Page file size for my 32 GB Win 10 PC?

Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Terry Pinnell wrote on 7/5/2016 9:53 AM:
Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?

The larger your memory, other things being equal, the less likely your
page file will be used. I have 64GB memory and a 256GB SSD. Since I
figured that the page file was unlikely to be used much, I located it on
a 4TB HDD and let Windows manage it. The Windows-managed size is 64GB
and I think equal page file and memory size is default behavior.

Though my configuration is a desktop, I needed to enable hibernation -
my APC UPS software hibernates when faced with a power outage. The
Window's hiberfil.sys is somewhat smaller than memory. Unfortunately, it
can not be moved of the C disk (the SSD) like the page file can. I
checked what was going on and found that the standards defining OS and
motherboard interactions REQUIRES that the hiberfil.sys file be found in
a known spot on the boot disk. So, in my case, that's a mostly wasted
50GB - Window's selected size - of my SSD. Mostly wasted because
long-duration power outages are rare here. If my page file had been on
my C disk, I would have lost a total of 114GB of my SSD not to mention
the 10% "over partitioning" tax imposed my Samsung to extend SSD life.

so my advise is to get the page file off the SSD since you have a lot of
memory; don't enable hibernation unless you have a good reason to; and
if you do enable hibernation, consider disabling hybrid sleep since it
writes hiberfil.sys every time your computer sleeps. My computer is on
all the time and used frequently so sleeps frequently: this means that
hiberfil.sys is written frequently and it is surprising how quickly the
TB of writes can add up and shorten the life of your SSD.
--
Jeff Barnett

Jeff Barnett wrote on 7/5/2016 10:35 AM:
Terry Pinnell wrote on 7/5/2016 9:53 AM:
Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?

The larger your memory, other things being equal, the less likely your
page file will be used. I have 64GB memory and a 256GB SSD. Since I
figured that the page file was unlikely to be used much, I located it on
a 4TB HDD and let Windows manage it. The Windows-managed size is 64GB
and I think equal page file and memory size is default behavior.

Though my configuration is a desktop, I needed to enable hibernation -
my APC UPS software hibernates when faced with a power outage. The
Window's hiberfil.sys is somewhat smaller than memory. Unfortunately, it
can not be moved of the C disk (the SSD) like the page file can. I
checked what was going on and found that the standards defining OS and
motherboard interactions REQUIRES that the hiberfil.sys file be found in
a known spot on the boot disk. So, in my case, that's a mostly wasted
50GB - Window's selected size - of my SSD. Mostly wasted because
long-duration power outages are rare here. If my page file had been on
my C disk, I would have lost a total of 114GB of my SSD not to mention
the 10% "over partitioning" tax imposed my Samsung to extend SSD life.

so my advise is to get the page file off the SSD since you have a lot of
memory; don't enable hibernation unless you have a good reason to; and
if you do enable hibernation, consider disabling hybrid sleep since it
writes hiberfil.sys every time your computer sleeps. My computer is on
all the time and used frequently so sleeps frequently: this means that
hiberfil.sys is written frequently and it is surprising how quickly the
TB of writes can add up and shorten the life of your SSD.

PS My experience and suggestions are based on use of Win 7 Pro SP1 64bit
so some of the stuff about hybrid sleep may not apply to XP.
--
Jeff Barnett

Terry Pinnell wrote:
Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging

"Windows can be configured to use free space on any available drives
for pagefiles. It is required, however, for the boot partition
(i.e. the drive containing the Windows directory) to have a pagefile
on it if the system is configured to write either kernel or
full memory dumps after a Blue Screen of Death. Windows uses the
paging file as temporary storage for the memory dump. When the system
is rebooted, Windows copies the memory dump from the pagefile to a
separate file and frees the space that was used in the pagefile."

Control Panels : System : Advanced : Startup and Recovery (Settings button)
Write Debug Information = "Small memory dump 64K"

That would reduce the need to dump the whole kernel.

*******

These days, I'm a fan of small pagefiles, and 1GB seems about
a good choice as any.

If you open Photoshop on the WinXP x32 sitting on the 6700K with
32GB of memory, the OS will report "3.1GB free" and Photoshop
can only use ~1.8GB. The userspace/kernel address split is
2GB/2GB by default. Photoshop needs some space for the program,
and the ~1.8GB is all the remaining address space left for
the image the user is working on.

So if you load a single program in WinXP with 3.1GB free, it's
pretty difficult to page out immediately with a single program.
You would need to start multiple large programs, to need a pagefile.

There can be as much as 300MB of paged out material, which
is never paged back in. A person could select a 300MB pagefile,
as the smallest practical option. Removing the pagefile
entirely, means that 300MB of stuff just sits in RAM.
Whatever it is...

Since you're using an SSD, you have the option of making the
pagefile larger. I use 1GB pagefiles, because virtually all my
disks are HDD and slow as molasses. HDD do not do 4KB random
I/O all that quickly, and paging at the steaming hot rate
of 1MB/sec is not my idea of fun. I thus seek to discourage
paging. If a program "goes nuts" and used more RAM than it
should, I'd sooner the pagefile ran out of space for it,
than to leave all that random I/O facing me. It can take
several minutes for a terminated program, for the
pagefile to "unwind" on a HDD. The OS seems to have no
"bulk unwind" capability.

An SSD on the other hand, while still not having stellar
4K random I/O (cannot do it at 500MB/sec), is still many
times better than a HDD. It means you can actually use
a pagefile for its intended purpose. If you want to
shoehorn three 1.8GB programs (5.4GB total) into a
3.1GB RAM machine, a 3.1GB SSD pagefile will allow it.
And you might not fall asleep waiting for the OS to
page back in an evicted running program. On a HDD
pagefile system, paging is too impractical to be
a serious feature.

The largest pagefile I've ever used, is 128GB. I was
unable to estimate how much space would actually be
needed, and at its peak, 30GB of space from the pagefile
was in use. The pagefile was returned to the "normal"
size by me, right afterwards. That run benefited
from not fragmenting the pagefile too badly, so
when paging happened, it seemed to be in relatively
well organized multi-gigabyte chunks (the disk heads
moved relatively sequentially). For which I'm
thankful. That was on a 64 bit OS, with 64GB of
physical RAM. I don't think the pagefile could
have gone much larger :-)

Paul

Paul wrote on 7/5/2016 1:58 PM:
Terry Pinnell wrote:
Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging

"Windows can be configured to use free space on any available drives
for pagefiles. It is required, however, for the boot partition
(i.e. the drive containing the Windows directory) to have a pagefile
on it if the system is configured to write either kernel or
full memory dumps after a Blue Screen of Death. Windows uses the
paging file as temporary storage for the memory dump. When the system
is rebooted, Windows copies the memory dump from the pagefile to a
separate file and frees the space that was used in the pagefile."

Control Panels : System : Advanced : Startup and Recovery (Settings button)
Write Debug Information = "Small memory dump 64K"

That would reduce the need to dump the whole kernel.

*******

These days, I'm a fan of small pagefiles, and 1GB seems about
a good choice as any.

If you open Photoshop on the WinXP x32 sitting on the 6700K with
32GB of memory, the OS will report "3.1GB free" and Photoshop
can only use ~1.8GB. The userspace/kernel address split is
2GB/2GB by default. Photoshop needs some space for the program,
and the ~1.8GB is all the remaining address space left for
the image the user is working on.

So if you load a single program in WinXP with 3.1GB free, it's
pretty difficult to page out immediately with a single program.
You would need to start multiple large programs, to need a pagefile.

There can be as much as 300MB of paged out material, which
is never paged back in. A person could select a 300MB pagefile,
as the smallest practical option. Removing the pagefile
entirely, means that 300MB of stuff just sits in RAM.
Whatever it is...

Since you're using an SSD, you have the option of making the
pagefile larger. I use 1GB pagefiles, because virtually all my
disks are HDD and slow as molasses. HDD do not do 4KB random
I/O all that quickly, and paging at the steaming hot rate
of 1MB/sec is not my idea of fun. I thus seek to discourage
paging. If a program "goes nuts" and used more RAM than it
should, I'd sooner the pagefile ran out of space for it,
than to leave all that random I/O facing me. It can take
several minutes for a terminated program, for the
pagefile to "unwind" on a HDD. The OS seems to have no
"bulk unwind" capability.

An SSD on the other hand, while still not having stellar
4K random I/O (cannot do it at 500MB/sec), is still many
times better than a HDD. It means you can actually use
a pagefile for its intended purpose. If you want to
shoehorn three 1.8GB programs (5.4GB total) into a
3.1GB RAM machine, a 3.1GB SSD pagefile will allow it.
And you might not fall asleep waiting for the OS to
page back in an evicted running program. On a HDD
pagefile system, paging is too impractical to be
a serious feature.

The largest pagefile I've ever used, is 128GB. I was
unable to estimate how much space would actually be
needed, and at its peak, 30GB of space from the pagefile
was in use. The pagefile was returned to the "normal"
size by me, right afterwards. That run benefited
from not fragmenting the pagefile too badly, so
when paging happened, it seemed to be in relatively
well organized multi-gigabyte chunks (the disk heads
moved relatively sequentially). For which I'm
thankful. That was on a 64 bit OS, with 64GB of
physical RAM. I don't think the pagefile could
have gone much larger :-)

Paul
Paul,

The original poster has 32GB of memory so is either really messed up or
using a 64 bit OS (Win 10). Many of your comments seem to imply a teeny
machine.
--
Jeff Barnett

Jeff Barnett wrote:
Paul wrote on 7/5/2016 1:58 PM:
Terry Pinnell wrote:
Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging

"Windows can be configured to use free space on any available drives
for pagefiles. It is required, however, for the boot partition
(i.e. the drive containing the Windows directory) to have a pagefile
on it if the system is configured to write either kernel or
full memory dumps after a Blue Screen of Death. Windows uses the
paging file as temporary storage for the memory dump. When the system
is rebooted, Windows copies the memory dump from the pagefile to a
separate file and frees the space that was used in the pagefile."

Control Panels : System : Advanced : Startup and Recovery (Settings
button)
Write Debug Information = "Small memory dump 64K"

That would reduce the need to dump the whole kernel.

*******

These days, I'm a fan of small pagefiles, and 1GB seems about
a good choice as any.

If you open Photoshop on the WinXP x32 sitting on the 6700K with
32GB of memory, the OS will report "3.1GB free" and Photoshop
can only use ~1.8GB. The userspace/kernel address split is
2GB/2GB by default. Photoshop needs some space for the program,
and the ~1.8GB is all the remaining address space left for
the image the user is working on.

So if you load a single program in WinXP with 3.1GB free, it's
pretty difficult to page out immediately with a single program.
You would need to start multiple large programs, to need a pagefile.

There can be as much as 300MB of paged out material, which
is never paged back in. A person could select a 300MB pagefile,
as the smallest practical option. Removing the pagefile
entirely, means that 300MB of stuff just sits in RAM.
Whatever it is...

Since you're using an SSD, you have the option of making the
pagefile larger. I use 1GB pagefiles, because virtually all my
disks are HDD and slow as molasses. HDD do not do 4KB random
I/O all that quickly, and paging at the steaming hot rate
of 1MB/sec is not my idea of fun. I thus seek to discourage
paging. If a program "goes nuts" and used more RAM than it
should, I'd sooner the pagefile ran out of space for it,
than to leave all that random I/O facing me. It can take
several minutes for a terminated program, for the
pagefile to "unwind" on a HDD. The OS seems to have no
"bulk unwind" capability.

An SSD on the other hand, while still not having stellar
4K random I/O (cannot do it at 500MB/sec), is still many
times better than a HDD. It means you can actually use
a pagefile for its intended purpose. If you want to
shoehorn three 1.8GB programs (5.4GB total) into a
3.1GB RAM machine, a 3.1GB SSD pagefile will allow it.
And you might not fall asleep waiting for the OS to
page back in an evicted running program. On a HDD
pagefile system, paging is too impractical to be
a serious feature.

The largest pagefile I've ever used, is 128GB. I was
unable to estimate how much space would actually be
needed, and at its peak, 30GB of space from the pagefile
was in use. The pagefile was returned to the "normal"
size by me, right afterwards. That run benefited
from not fragmenting the pagefile too badly, so
when paging happened, it seemed to be in relatively
well organized multi-gigabyte chunks (the disk heads
moved relatively sequentially). For which I'm
thankful. That was on a 64 bit OS, with 64GB of
physical RAM. I don't think the pagefile could
have gone much larger :-)

Paul
Paul,

The original poster has 32GB of memory so is either really messed up or
using a 64 bit OS (Win 10). Many of your comments seem to imply a teeny
machine.

I think he has two OSes. And runs WinXP x32
on the 32GB machine. In that case, the machine
will report "3.1GB free" for memory. The memory
license on WinXP x32, means the rest of the memory
won't be used. Even though WinXP x32 SP3 is in PAE mode
by default. (It's in PAE mode, so the page table has
a provision for an NX bit or something.)

If it was not for the Microsoft memory license, you
could do this. This guy shows how Vista x32 supports
8GB of RAM, because PAE makes it possible. The author of
this page, bypassed the memory license.

http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/w...nse/memory.htm

But as it stands now, Terry should see "3.1GB free" in
Task Manager, when WinXP is running on the new computer.
You cannot get all 32GB of RAM to register.

Paul

Paul wrote on 7/5/2016 4:42 PM:
Jeff Barnett wrote:
Paul wrote on 7/5/2016 1:58 PM:
Terry Pinnell wrote:
Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging

"Windows can be configured to use free space on any available drives
for pagefiles. It is required, however, for the boot partition
(i.e. the drive containing the Windows directory) to have a pagefile
on it if the system is configured to write either kernel or
full memory dumps after a Blue Screen of Death. Windows uses the
paging file as temporary storage for the memory dump. When the
system
is rebooted, Windows copies the memory dump from the pagefile to a
separate file and frees the space that was used in the pagefile."

Control Panels : System : Advanced : Startup and Recovery (Settings
button)
Write Debug Information = "Small memory dump 64K"

That would reduce the need to dump the whole kernel.

*******

These days, I'm a fan of small pagefiles, and 1GB seems about
a good choice as any.

If you open Photoshop on the WinXP x32 sitting on the 6700K with
32GB of memory, the OS will report "3.1GB free" and Photoshop
can only use ~1.8GB. The userspace/kernel address split is
2GB/2GB by default. Photoshop needs some space for the program,
and the ~1.8GB is all the remaining address space left for
the image the user is working on.

So if you load a single program in WinXP with 3.1GB free, it's
pretty difficult to page out immediately with a single program.
You would need to start multiple large programs, to need a pagefile.

There can be as much as 300MB of paged out material, which
is never paged back in. A person could select a 300MB pagefile,
as the smallest practical option. Removing the pagefile
entirely, means that 300MB of stuff just sits in RAM.
Whatever it is...

Since you're using an SSD, you have the option of making the
pagefile larger. I use 1GB pagefiles, because virtually all my
disks are HDD and slow as molasses. HDD do not do 4KB random
I/O all that quickly, and paging at the steaming hot rate
of 1MB/sec is not my idea of fun. I thus seek to discourage
paging. If a program "goes nuts" and used more RAM than it
should, I'd sooner the pagefile ran out of space for it,
than to leave all that random I/O facing me. It can take
several minutes for a terminated program, for the
pagefile to "unwind" on a HDD. The OS seems to have no
"bulk unwind" capability.

An SSD on the other hand, while still not having stellar
4K random I/O (cannot do it at 500MB/sec), is still many
times better than a HDD. It means you can actually use
a pagefile for its intended purpose. If you want to
shoehorn three 1.8GB programs (5.4GB total) into a
3.1GB RAM machine, a 3.1GB SSD pagefile will allow it.
And you might not fall asleep waiting for the OS to
page back in an evicted running program. On a HDD
pagefile system, paging is too impractical to be
a serious feature.

The largest pagefile I've ever used, is 128GB. I was
unable to estimate how much space would actually be
needed, and at its peak, 30GB of space from the pagefile
was in use. The pagefile was returned to the "normal"
size by me, right afterwards. That run benefited
from not fragmenting the pagefile too badly, so
when paging happened, it seemed to be in relatively
well organized multi-gigabyte chunks (the disk heads
moved relatively sequentially). For which I'm
thankful. That was on a 64 bit OS, with 64GB of
physical RAM. I don't think the pagefile could
have gone much larger :-)

Paul
Paul,

The original poster has 32GB of memory so is either really messed up
or using a 64 bit OS (Win 10). Many of your comments seem to imply a
teeny machine.

I think he has two OSes. And runs WinXP x32
on the 32GB machine. In that case, the machine
will report "3.1GB free" for memory. The memory
license on WinXP x32, means the rest of the memory
won't be used. Even though WinXP x32 SP3 is in PAE mode
by default. (It's in PAE mode, so the page table has
a provision for an NX bit or something.)

If it was not for the Microsoft memory license, you
could do this. This guy shows how Vista x32 supports
8GB of RAM, because PAE makes it possible. The author of
this page, bypassed the memory license.

http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/w...nse/memory.htm

But as it stands now, Terry should see "3.1GB free" in
Task Manager, when WinXP is running on the new computer.
You cannot get all 32GB of RAM to register.

The subject of all these messages says "32 GB Win 10 PC". I originally
assumed he was on a 64bit XP machine until I noticed. By the way, what
is the memory limit for a 64bit XP machine?
--
Jeff

Jeff Barnett wrote:
Paul wrote on 7/5/2016 4:42 PM:
Jeff Barnett wrote:
Paul wrote on 7/5/2016 1:58 PM:
Terry Pinnell wrote:
Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging

"Windows can be configured to use free space on any available drives
for pagefiles. It is required, however, for the boot partition
(i.e. the drive containing the Windows directory) to have a
pagefile
on it if the system is configured to write either kernel or
full memory dumps after a Blue Screen of Death. Windows uses the
paging file as temporary storage for the memory dump. When the
system
is rebooted, Windows copies the memory dump from the pagefile to a
separate file and frees the space that was used in the pagefile."

Control Panels : System : Advanced : Startup and Recovery (Settings
button)
Write Debug Information = "Small memory dump 64K"

That would reduce the need to dump the whole kernel.

*******

These days, I'm a fan of small pagefiles, and 1GB seems about
a good choice as any.

If you open Photoshop on the WinXP x32 sitting on the 6700K with
32GB of memory, the OS will report "3.1GB free" and Photoshop
can only use ~1.8GB. The userspace/kernel address split is
2GB/2GB by default. Photoshop needs some space for the program,
and the ~1.8GB is all the remaining address space left for
the image the user is working on.

So if you load a single program in WinXP with 3.1GB free, it's
pretty difficult to page out immediately with a single program.
You would need to start multiple large programs, to need a pagefile.

There can be as much as 300MB of paged out material, which
is never paged back in. A person could select a 300MB pagefile,
as the smallest practical option. Removing the pagefile
entirely, means that 300MB of stuff just sits in RAM.
Whatever it is...

Since you're using an SSD, you have the option of making the
pagefile larger. I use 1GB pagefiles, because virtually all my
disks are HDD and slow as molasses. HDD do not do 4KB random
I/O all that quickly, and paging at the steaming hot rate
of 1MB/sec is not my idea of fun. I thus seek to discourage
paging. If a program "goes nuts" and used more RAM than it
should, I'd sooner the pagefile ran out of space for it,
than to leave all that random I/O facing me. It can take
several minutes for a terminated program, for the
pagefile to "unwind" on a HDD. The OS seems to have no
"bulk unwind" capability.

An SSD on the other hand, while still not having stellar
4K random I/O (cannot do it at 500MB/sec), is still many
times better than a HDD. It means you can actually use
a pagefile for its intended purpose. If you want to
shoehorn three 1.8GB programs (5.4GB total) into a
3.1GB RAM machine, a 3.1GB SSD pagefile will allow it.
And you might not fall asleep waiting for the OS to
page back in an evicted running program. On a HDD
pagefile system, paging is too impractical to be
a serious feature.

The largest pagefile I've ever used, is 128GB. I was
unable to estimate how much space would actually be
needed, and at its peak, 30GB of space from the pagefile
was in use. The pagefile was returned to the "normal"
size by me, right afterwards. That run benefited
from not fragmenting the pagefile too badly, so
when paging happened, it seemed to be in relatively
well organized multi-gigabyte chunks (the disk heads
moved relatively sequentially). For which I'm
thankful. That was on a 64 bit OS, with 64GB of
physical RAM. I don't think the pagefile could
have gone much larger :-)

Paul
Paul,

The original poster has 32GB of memory so is either really messed up
or using a 64 bit OS (Win 10). Many of your comments seem to imply a
teeny machine.

I think he has two OSes. And runs WinXP x32
on the 32GB machine. In that case, the machine
will report "3.1GB free" for memory. The memory
license on WinXP x32, means the rest of the memory
won't be used. Even though WinXP x32 SP3 is in PAE mode
by default. (It's in PAE mode, so the page table has
a provision for an NX bit or something.)

If it was not for the Microsoft memory license, you
could do this. This guy shows how Vista x32 supports
8GB of RAM, because PAE makes it possible. The author of
this page, bypassed the memory license.

http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/w...nse/memory.htm

But as it stands now, Terry should see "3.1GB free" in
Task Manager, when WinXP is running on the new computer.
You cannot get all 32GB of RAM to register.

The subject of all these messages says "32 GB Win 10 PC". I originally
assumed he was on a 64bit XP machine until I noticed. By the way, what
is the memory limit for a 64bit XP machine?

It's amazing. You're allowed 128GB. But I think that's probably
for Pro.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...s_wind ows_xp

Paul

Il giorno Tue 05 Jul 2016 06:35:08p, *Jeff Barnett* inviava su
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general il messaggio news:nlgnju$6jf$1@dont-
email.me. Vediamo cosa scrisse:

My computer is on
all the time and used frequently so sleeps frequently

you should change some power-settings so that sleep just turns off the
monitor, switches off the (traditional) HDD and slows down the cpu

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Paul wrote:

Terry Pinnell wrote:
Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging

"Windows can be configured to use free space on any available drives
for pagefiles. It is required, however, for the boot partition
(i.e. the drive containing the Windows directory) to have a pagefile
on it if the system is configured to write either kernel or
full memory dumps after a Blue Screen of Death. Windows uses the
paging file as temporary storage for the memory dump. When the system
is rebooted, Windows copies the memory dump from the pagefile to a
separate file and frees the space that was used in the pagefile."

Control Panels : System : Advanced : Startup and Recovery (Settings button)
Write Debug Information = "Small memory dump 64K"

That would reduce the need to dump the whole kernel.

*******

These days, I'm a fan of small pagefiles, and 1GB seems about
a good choice as any.

If you open Photoshop on the WinXP x32 sitting on the 6700K with
32GB of memory, the OS will report "3.1GB free" and Photoshop
can only use ~1.8GB. The userspace/kernel address split is
2GB/2GB by default. Photoshop needs some space for the program,
and the ~1.8GB is all the remaining address space left for
the image the user is working on.

So if you load a single program in WinXP with 3.1GB free, it's
pretty difficult to page out immediately with a single program.
You would need to start multiple large programs, to need a pagefile.

There can be as much as 300MB of paged out material, which
is never paged back in. A person could select a 300MB pagefile,
as the smallest practical option. Removing the pagefile
entirely, means that 300MB of stuff just sits in RAM.
Whatever it is...

Since you're using an SSD, you have the option of making the
pagefile larger. I use 1GB pagefiles, because virtually all my
disks are HDD and slow as molasses. HDD do not do 4KB random
I/O all that quickly, and paging at the steaming hot rate
of 1MB/sec is not my idea of fun. I thus seek to discourage
paging. If a program "goes nuts" and used more RAM than it
should, I'd sooner the pagefile ran out of space for it,
than to leave all that random I/O facing me. It can take
several minutes for a terminated program, for the
pagefile to "unwind" on a HDD. The OS seems to have no
"bulk unwind" capability.

An SSD on the other hand, while still not having stellar
4K random I/O (cannot do it at 500MB/sec), is still many
times better than a HDD. It means you can actually use
a pagefile for its intended purpose. If you want to
shoehorn three 1.8GB programs (5.4GB total) into a
3.1GB RAM machine, a 3.1GB SSD pagefile will allow it.
And you might not fall asleep waiting for the OS to
page back in an evicted running program. On a HDD
pagefile system, paging is too impractical to be
a serious feature.

The largest pagefile I've ever used, is 128GB. I was
unable to estimate how much space would actually be
needed, and at its peak, 30GB of space from the pagefile
was in use. The pagefile was returned to the "normal"
size by me, right afterwards. That run benefited
from not fragmenting the pagefile too badly, so
when paging happened, it seemed to be in relatively
well organized multi-gigabyte chunks (the disk heads
moved relatively sequentially). For which I'm
thankful. That was on a 64 bit OS, with 64GB of
physical RAM. I don't think the pagefile could
have gone much larger :-)

Paul


Thanks to all for the advice and recommendations. Lots to think about,
although I meant to post to the newsgroup on the next line in my
folder, alt.comp.os.windows-10 !

Note that I do not run two OSs. As per my other recent posts, this is
a new Win 10 Pro PC, 32 GB. I've made room here to run my other XP Pro
(SP3) 4 GB PC in parallel until I get comfortable. After 15 years with
XP I find Windows 10 hard work at present ;-)

Um, this is a Windows XP newsgroup. :P


Terry Pinnell wrote:
Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?


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(Ant) wrote:

Um, this is a Windows XP newsgroup. :P

Quote from my follow-up post yesterday:
"Lots to think about, although I meant to post to the newsgroup on the
next line in my folder, alt.comp.os.windows-10 !

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK


Terry Pinnell wrote:
Could I get some expert advice on the recommended size of the page
file I need please. I've done a fair bit of googling and found
conflicting opinions. I'm sure I even saw the suggestion - surely
outdate years ago - that it should be "three times RAM capacity"!

Having forked out for a hefty 32 GB of RAM on this i7 6700K, I'm
rather hoping I could get away without one altogether?

If I do need one, where should I put it: on the 256 GB SSD or the 4 TB
HD?

Or do most experienced users still leave it to Windows to set the min
and max?