XP Swapping

[Evo]

I'm currently using an IBM T40 Thinkpad, with XP/Pro SP1* and 2Gig Ram. Looking at the task manager, I'm using around 800Mb, with 1.2Gig free.

However, XP still seems extremely keen to swap things out to disk at any opportunity, so every time I maximise a previously-minimized window I have to sit here and wait while Windows pages it back in. There's no need for Windows to be swapping at all, as the half-gig page file would still fit easily in physical memory, and i'm changing windows regularly so it's getting annoying. I don't remember Win2k being so bad on a T30 with 1Gb, so it must be an XP thing. Any idea if I can tune it to be less enthusiastic?

I can't just disable the swap file, because i'm running some rather heavyweight software (WebSphere Application Server and Oracle 10g) and it sometimes has a real need to swap.

*it's a business machine, and SP2 isn't allowed on yet.

[The Nr Fairy]

I've found the best way is to have a separate disk (best, but not often practical, espicially on a laptop), or at the least a separate partition.

Configure a separate swap file, of a large and constant size (i.e. minimum and maximum sizes are the same) on the second disk / partition, and remove any swap files on any other drives.

Reduces contention for disk time, stops fragmentation.

[timmcat]

Can vouch for that - my 80GB hd on my home PC is partitioned 39 / 39 / 2 with the swap file on the small partition. Works great, I never notice much paging activity. Oddly enough, this partition tells me it's FAT32, although this doesnt seem to have any detrimental effect.

[Tinstaafl]

Would have thought FAT would be beneficial. Isn't NTFS a journalled file system? No extra overhead wrt a journal if using FAT. Depending on the size of the partition it might even be beneficial to choose what version of FAT to use.

[Front_Seat_Dreamer]

Evo

Are you managing your Swap file or are you leaving up to windows?

With that amount of RAM you could try switching your pagefile off altogether, never tried it personally but heard good reports.

[Evo]

Thanks, folks. I was hoping not to repartition, but it may be necessary.

FSD - I'm not letting Windows manage the swap file, but it is turned on (constant size of 4Gb). In the past i've found that a bit quicker than letting Windows dynamically resize it, because you can be sure that it's all in one contiguous block. I've tried switching to system managed and it doesn't make an obvious difference. Unless I turn off the swap file completely, Windows is still very keen to swap out.

The software I'm running needs a lot of memory when it gets going. The laptop is supposed to duplicate the setup on my desktop machine. Currently Oracle is using approx 950Mb, WSAD 850Mb, WAS 550Mb and WebSphere MQ 350Mb - and that's not including the OS or several instances of the java runtime...

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Evo,

In regedit go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

You want to chance DisablePagingExecutive from a 0 to a 1.

Then in the Pagefile under System Properties just set it to two identical numbers. (I use 384 for both Min and Max)

Take Care,

Richard