Support NeoGAF

[RaymondCarver]

I wonder if you do this.


Supposedly, putting the windows "page" or "swap" file on a different physical drive, on its own drive letter, with 2GB to 4GB per space, is one of the single best ways to improve system performance.

Supposedly, the hard drive is the slowest thing in the system (next to the optical media, etc.). For memory, the hierarchy here is the hard drive, the on-die cache, the physical system RAM memory, and then the operating system page file. Am I correct in my thinking on this? Doesn’t a page file on a different physical drive, or any application, run faster when run on its own drive?

 

[golem]

it helps if you dont have that much ram/are hitting the page file alot

the hard drive technically just stores stuff, the pagefile is used when Windows is running low on physical memory (well, it will use it anyways even if its not i think). of course if windows is making heavy use of the pagefile on your system, and you're running programs off the same harddrive the pagefile is installed to it will slow you down

personally i have all my games (which are the programs i use the most) installed to D: and Windows and the pagefile on C: (15000 rpm hard drive so i have speed to spare) with 1gig of ram

 

[maharg]

"For memory, the hierarchy here is the hard drive, the on-die cache, the physical system RAM memory, and then the operating system page file."

Erm, you're a little confused I think. The page file is on the hard drive, so they are the same. They can't exist on opposite ends of the spectrum. From fastest to slowest the order would typically be: Level 1 cache, Level 2 cache, RAM, hard drive (and by extension page file), optical disc, floppy disk. Mind you different types of storage have different characteristics and one might be faster in bursts than another in random access, even if with the same operation they would be the same.

At any rate, yes, putting your page file on an otherwise unused hard drive on an otherwise unused IDE channel will increase performance if you hit swap. Of course, as the previous poster said, the best way to improve performance is to simply not hit swap.

NT and XP actually allow you to tune the way swap is used. There are two primary strategies for swap use: an aggressive strategy where unused memory is swapped early so RAM is never more full than it has to be, and a defensive strategy where memory is never swapped until RAM is getting full. They both have merit, but if the applications you run tend to be stable memory users and you don't often load new applications in and out, the defensive strategy will lead to less unnecessary swapping.

I believe in the System control panel, they call the defensive strategy the "server" strategy and the aggressive one the "desktop" strategy. (sorry, that's not right. If you tell windows to reserve memory for the system cache it will aggressively page memory to disk).