Pagefile FAQ

I have seen a lot of false information on the internet related to the Pagefile and alot of bad advice about tweaking it. I am creating this topic so you guys can ask questions about tweaking the pagefile. Maybe you heard something about \"tweaking\" it and want to know if it is good advice. In the end I can create a FAQ that will surely help a lot of people.

I've heard alot of people saying to make a seperate partition for the pagefile, and then another whole bunch of people say not to. Which should it be?

Last edited by KoolDrew on Sat Sep 03, 2005 1:05 pm; edited 1 time in total

You should never put the pagefile in a partition of its own. All that will do is increase your average seeking distance, thus decreasing performance. For best performance the pagefile should be on the least-used HDD and the most-used partition. If you have one drive you want your OS, applications and pagefile all on the same partition for best performance.

That is a good question to get us started since I have seen that recommended quite a bit too. If you have any other questions feel free to ask. Also while this topic is named \"Pagefile FAQ\" feel free to ask about any \"tweaks\" you have heard about on the net. Just about every registry tweak out there is false. Then maybe I can create a topic covering all these myths.

Ok, thanks. I guess I'll be switching it over to my other hard drive, then.

Last edited by KoolDrew on Sat Sep 03, 2005 1:48 pm; edited 1 time in total

That would be a good idea, since each drive can handle requests simultaneously. The second drive would of course have to be on a seperate IDE controller though.

Also, I must note that if you have a sufficient amount of RAM the pagefile is not acessed enough to make a difference in performance when putting it on another drive, but it is a good idea to do it anyway.

Well, I've only got 512MB (hopefully to change that soon), so I bet my pagefile is used quite frequently.
Does it make a huge amount of difference to have it on a different channel? I mean, I know it can ony access one drive at a time (I think), but will I notice a great deal of difference? It'll really mess up the wires in my case ;)

Last edited by KoolDrew on Sat Sep 03, 2005 3:42 pm; edited 1 time in total

Pagefile usage depends more on your usage patterns then the amount of RAM you have. For example, if all you do is browse the Internet the pagefile probably won't be used much anyway. However if you are a gamer with only 512MB the pagefile is most likely used often. To see how much pagefile is being hit, run perfmon and add the counter for Memory, and look at Pages Input/sec and Pages Output/sec. To determine PF usage use the \"%usage\" counter for it.

If the second drive is not on a separate IDE controller then it defeats the purpose of putting it on that second drive in the first place. This is because only one device can be active at any one time on the same IDE channel. So, data can not be read from both disk at the same time, which is the reason to move it to a separate drive. The trouble with a setup like this though is that most motherboards only come with two IDE channels.

One advantage of Serial-ATA is that each device is given its own channel. ;)

If you have any more questions related to the pagefile or things you have heard about tweaking Windows, feel free to ask.