Paging File Memory?

[slowday444]

I have an 80GB drive and 1G of RAM, XP. How much memory should I allot to paging? Thank You!

[gunner]

A good rule of thumb is 2.5 times the size of your RAM.

[Tarun]

With 1 GB of RAM, 256MB or 512MB. If you do graphics intensive things, use 512MB, otherwise 256MB should work fine with 1GB memory. If you feel the need to up it, change it to 512MB.

[gunner]

How big a file will turn out to be needed depends very much on your work-load. Simple word processing and e-mail may need very little ? large graphics and movie making may need a great deal. For a general workload, with only small dumps provided for, it is suggested that a sensible start point for the initial size would be the greater of (a) 100 MB or ( enough to bring RAM plus file to about 500 MB. EXAMPLE: Set the Initial page file size to 400 MB on a computer with 128 MB RAM; 250 on a 256 MB computer; or 100 MB for larger sizes.

 

But have a high Maximum size ? 700 or 800 MB or even more if there is plenty of disk space. Having this high will do no harm. Then if you find the actual pagefile.sys gets larger (as seen in Explorer), adjust the initial size up accordingly. Such a need for more than a minimal initial page file is the best indicator of benefit from adding RAM: if an initial size set, for a trial, at 50MB never grows, then more RAM will do nothing for the machine's performance.

 

Bill James MS MVP has a convenient tool, ?WinXP-2K_Pagefile?, for monitoring the actual usage of the Page file, A compiled Visual Basic version is available from Doug Knox's site which may be more convenient for some users. The value seen for ?Peak Usage? over several days makes a good guide for setting the Initial size .