OK - I would like to pick the brains of the SN masses on this one. I've just ordered my new laptop for work. The spec is pretty good (Dell Inspiron 9400, 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 2048 MB 667 Mhz RAM, 256Mb ATI graphics card and 160 Gb hard drive running at 5400 RPM).

We run a lot of quite memory hungry apps and VMWare sessions, so I would like to get the paging file size right. I've always worked on the 2 1/2 x RAM theory, which would make it around 5 Gig. Does this still apply when it gets to this amount of RAM? Does it actually make that much difference?

Cheers
Chris

 

On one machine I have no page file at all

On my other I just leave it as the system sets it for 1.5Gb Ram

 

To be honest Chris, I have fiddled around with the paging file loads of times in the past and always found that it made little to no difference no matter where I set it.

In the end I just left it up to the OS to do it's thing. Works fine for me.

 

I set the max and min the same, VM should be at least the size of your RAM. If you have a 2 hard drives, place the VM on the other drive

Overclockers UK Forums - Do i need virtual memory enabled with 4gig of ram?

read the replies here by Nathan E

 

Rule of thumb should be:

Less that 2gb RAM - Swap file = 2x ram

2gb or more ram then swap file = ram.

The tricky bit is to get the swap file on a contigiuos bit of disk without having the file clusters spread all over the place - that's really where the performance gain is.

I usually create a 4gb partition on a disk & use that solely for the swap file (for whatever size i set it to).

If you set it to "let windows manage my swap file" your swap file will be all over the place as it is always changing size.

 

Thanks chaps

 

so do you guys seriously notice a differnece in day to say use

I have a few guys that keep tyring to convince me to change a build at work - I keep on windows default for ease of one build per many machines

 

Dont forget that the VMWare virtual machines will manage their own memory allocation with transparent memory allocation and the balloon driver, which is ultra cool. I know it does that with VI3/ESX but not sure about Workstation, but I cant see why not.

Dave