Space reserved for System Restore files

On Tue, 01 Mar 2016 20:03:47 -0500, Paul wrote:

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

In a similar way, I never understood (this is going back several OS
versions, possibly even to 3.1!) the adage of always setting a page file
size (I think that's what it was) a fixed multiple (e. g. 3) of the
amount of RAM you've got. As I saw it, if you had _more_ RAM, you needed
_less_ page file, except for when you had a very small amount.

The old 2:1 ratio used to be a mantra a long time ago.

And even back then, you couldn't trace the advice given,
to some published article or something. It was just
coffee table chat that got passed around.

The practice is all over the map now. People are using
their actual experience, to set a value.

*******

I did resort to using a huge pagefile for a week long
calculation - I did it, because I had a lot to lose,
if the calculation crashed before completion. The max
pagefile usage extended to about 25% of my huge allocation.
I turned it all the way down, later...

There used to be advice floating around, probably some 15+ years ago, about
enabling a performance counter, which is a feature built in to Windows, to
track actual pagefile usage. With the performance counter enabled, you'd use
your computer for a number of days or even a week or more, periodically
checking the performance counter to see how much pagefile had been used.
You'd be looking at the high water mark, rather than current usage. Once
you're satisfied that your normal usage isn't going to push the high water
mark any higher, you simply add a safety margin and now you know, as
precisely as possible, what value you should use. You then set the Min and
Max sizes to that value. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to revisit that
once or twice a year because your software mix and usage habits might change
over time.

It seems like my OS back when I followed that advice was a Win 9x flavor.