virtual mem settings

What should the virtual memory settings be if I have 1 gig of ram?

I have 1 gig with XP. I turn virtual memory off, and have never looked back. Even with as many as 8 instance of Plugsounds ultimate sound bank running, I never went beyond 600-700 megs used.

Jake
www.jakelampe.com
Sonar 4 Producer
Aardvark LX6

Here is an article online with everything about RAM, virtual memory, and pagefiles. It speaks of how to set the limits of the pagefile according to how much RAM and some general rules of thumb. It also discusses defragmenting the pagefile so it is more quickly accessible.

I quick Google search will yield a lot of conflicting opinions. You should pay particular attention to articles like this one that come from a deep technical source.

http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/WindowsGeneralWeb/RAMVirtualMemoryPageFileEtc.htm

Here is another good article with tweaking considerations and a brief explanation why running without a paging file is a bad idea:

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

Yeah, a lot of documentation says 1.5 times the physical RAM count for the low end and 2 times or 3 times the physical RAM count for the high end. However, there are file-system size limits and it is not practical to have multi-gigabyte paging files.

Some say to set the lower and upper pagefile limits to the same value so Windows won't attempt to increase the pagefile size. This may work well as long as there is a sufficient amount of pagefile available.

It is also good practice to place the pagefile on its own partition on a physically separate hard drive (or on a hardware RAID0 drive) to get better speed when it is in use.

It is also good practice to ensure the pagefile is not externally fragmented on a disk.

Very nice research and article sinc.....good job

Would you mind if we linked to your article from our Wiki or even imported its entire text into our Wiki database?

Sure, no problem.

Thanks, guys.

Monday Morn

ORIGINAL:
After lots of research and experimentation, I put this together.

Let me know if you see any errors/ommissions in it.

Thank you for consolidating this information. Lots of old w98 tweaks are obviously outdated.

I did not read that one should disable the pagefile for the audio data drive.

I have done this, and have disabled system restore for the audio data drive, and for the samples drive.

The system drive has both enabled.

Any problems with these actions?

J

'Fraid to say sinc, but there's just so many factual mistakes in your article, it's really painful to read.

So the recommedation is to disable the pagefile for the audio drive?

Yep. You got it.

Of course, as I was saying, this is a relatively minor optimization. In the grand scheme of things, if you're looking to optimizations like this to fix a recurring problem with your DAW, you're probably better off looking to a REAL fix (e.g., adding more RAM). But yeah, keeping the pagefile off your audio disc can help sometimes.

The main point of the paper is that, with XP, turning the pagefile off does much more harm than good, and should not be done, even though it may have helped in earlier versions of the operating system (or in other operating systems).

I have received feedback on the paper from Windows XP experts, who most strongly assure me that there is no need to have the pagefile larger than available RAM. There are many references on the web that state performance will degrade unless all available RAM can be mapped to a spot in virtual memory, but these references are mistaken. The 1.5x RAM rule is also bad, since it can dictate incredibly large pagefile sizes for systems with lots of RAM. For most systems, this ends up being nothing more than a waste of disc space.

The truth of the matter is that the pagefile only needs to be large enough that it never gets expanded during normal usage. The maximum pagefile size should always be set to something larger than the minimum, to allow this expansion if it is required. But other than that, the minimum pagefile should be determined only by the needs of your system. They still recommend that the minimum be set to 100MB, or larger on systems with small amounts of RAM (total of RAM+pagefile should be at least 500MB). They also recommend that the maximum should never be set lower than about 700MB, as a basic rule-of-thumb. Larger is better if you ever work with graphics or other memory-intensive applications.

I have revised the paper accordingly, including instructions on how to determine the best minimum size for your system.