Windows Swap File on Seperate Hard Drive

[roderickom]

I am trying to squeeze as much performance out of my server as possible. I was wondering if installing the windows swap file on a seperate hard drive would increase performance. Any one have any suggestions?

Roderick Shilling

http://www.orbitmicro.com

http://www.qubitmicro.com

 

[dpc123]

yes, installing swap file on a seperate hard disk increases swap file performance. MS recommends it

 

[roderickom]

could you show me a link?

Roderick Shilling

http://www.orbitmicro.com

http://www.qubitmicro.com

 

[roderickom]

How do you go about installing the swap file on a different hard drive?

Roderick Shilling

http://www.orbitmicro.com

http://www.qubitmicro.com

 

[dholbrook]

Even better, put multiple swap files on different physical hard drives (adding into different locical drives does not improve performance, just adds size), especially if they are also on different controllers.

Go to control panel, system icon, advanced tab, performance options, and change the virtual memory. There you can add other drive spaces, etc. Make sure you have at least 1.5 times the RAM as a minimum swap space. I would recommend setting the space as 2x RAM (max and MIn values), and making it fixed on both locations. After this, go and defragment both drives until they are clean and as fully defragmented as possible. This fixing the size followed by defragmenting will improve performance and prevent the swap space from becoming fragmented.

If the defragmentation of the original drive will not run because of the lack of empty space, then you can create the new swap file, then delete the original file to create free space on the original drive (call it C. Then defrag C: and then re-create the swap swapfile on the C: in the cleaned up drive. This creates a single contigious space on the drive for the swapfile.

After doing this, clean out all the cookies installed under each user account on the system. The temporary internet files are installed under each user account under documents and settings, under local settings, temporary internet files, in a subdirectory called content.ie? (5 or6). You can safely delete ALL the funny letter/number subdirectories under content, the system will re-create them as needed. I had a system that had over 26000 cookies on it, and a very large amount of drive space wasfreed up doing this. NOw run defragment on the drive again. NOTE: In order to even see the local settings directory you need to set (explorer, tools, folder options, view) the show hidden folders/folders to be visable.

Next, to improve performance, go and get the ADAWARE program from

http://www.lavasoft.de,

install the program (very small program, and it is free for home use) and run it to clean out all the spybot programs that have been installed on your system but web sites you visited. You will be amazed at what it finds. I had a system crawling along that had over 750 of these little incidious programs installed, and removal of them restored the system to original speed immediately.


You should see a very marked improvement after doing all this.

HTH

David