A swap file question

Steve C · 24 Jan 2020

reddwarf4ever said:

Hello
from my research and past experience, I have been led to believe that
1-the swop file should be 1.5 x RAM
2-It should not be on multiple drives
3-C drive swap file holds crash dump files, so not sure if that should have a swap file as well as another HDD

however now I see MS suggest a max of 3x RAM and another site suggested creating a separate partition just for the swap file, to this end I have created a swap file partition of 32 GB ( set min & max to 32GB to prevent fragmentation or does this matter in this instance ? )

I am certain from what I read that this has been discussed very often, but with conflicting info, would like a definitive answer, also can performance suffer if the swap file is too big ?

this is For a 64 BIT PC.....it’s getting a bit old now, was looking at how to improve performance, as the CPU often maxes at 100% when doing video conversions, during which time even slows down file copying .

Do you mean the swap file or page file? The swap file is generally small c. 16MB.

swarfega · 24 Jan 2020

Windows 10 is a different beast from XP days, I would let windows manage it. I wonder how many other expired "optimisations" you do.

eLPuSHeR · 24 Jan 2020

+1 to let Windows manage pagefile. Even if using SSD.

reddwarf4ever · 24 Jan 2020

swarfega said:

Windows 10 is a different beast from XP days, I would let windows manage it. I wonder how many other expired "optimisations" you do.

Even MS say the swop file, should be equal to the RAM to capture a full crash dump.......think I will leave this question, so many opinions, it’s difficult to decide what’s best.....as per your ‘ comment’ which seemed a little harsh......I do the best I can and try to keep my PC running efficiently......guess you’re going to tell me that defragmenting a HDD, making regular image backups and creating restore points, are no longer necessary......LOL

i have created a 32GB partition for the swap file alone, perhaps I Mr THiCKY......but I am sure that will do no harm......thanks to all the ‘ helpful’ contributors

jimbo45 · 24 Jan 2020

Hi there
other things this file is used for is for "pre-fetching" of disk data. W10 (and most OS'es) have quite a bit of A.I based into their kernels -- what this does is after a while builds up a "user profile" of what applications you use and what disk data you are likely to read next -- after a few days or so of using Windows it settles down and is usually a pretty good algorithm.

So in plain English this algorithm tries to guess what you need next and when the I/O is idle the computer reads this data and stores it in the paging area. Since some of this is cached into RAM it improves the whole efficiency of the system as the data is already in the system when you need it and doesn't need further Disk accesses (even on an SSD !!)..

Obviously if you are a highly unpredicatable user the AI algorithm on pre-fetch won't be as good but these days on things like W10 it's actually pretty good now.

So another good reason to leave this stuff for W10 internals to handle --pretty well any user tinkering with this is likely to make it worse !!!

Not a very technical answer but you should get the idea --BTW AI = Arificial Intelligence for those not familiar with the standard abbreviation.

Cheers
jimbo

f14tomcat · 24 Jan 2020

It's already been covered in part, but just to restate.....

The Swap File and the Page File are two different things on Win10. Swap File is used to suspend apps and tasks, keeping just enough in memory to quickly come back up when called for. Page File is for crash dumps and memory management.

"The swap file deals with modern Windows apps (the kind you download from the Windows Store), moving them to the hard drive in a sort of hibernation state when not in use, while the page file takes individual pages (4KB in size) of a process and moves them back and forth as needed."

What is Swapfile.sys and do I need it on my Windows 10 PC? | Windows Central

Example from my machine:

A swap file question-2020-01-24_07h11_14.png

swarfega · 24 Jan 2020

reddwarf4ever said:

Even MS say the swop file, should be equal to the RAM to capture a full crash dump.......think I will leave this question, so many opinions, it’s difficult to decide what’s best.....as per your ‘ comment’ which seemed a little harsh......I do the best I can and try to keep my PC running efficiently......guess you’re going to tell me that defragmenting a HDD, making regular image backups and creating restore points, are no longer necessary......LOL

i have created a 32GB partition for the swap file alone, perhaps I Mr THiCKY......but I am sure that will do no harm......thanks to all the ‘ helpful’ contributors

But how old is the article? Got a link?

reddwarf4ever · 24 Jan 2020

Not sure how,old the article was but it mentioned W7 and W10, but no idea where it was sorry

swarfega · 24 Jan 2020

I seem to remember fiddling with the pagefile in XP. Haven't bothered since Windows 7 though.

altae · 24 Jan 2020

It's kind of silly to still hear of the 1.5 times RAM recommendation. My system hast got 64 GB of RAM, should I really reserve 96 GB of the System drive for the page file? Definitely not, that's complete nonsense which apparently even MS agrees to as the Windows page file management has assigned a page file of 9728 MB on my machine.