Question about pagefile requirements on secondary drive. 1

[pgaiger]

Does anyone know if a pagefile is needed for a secondary drive. This drive is just being used to store mp3s and such. I would assume that having a pagefile on C: should be enough. Is this correct?

Thanks in advance.

Pete

 

[bcastner]

Yes, but there are advantages to moving the pagefile to your second drive and removing it from drive C. See:

http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

 

[pgaiger]

Thanks for that info.. I gave it a try as it made sense, however I seem to see a trade off in performance. While some things appear to work more smoothly, others are considerably slower. With my pagefile set to my secondary drive, the PC seems to freeze occasionally. Everything just hangs. I have made sure that the 2 drives are defragged, and that the bios settings are optimal. SMART is off on both drives.

Any ideas?

Pete

 

[linney]

delete pagefile.sys?
thread779-864144

 

[bcastner]

The pagefile may be too small, or may becoming defragmented. As Jim Eshelman noted in the link I provided earlier: "Windows will expand a file that starts out too small and may shrink it again if it is larger than necessary, so it pays to set the initial size as large enough to handle the normal needs of your system to avoid constant changes of size. This will give all the benefits claimed for a ‘fixed’ page file. But no restriction should be placed on its further growth."

Set the Minimum size to 500 MB, and do not limit the upper size.

Test again.

The Petri link earlier has free utilities to allow monitoring and defragging the page file.

 

[BernardStewart]

Since you have a second drive the sensible thing to do is to partition the second drive and have a partition solely for the pagefile (it only needs to be a mazx of 4Gb as windows will not allow a pagefile larger than this). This way when you set the pagefile to this partition it will always be unfragmented no matter what. I find this improves system speed and reliability.

 

[bcastner]

BernardStewart,

I like the idea. But why would this prevent defragmentation? If the argument is that the pagefile would be the only file on the partition, I am not sure that is sufficient.

If you combined your tip with a sufficient Minimum size (so that XP does not have to enlarge or shrink, usually), or set Min and Max to 4 Gb. (so the pagefile is static, essentially) it is an interesting proposition for those with large drives.

Bill

 

[pgaiger]

I have tried all of the solutions offered here. I can most definately see a performance increase, but it is coming at a cost. As my secondary drive is also used for file storage (approx. 60%) and is not dedicated to pagefile alone, I don't think that the solution of putting my pagefile on this disk is ideal for my situation. Add to this that my secondary is only a 5400 RPM drive, and I think it compounds the problem.

The system will run with a huge performance increase, and then as soon as I close a large application I can literally go for a coffee before I regain control of my desktop.

Does that make any sense?

 

[bcastner]

pgaiger,

This does not sound, on its face, as a pagefile issue.

How much physical RAM is on your machine?

This much pagefile thrashing indicates a need for more RAM, which is relatively inexpensive.

See, as a first step,

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308417

 

[pgaiger]

Hi there. Thanks for the quick reply. I have 512Mb DDR.

 

[bcastner]

Try this for a week:

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm

Lets see what is going on. I am concerned it is not a pagefile issue.

 

[pgaiger]

OK thanks. Here are the results.

After first installing the script:

6/21/2004 9:17:16 AM
Pagefile Physical Location: F:\pagefile.sys
Current Pagefile Usage: 36 MB
Session Peak Usage: 36 MB
Current Pagefile Size: 512 MB

After running a large application:

6/21/2004 9:23:57 AM
Pagefile Physical Location: F:\pagefile.sys
Current Pagefile Usage: 122 MB
Session Peak Usage: 122 MB
Current Pagefile Size: 512 MB

 

[bcastner]

Looks good, as far as the pagefile is concerned.

 

[BernardStewart]

Bcaster,

Well, having done this I can attest to the fact that since nothing else gets written to the pagefile partition the pagefile always seems (as seen by Diskkeepeer Workstation) to be one continuous file. So it appears not to ever get fragmented in this configuration.

 

[pgaiger]

Ok, so I have done extensive work to get this machine up to speed and as it turns out I may have errors on my c:

I try and chkdsk and I get the famous "Cannot open volume for direct access" error for which MS acknowledges, but has no fix.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;823439

At least now I know. Once I get that fixed, I can work on tweaking performance with the pagefile and such. Thanks to everyone for their help.

 

[bcastner]

Run chkdsk /r in Recovery Console:

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...efault.aspx?scid=kb;en-gb;307654&ln=en-gb

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=314058

 

[pgaiger]

Ok. So I have chkdsk /r in Recovery Console..

It finds a bunch of errors and fixes them. The machine seems to be operating MUCH faster and smoother. The prob is, when I run chkdsk again in read-only mode it gives more errors. No matter how many times I run it... But, things seem to be getting progressively better. Any input is appreciated.

Now, I am going to go back to the beginning of this thread and start over with the pagefile. I will report back my findings.

BTW you were right bcaster. It was something other than a pagefile issue to start.

Thanks.