StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Lately I've noticed my free space going up and down for no obvious reason. The first time, a few weeks ago, it went down by six hundred meg. Then about a week later it went back up again. Just in the past couple of days it's gone down again by about four hundred meg. I reset a few minutes ago and checked it, then a few minutes after that it had gone up by about fifty.

Anyone here familiar with this sort of thing?

Yeah, the same happened to me. Except it was in much shorter intervals, and less hd space. After a while, it sort of went away.

You haven't been deleting stuff, have you? My HD sometimes does that shit when I remove a lot of files.

Sounds like your page file growing & shrinking like crazy.

When your free space take a plunge again, check to see what your page file useage.

Under windows NT onward is is easy (taskmanager), but under win9x I cant remember how you check to see how mcuh of the page file is in use.

Try forcing your swap file to a minimum, this should stop it trashing like crazy. (I force my swap file to be a minium of 1gb in size, with 512mb of physical ram...)

Frankly I dont think I would notice if I lost upt to a gb of hhd space.

Your swapfile probably is expanding and contracting at ludicrious rates. Get more RAM.

I've been watching the swap file. It generally stays between 80 and 150 meg. Not large enough by far. I have 640 meg of RAM already.

Start monitoring what applications are active and what they're doing.

If you have Office XP, then you might want to uninstall "fast searching support", and look for a directory called "C:\WINDOWS\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Office Search Services\IndexingService" and check the properties for massive size.

XaLEv wrote:I've been watching the swap file. It generally stays between 80 and 150 meg. Not large enough by far. I have 640 meg of RAM already.

Hm....with 640 mb of RAM then paging could range as far as your first post described....

This is why I highly recommend limiting your swap file (page file for NT/2k/XP users) to a given range. That way your hard drive won't get too fragmented and won't take absolutely forever when defragging every month.

Bah. Better to have a fragmented drive than to run out of pagefile space.

Whenever it happens I search for all files modified in the past two or three days but never find anything anomalous.

phongn wrote:Bah. Better to have a fragmented drive than to run out of pagefile space.

If that happens, you can easily increase the limit. I rarely hit even 768MB on my pagefile let alone the 1GB limit I have set. It all depends on how much bloated crap you use.