Page files with SSD/multi-partition HDD combos

[Edward Yee]

I've read a Computer Power User (CPU) magazine article in the October 2010 issue on optimizing a SSD, mainly through proper setup before installing the OS, then tweaking it to minimize writes to the drive. Now, as one of the recommended performance tweaks, the article recommends that I as a would-be SSD user should "always" set the size of the page file manually to the Windows-recommended size (in my case 1.5x my RAM total or ~6.1 GB) and to keep it on the SSD.

Before this, in PC Gamer's PC Builder's Bible ("Hardware Special 2010"), out of six suggested Windows 7 tweaks, the first was that in a two hard drive setup, the page file should not be automatically managed, but rather that there should be no paging file on the "C:\ partition" (i.e. first HDD), and that the second hard drive (or second partition?) should have a "system managed size" page file. In this context, is it safe to treat a partition as interchangable with a separate physical hard drive? (i.e. on my three-partition HDD, set the C:\ partition for "no paging file," and the D:\ or E:\ partition for "system managed size.")

Now, between the above solutions, if I should have a SSD (OS and a few games) + two storage HDDs, which of these would apply as best, i.e. write-minimizing?

EDIT: What a great 3,000th post, huh?

[Ariphaos]

Why the hell are people still recommending swap to be based off of RAM size? I thought that idiocy was put to rest a decade ago.

If you have a 32 bit OS, you can only really make use of a few hundred megs (depending on how much is reserved) up to a total of physical+virtual=4gb. If you have a 64 bit OS, pick some static size (I use a big fat -zero-, but I should probably use a gig or two to allow some amount of swapout).

With SSDs and an OS that supports TRIM (as Windows 7 does), pick the one that is going to have the least I/O and stick a swap on it. If you find you need more you can always grow it later.

I wouldn't do this on an SSD when TRIM isn't supported. For platter drives with NCQ, you want most simultaneous I/O operations to occur on nearby tracks. My own benchmarking seems to suggest that modern drives go into a sort of sequential mode - they end up losing about a third of their performance when data accesses occur across the disk. So keeping I/O operations on nearby tracks is critical.

I don't know what you're doing on what drive, but if you're splitting stuff up into volatile versus not-very-volatile partitions (on the same disk), you will want the swap file on the volatile partition.

[General Zod]

Write minimizing? If all you do is use the ssd for the OS and software who cares? Keep everything backed up on a separate drive (not partitions) and in the odd chance your SSD starts to fail make sure you create occasional disk images to do a complete restore. Tweeking the page file sounds totally pointless.

[Stark]

Vista and w7 use a bunch of precaching silliness which benefit from a page file. Aside from not putting it on the system drive and making it at least a gig, I really wouldn't put any more thought into it.

The whole system memory 1.5x ram or 2x ram stuff is seriously win9x vintage.

[Xon]

And back when you where lucky to have 128mb to 512mb of ram. In the days of +4gb machines that type of lack of thinking has transcended into cargo cult stupid.

[Ariphaos]

And back when you where lucky to have 128mb to 512mb of ram. In the days of +4gb machines that type of lack of thinking has transcended into cargo cult stupid.

It's older than that. It comes from the days when the typical machine came with 8 or 16 megabytes of RAM. You based what you ran on what you could expect your computer to reasonably store at once, and what swap space (for open but currently unused programs) you could expect to get away with to do as much as you could with so little.

There are still elements of the kernel, startup and various little-used items where swap can give you a few dozen extra megabytes of RAM. It's free and can go past your system limits, so setting a small portion for your swap is not stupid.

[General Zod]

And back when you where lucky to have 128mb to 512mb of ram. In the days of +4gb machines that type of lack of thinking has transcended into cargo cult stupid.

It's older than that. It comes from the days when the typical machine came with 8 or 16 megabytes of RAM. You based what you ran on what you could expect your computer to reasonably store at once, and what swap space (for open but currently unused programs) you could expect to get away with to do as much as you could with so little.

There are still elements of the kernel, startup and various little-used items where swap can give you a few dozen extra megabytes of RAM. It's free and can go past your system limits, so setting a small portion for your swap is not stupid.

There's really no point most of the time though. Unless you're actually running something that really needs that extra little bit of ram and you're too cheap to upgrade it's just fatty nerd dickwaving.

[Xon]

It's free and can go past your system limits, so setting a small portion for your swap is not stupid.

You also need at least 256mb so Windows can create mini-dumps which and these mini-dumps can be submitted to a process which can actually diagnose BSoD sometimes or at least tell Microsoft hey there is a rash of BSoD might want to look into it.

[Ariphaos]

I thought Microsoft fixed that? Gah.

Does it still need to be on C:?

There's really no point most of the time though. Unless you're actually running something that really needs that extra little bit of ram and you're too cheap to upgrade it's just fatty nerd dickwaving.

'Too cheap' in today's economy? ~$1k for a new mobo, cpu and RAM is quite a hit for most people.

Swap still serves its original purpose, especially for desktop users. My main server has 12 gigs of RAM and should have 24 gigs, where yes, generally only ~300mb of swap is usable before the system starts to die. That's a server under heavy database load, and isn't relevant to the user who is swapping between Photoshop and Firefox, where the swap out can in fact provide gigabytes of ram to the foreground.

But rather than 1-2x RAM, it should be roughly what your most memory hungry program can expect to use, and even that will often be excessive. It's also highly irritating, so it's a tradeoff. Less so with an SSD, however.

Part of the reason my servers have swap and my desktop doesn't has to do with the way Linux handles memory under certain situations rather than an actual need for $2 of RAM, but that's Linux specific more than anything.

[Stark]

While RAM is cheap, disk space is still cheaper. I simply don't give a shit that windows is STEELING MY GIBBIS for a swap file; the memory management business in Vista and Win7 apparently need it and it provides benefit and I have like 2tobbs of space anyway.

[General Zod]

I thought Microsoft fixed that? Gah.

Does it still need to be on C:?

There's really no point most of the time though. Unless you're actually running something that really needs that extra little bit of ram and you're too cheap to upgrade it's just fatty nerd dickwaving.

'Too cheap' in today's economy? ~$1k for a new mobo, cpu and RAM is quite a hit for most people.

Swap still serves its original purpose, especially for desktop users. My main server has 12 gigs of RAM and should have 24 gigs, where yes, generally only ~300mb of swap is usable before the system starts to die. That's a server under heavy database load, and isn't relevant to the user who is swapping between Photoshop and Firefox, where the swap out can in fact provide gigabytes of ram to the foreground.

But rather than 1-2x RAM, it should be roughly what your most memory hungry program can expect to use, and even that will often be excessive. It's also highly irritating, so it's a tradeoff. Less so with an SSD, however.

Part of the reason my servers have swap and my desktop doesn't has to do with the way Linux handles memory under certain situations rather than an actual need for $2 of RAM, but that's Linux specific more than anything.

$1k? What are you smoking? If you bought your desktop in the last three years you can upgrade to as much as 8gb of ram for minimal cost. We have cheap as shit Dells at work that have 8gb of ram in them for fuck's sake.

[Ariphaos]

$1k? What are you smoking? If you bought your desktop in the last three years you can upgrade to as much as 8gb of ram for minimal cost. We have cheap as shit Dells at work that have 8gb of ram in them for fuck's sake.

As does mine, thus my choice of price point, though homeless people don't quite have the desktop option in the first place. If you insist on decreeing that $300 is infinitely more affordable than $1k, though, you are intentionally missing the point and you aren't making any sort of argument, just tossing insults to make yourself look cool.

Go you.

[General Zod]

$1k? What are you smoking? If you bought your desktop in the last three years you can upgrade to as much as 8gb of ram for minimal cost. We have cheap as shit Dells at work that have 8gb of ram in them for fuck's sake.

As does mine, thus my choice of price point, though homeless people don't quite have the desktop option in the first place. If you insist on decreeing that $300 is infinitely more affordable than $1k, though, you are intentionally missing the point and you aren't making any sort of argument, just tossing insults to make yourself look cool.

Go you.

Are you even going to attempt to address my main point or are you just going to whinge about how I'm not being nice? I'm still not seeing any real need for most people to fuck with page files for minimal performance gain when you can just plunk down $30 (when was the last time you actually priced desktop components?) and put in a couple more sticks of ram if you really need the extra performance that badly. (Hint: Most people don't use Linux.)

[Xon]

I thought Microsoft fixed that? Gah.

I suspect it is an artifact of how the memory manager, and kernel behaves when the kernel has BSoD and the kernel is no longer guaranteed to be in a consistant state.

Does it still need to be on C:?

It's required to be on the system. Which is almost always C:

While RAM is cheap, disk space is still cheaper. I simply don't give a shit that windows is STEELING MY GIBBIS for a swap file; the memory management business in Vista and Win7 apparently need it and it provides benefit and I have like 2tobbs of space anyway.

Amusingly, the Window NT kernel line reserves ~256kb of physical memory per process and some per thread.

[Ariphaos]

Are you even going to attempt to address my main point or are you just going to whinge about how I'm not being nice? I'm still not seeing any real need for most people to fuck with page files for minimal performance gain when you can just plunk down $30 (when was the last time you actually priced desktop components?) and put in a couple more sticks of ram if you really need the extra performance that badly.

You haven't even addressed any of my points.

1) Some people have machines that have maxed out their current RAM capacity. This was in fact my first point that you would even mention a $30 purchase when the first post of mine you responded to said:

There are still elements of the kernel, startup and various little-used items where swap can give you a few dozen extra megabytes of RAM. It's free and can go past your system limits, so setting a small portion for your swap is not stupid.

I merely said it wasn't stupid.

2) The benefit of swap past that point is that it allows more ram for running applications. Tolerating paging is a matter of personal preference until thrashing begins. As I mentioned, but you did not remotely address:

...isn't relevant to the user who is swapping between Photoshop and Firefox, where the swap out can in fact provide gigabytes of ram to the foreground.

3) Not everyone uses, or can use, desktop systems. As I said, and you quoted me:

As does mine, thus my choice of price point, though homeless people don't quite have the desktop option in the first place.

4) You're talking about something that is enabled by default on most desktops, and assigns an even less valuable resource. So saying it's not worth it is simply nonsense, unless you're arguing that spending time disabling swap and low vm warnings is actually worth it, which is even more nonsensical (granted, I don't know if the warnings occur in Vista on up, but still).

5) This doesn't even approach high performance SSD solutions where chaining together multiple drives allows them to get comfortably within an order of magnitude of RAM performance.

The only factual claim you made in response to my actual points is:

Unless you're actually running something that really needs that extra little bit of ram and you're too cheap to upgrade it's just fatty nerd dickwaving.

Which is simply declaring to the world that you're willing to use 'dick' in a sentence. Be sure to grab some reading comprehension skills while you grow up.

(Hint: Most people don't use Linux.)

This comment would be relevant if my post was not making a statement in contrast about swap being able to swap out idle tasks, which is not significantly feasible on an active server, but is on a desktop system.

[General Zod]

1) Some people have machines that have maxed out their current RAM capacity. This was in fact my first point that you would even mention a $30 purchase when the first post of mine you responded to said:

There are still elements of the kernel, startup and various little-used items where swap can give you a few dozen extra megabytes of RAM. It's free and can go past your system limits, so setting a small portion for your swap is not stupid.

I merely said it wasn't stupid.

2) The benefit of swap past that point is that it allows more ram for running applications. Tolerating paging is a matter of personal preference until thrashing begins. As I mentioned, but you did not remotely address:

...isn't relevant to the user who is swapping between Photoshop and Firefox, where the swap out can in fact provide gigabytes of ram to the foreground.

3) Not everyone uses, or can use, desktop systems. As I said, and you quoted me:

As does mine, thus my choice of price point, though homeless people don't quite have the desktop option in the first place.

4) You're talking about something that is enabled by default on most desktops, and assigns an even less valuable resource. So saying it's not worth it is simply nonsense, unless you're arguing that spending time disabling swap and low vm warnings is actually worth it, which is even more nonsensical (granted, I don't know if the warnings occur in Vista on up, but still).

5) This doesn't even approach high performance SSD solutions where chaining together multiple drives allows them to get comfortably within an order of magnitude of RAM performance.

The only factual claim you made in response to my actual points is:

Unless you're actually running something that really needs that extra little bit of ram and you're too cheap to upgrade it's just fatty nerd dickwaving.

Which is simply declaring to the world that you're willing to use 'dick' in a sentence. Be sure to grab some reading comprehension skills while you grow up.

(Hint: Most people don't use Linux.)

This comment would be relevant if my post was not making a statement in contrast about swap being able to swap out idle tasks, which is not significantly feasible on an active server, but is on a desktop system.

In other words you actually agree with my point, you're just whining because I dared to use naughty words. Frankly I'm not even convinced you actually read my post, because I didn't say it wasn't worth it, I said it wasn't worth it MOST OF THE TIME. Which, for anyone with a 6th grade reading comprehension, means that there might be some rare situations where it is. But really, fuck off if all you're going to do is Miss-Manners me to death.

[Ariphaos]

The situations I've covered involve most budget strained situations, which applies to roughly 80% of my customer base that can't go buy a new machine at the drop of a hat. So no, it actually applies for the vast majority of normal situations, and most people. You or the business you work for may have plenty of cash flow. That situation is not universal, no matter how much you pretend otherwise.

[General Zod]

The situations I've covered involve most budget strained situations, which applies to roughly 80% of my customer base that can't go buy a new machine at the drop of a hat. So no, it actually applies for the vast majority of normal situations, and most people. You or the business you work for may have plenty of cash flow. That situation is not universal, no matter how much you pretend otherwise.

"80% of your customer base" is a completely meaningless number since I have no idea who your customer base is supposed to be; and unless you're working for Best Buy or something I'd hardly call that representative of your average PC owner. Since upgrading the ram doesn't require buying a new machine and is considerably less risky than messing with the page file, I'm still not convinced you actually read anything I posted.

[MKSheppard]

Since upgrading the ram doesn't require buying a new machine

Actually, yes it does in quite a few cases -- slots are maxed out, and/or the BIOS does not support memory beyond x.

There's still a lot of cheap stuff out there from 2006/2007.

[General Zod]

Since upgrading the ram doesn't require buying a new machine

Actually, yes it does in quite a few cases -- slots are maxed out, and/or the BIOS does not support memory beyond x.

There's still a lot of cheap stuff out there from 2006/2007.

Did I really have to put the "usually" disclaimer in there?

[MKSheppard]

Did I really have to put the "usually" disclaimer in there?

Please. You claimed that upgrading RAM did not need buying a new machine. I proved you wrong. Suck it up and take it like a man, Zod.

[General Zod]

Did I really have to put the "usually" disclaimer in there?

Please. You claimed that upgrading RAM did not need buying a new machine. I proved you wrong. Suck it up and take it like a man, Zod.

Don't go around patting yourself on the back too hard there. You might hurt your arm.

[Ariphaos]

"80% of your customer base" is a completely meaningless number since I have no idea who your customer base is supposed to be; and unless you're working for Best Buy or something I'd hardly call that representative of your average PC owner. Since upgrading the ram doesn't require buying a new machine and is considerably less risky than messing with the page file, I'm still not convinced you actually read anything I posted.

Considering I specifically mentioned system limits (IE, BIOS/motherboard) in the part of my post that you replied to, the situation where a new computer is required is exactly what I was referring to. I made that explicit. Typically, with customers that don't, I just throw in hand-me-down RAM from previous customers that upgraded. Only way up from there is general tweaking and cleanup, or doing something ridiculous like buying high performance RAM.

And seriously, what the hell is up with the bolded bit? One friend of mine accidentally dropped a screwdriver onto his motherboard when trying to upgrade his RAM. I've had others who bought the wrong type of RAM (particularly various high density schemes). The worst you can do with a page file is set it too big. I've walked 80 year olds through changing their page file over the phone.

[General Zod]

Considering I specifically mentioned system limits (IE, BIOS/motherboard) in the part of my post that you replied to, the situation where a new computer is required is exactly what I was referring to. I made that explicit. Typically, with customers that don't, I just throw in hand-me-down RAM from previous customers that upgraded. Only way up from there is general tweaking and cleanup, or doing something ridiculous like buying high performance RAM.

Which . . .doesn't actually disagree with my point. That it was only really useful for certain specific situations. I'm not even sure why you're still arguing at this point, but I guess you think your personal anecdotes are more valid than mine . . . somehow.

[Dragon Angel]

Usually what I do is set my page file to use a separate, dedicated partition at the beginning of another hard disk, since your disk's performance drops as it reads/writes data toward its last sectors. I do this on my desktop just to be safe (it is set at a custom size of 1024-4096MB, which extends to my RAM's size), since the great majority of my memory-intensive work is done on that system. On my laptop, however, I do not have a page file at all, but that is because I use an SSD for it. I hardly do anything memory-intensive on my laptop anyway, so I didn't see any real need for one.

I also format my swap partition as FAT32, since NTFS writes to the disk more often, and supposedly FAT32 is better for small volumes. Unfortunately, one side effect of this is that your page file cannot exceed 4GB, since that is the maximum limit for any file on a FAT32 volume. I haven't tried using exFAT for one, though, so that may be another option you could consider if you need that much swap space, but I don't think you will need more than that anyway.