Page and Swap File?

Berton said:

I've always seen paging file [virtual memory] on Windows NT-based versions and swap file on Windows ME and earlier.

I set the paging file on the C: drive at 2048MB and on a second hard drive at the recommended 1.5 times the physical RAM. With 8GB RAM that would be 2048MB on C: and 12288 on D:. I've seen marked improvement in system performance on the computers. Some program installations look for the paging file on the same drive as the OS.

I was mainly concerned about the 2 swap files, but now I don't really care any more.
I also have 8GB's, so I'll give your configuration a try, it couldn't hurt, or at least I hope it doesn't hurt.
Thanks.

dalchina said:

Just to check- Win 8 & Win 10 have both a pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys - not to be confused with the older nomenclature (win 7 and earlier) where the pagefile was also referred to as the swap file for legacy reasons.

True.

The term "swapfile" is an old one, dating back to a time when the OS would swap entire processes to disk. This wasn't very efficient but the best that could be done with the relatively primitive hardware available. But in the NT platform (and Windows 95, 98, ME) data was written to disk in pages of 4096 bytes. As a reflection of this the former swapfile became pagefile.sys, although the older term remained in use in Windows 9x. It iterm s still used in Linux, even though it is actual used for pages of data.

That changed in Windows 8. pagefile.sys kept it's traditional role but a new swapfile.sys was introduced to page out the modern Apps. These are very small in comparison to traditional applications. For technical reasons it was more efficient to use a different file for this purpose. So in Windows 8 and later we have both pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys serving different purposes.

There is some value in having a pagefile (or swapfile) on a separate physical drive other than that containing the OS. This largely disappears when SSDs are being used. But note carefully that these must be separate physical drives, not partitions. In the latter case performance would be impaired.

But if you have a reasonable amount of RAM for your workload you won't gain much by doing this. This also assumes that the other drive is at least as fast as the OS drive.

I do wonder though why the OS isn't on the faster drive. That would make more difference than anything you could do with the pagefile.