Page file

Jun 03, 2004 1 Replies

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Rich Montminy 22 years ago

I read somewhere "performance gains of 15%-30% are not uncommon" by dedicating a separate physical drive for the page file. Does anyone know how to move the page file completely to a separate drive. I can set up the majority but WinXP requires a minimum amount (about 40meg) to remain in the root drive(C:). Does that not defeat the purpose of having the remainder in another location, in effect, fragmenting the page file? Also, I was always under the assumption that the page file was only used when physical RAM was exceeded.

Thanks in advance, Rich Montminy

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Dale Dunn 22 years ago

Don't worry about that tiny fragment on the boot drive. The huge performance numbers you quote would be referring to saving data from paged memory to the HD (Or opening into paged memory). If the data is paged on the same drive it's being saved to, it's really just being moved from one place on the drive to another. If the page file is on another physical drive (preferebly another channel even) then one drive is reading, and the other is writing. The heads don't have to shuttle back and forth, and some of the reads and writes could take concurrently, if your controller is smart enough.

Practically speaking, your not gaining new performance, you're reclaiming some performance lost by not having enough memory.

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