)
Unfortunately the paging system isnt easy to manipulate and if you give 2k
a whole gig to run with, it will crave about the same amount of hard disk
space to perform paging duties for duplicating Ram to.

I believe the expert way to utilise large Ram, and avoid HDisk being used
for memory management, is to set Maxmem to Half the Mobos memory supply in
Boot.ini and use a ramdisk driver like Cenatek to make a big Ramdisk to
play with -this can hold a Pagefile -or scratchdisks or caches as one
sees fit.

The root drive needs a 2meg pagefile put on it to accomodate crash dumps,
which can have its max size left free on it, too accodomate awol memory
situations, while using a lightning fast pagefile of limited size on a
ramdisk.

With only 512megs I use maxmem=256 and a 220meg pagefile in Ramdisk and get
the occasional out of memory situation occuring when running oddles of apps
and a couple of big ones, but the situation has never caused a crash, the
message goes away after a quick look in taskmanager and closing an app or
two.

It appears that 2k actualy compresses data into the pagefile as some info
tools report double the space there is and my little 220meg pagefile fills
much slower than expected.

Sticking a tight codec inline with the paging driver makes perfect sense if
the platform has lots of computes sitting idle during io transfers. Plenty of
shrinkware was once sold to do just that. MS was late to that party...

back to the wisdom of taking main memory away from an NT class OS, which would
raise the paging rate and then make OS and applications churn through a
software disk driver AND the page file manager to get to that same memory
space, I have three words: "that's crazy talk".

it makes more sense to keep that memory in its lowest latency state, and not
bury it under multiple layers of class and device drivers. If the system is
paging unecessarily, fix that.

/daytripper (cripes, we bust our humps to cram more, quicker and faster memory
under the hood and the first chance you rascals get you part it out! ;-)

 

[_]

I've read a lot on this and I said the heck with it.
I set up a 4 gig partition on my second drive and put the swap file
there. fixed size, about 1.5 Gig for my system.

Hey, I've still got like 506 Gigs left

worry worry worry.

PS you might try PerfectDisk defragmenter for win2k. Much better than
the crap that comes with Win2k. There's a free 30 day trial download
so you can check it out.

 

[Kevin D. Kissell]

By default, Win 2k/XP sets a swap size of 1.5x your physical RAM. This seems
pretty illogical, since someone with a small amount of RAM would usually
need a big swapfile, and someone with a gig should ususally need a small
one, but I'm sure M$ has their reasons (I guess potentially someone with a
gig of RAM has much more to be swapped out).

Set it to 256 MB or something.

On one hand, at least in NT 4, having less total swap space
than physical memory can result in system crashes, which isn't
surprising, if you think a bit about how VM systems work.
On the other hand, the chances of your getting into a serious
paging situation with 1GB of RAM aren't that great. But it
can still happen - all you need is one program with a nasty
memory leak that runs for days and days until...

As someone else noted, yes, 4GB is actually pretty small for
a system partition these days, but yes, you can assign your
swap space to other partitions than C:

 

[Creeping Stone]

Agree 100%.

Get raptors or ultra 320 scsi, more ram, don't frig around with tweaks or
tweak software. Save it for what does work.

Would you port and polish a ferrari yourself? Compared to an Intel P4 3GHz,
a ferrari is a model T anyway. STI hmmm, 350z hmmm

- Tim

Same as everyone who dismisses the idea outright -you just haven't tried it

 

[Robert Hancock]

Using a RAM disk as a pagefile is pretty ridiculous, as is trying to avoid
the harddisk being used for paging at all costs.

If a program is doing heavy, extended disk I/O, Windows will page out
code/data which is not being used in favor of increasing the disk cache
size, which will increase performance. That RAM disk approach will force
Windows to keep a bunch of crap in memory which is not even being used.

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from (e-mail address removed)
Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic but I just installed Win 2K SP3 on a
P4C800-E with 1Gb of RAM. I set up a 4.0Gb partition on one of the
disks to use for the operating system. I would have thought at 4.0G
would have been more than enough for the OS and applications but when
I look at the space remaining I only have 1.6Gb remaining.

I went searching for the missing hard drive space and found it being
occupied by a 1.5Gb swap file! Does Win 2K really need this much or is
it just being greedy?

I see this as owing to win nt/2k/xp's design legacy. In practical terms,
its doesnt usually need all that space but the behaviour of the paging
system harks back to when 64megs was a decent amount to run an NT
workstation with. As more Ram is provided , the paging system pages more to
meet future imaginary potential memory demands -the ratios dreamed up for
these circumstances years ago and left in now to accomodate possible new
humungous applications, so it will still copy memory marked as pageable by
programs to pagefiles even if its very unlikely that it will run out of RAM
(it seems designed to duplicate Data to pagefile much before it needs to
reuse the same RAMspace)
Unfortunately the paging system isnt easy to manipulate and if you give 2k
a whole gig to run with, it will crave about the same amount of hard disk
space to perform paging duties for duplicating Ram to.

I believe the expert way to utilise large Ram, and avoid HDisk being used
for memory management, is to set Maxmem to Half the Mobos memory supply in
Boot.ini and use a ramdisk driver like Cenatek to make a big Ramdisk to
play with -this can hold a Pagefile -or scratchdisks or caches as one
sees fit.

The root drive needs a 2meg pagefile put on it to accomodate crash dumps,
which can have its max size left free on it, too accodomate awol memory
situations, while using a lightning fast pagefile of limited size on a
ramdisk.

With only 512megs I use maxmem=256 and a 220meg pagefile in Ramdisk and get
the occasional out of memory situation occuring when running oddles of apps
and a couple of big ones, but the situation has never caused a crash, the
message goes away after a quick look in taskmanager and closing an app or
two.

It appears that 2k actualy compresses data into the pagefile as some info
tools report double the space there is and my little 220meg pagefile fills
much slower than expected.