Turning off page file question.

[Altered]

I have heard that turning the page file off will help gaming if you have 4 gigs of ram. Just how does this effect the gaming and does it actually work.

 

[newtekie1]

Don't do it, it won't make a difference, and you need a page file.

 

[hat]

What he said... keep it. My advice is put like a 2GB page file on all your hard drives, that way it's very easily accessable and as fast as possible

 

[Kursah]

Don't do it, it won't make a difference, and you need a page file.

+1

Windows, many programs and games were designed for it, and look for it...many may claim it helps performance, waste of time. I've tried with it, without it, and with it at different sizes...when I have 4GB I match that, when I'm at 2GB, I set it for 3GB, call it a day and never think about it again, never have any issues...as newtekie said, it won't make a difference...tbh, not even worth the time to disable to find out.

 

[Altered]

I thought it was odd to want to turn it off. These same guys went and bought VelociRaptor drives and then turn off the pagefile sounded very odd to me. I just needed someone with real PC experience and knowledge to explain it to me.

 

[Kursah]

Yeah that question pops up every once in a while here...I read a lot of pros and cons when researching it myself...decided to try it myself, XP, Vista and even 7 RC. Really, it's best left enabled...HDD's are getting larger, so no reason to disable it...if you have more RAM that'll still help for larger programs and games, I can tell a diff between 2gb and 4gb in my daily use, though I do have a lot running at the same time, so it greatly helps. But the instability that disabling the page file can cause and the possibility of running out of ram and then causing chaos with the windows design is bad voodoo. If you're still curious, give it a shot...some people/users/gamers swear by disabling it, which works for few, many fewer than leaving it on works for though.

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

I thought it was odd to want to turn it off. These same guys went and bought VelociRaptor drives and then turn off the pagefile sounded very odd to me. I just needed someone with real PC experience and knowledge to explain it to me.

This was used in windows XP when you had an abundance of memory and slow IDE hard drives IIRC...

But Vista is different.

XP tweaking tricks don't carry over.

 

[Altered]

This was used in windows XP when you had an abundance of memory and slow IDE hard drives IIRC...

But Vista is different.

XP tweaking tricks don't carry over.

That makes a lot of sense right there. Sounds like that may be where this came from knowing the guys that I heard this from.

 

[francis511]

Some tweaking apps let you fool around with paging , but like "freememory" apps the differences are hardly worth it. And you can definitely cause crashes by disabling it.

 

[Asylum]

Yea it dont work bro!!
Tried it on my system and all it did was give me random crashes on some programs.

 

[Papahyooie]

here's what you do: take two very small hard drives (i have two 8gb xbox original hard drives) and raid0 them together, then dedicate it to your pagefile. Works awesome! Disabling pagefile is very very bad.

 

[AsRock]

Been there tried it games run no faster and gives more chance a game will crash if you do run of memory to run the game or even stop a game from working at all for example Titan Quest.

 

[Kursah]

here's what you do: take two very small hard drives (i have two 8gb xbox original hard drives) and raid0 them together, then dedicate it to your pagefile. Works awesome! Disabling pagefile is very very bad.

Yeah but a single fairly modern HDD will prolly trump those 2 8GB hdd's in raid anyways, so whether or not that's truly worth it can also be argued. My 6400AAKS drives average around 90-100MBs with an average seek of 11.5-12.5ms. Here's what I do:

Partitions: OS = 50GB, Rest = Rest of availabe space
OS + Page File = OS partition + C: restricted installers, beyond that, the rest goes on D:. As a gamer, multimedia user, encoder, no issues this way, plus waaaay less hassle w/o Raid. Though you could enable AHCI for at least some benefits of a newer HDD, minimal but might be useful...if you didn't install Vista or Xp in that mode, you'll have to do a couple of things to get there...I responded to a thread here with links how to do it, fairly easy in XP, and cake in Vista..lemme know if ya need it.

 

[Mussels]

the only thing worth doing is setting the min and max size the same, to prevent the page file fragmenting. ever since i went 2GB of ram, i've set my page file at 2GB and had no problems. (and now i'm on 8GB, and its still enough)

 

[Papahyooie]

@kursah: yea, if you use older hard drives thats the case. But the ones I use are xbox hard drives which ARE modern.

 

[Kursah]

@kursah: yea, if you use older hard drives thats the case. But the ones I use are xbox hard drives which ARE modern.

But just how modern? Do they support the AHCI features? What size of cache do they have? Remember the xbox is quite old, so the modern they supported back then was already dated compared to what PC HDD's of that time were using. Run an HDTach/HDTune run of those single and raid, find my thread of the WD6400AAKS drives single and the two I ended up raiding...I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure those 8GB drives weren't much better than the average laptop hdd. No offense, just going off of what I have dealt with and remember, though I could be wayyyy of base there.

 

[Papahyooie]

i will see about running HDtach on them. I actually havent ever done so, but it sped up multitasking (alt/tabbing) tremendously back when I was still running an IDE drive as C. I suppose now that I think about it it might not have any impact atall now that Im on a sata drive, Ive just never gone away from it. Im more of the persuasion though of, its not a matter of if its "worth it"... if it gives even a minute performance increase, then its good. And surely if you have one drive handling it all, then offloading the pagefile to a raid array, freeing up the main drive for file operations, then it has to yield some, even if minute, performance increase.

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

@kursah: yea, if you use older hard drives thats the case. But the ones I use are xbox hard drives which ARE modern.

Xbox drives suck.

2Mb cache 5400rpm.

I've taken plenty out, and turned them into a NAS.

Definitely gonna get owned by a newer fast drive.

 

[Kursah]

i will see about running HDtach on them. I actually havent ever done so, but it sped up multitasking (alt/tabbing) tremendously back when I was still running an IDE drive as C. I suppose now that I think about it it might not have any impact atall now that Im on a sata drive, Ive just never gone away from it. Im more of the persuasion though of, its not a matter of if its "worth it"... if it gives even a minute performance increase, then its good. And surely if you have one drive handling it all, then offloading the pagefile to a raid array, freeing up the main drive for file operations, then it has to yield some, even if minute, performance increase.

That's definately something to go by imo, is the "seat of the pants feel", part of why I ran RAID0 as long as I did, and also the same reason I got out of it...the placebo affect. Works great when advertised right and not proven wrong to the masses. Not saying RAID is a joke, but if you truly want to enjoy it, being a gamer isn't really the type to enjoy it overall. I noticed pretty good performance increases in those benchmarks compared to a single drive an AHCI, but at the end of the day, my seat of the pants for gaming proved that non-raid was the way to go in my setup...now a series of 60-120gb mlc SSD's would be different, but a seperate RAID controller and a lotta money in the end...is that really worth a couple of seconds while loading a level? Not at this point in time imo...but if you can get that from one drive by just plugging it in, and get double the space? Then hell yeah!

 

[Altered]

Excellent points. Nice to get all this extra info from everyone's experiences. I had actually tried turning the page file off and as far as "seat of the pants" feel goes I had pagefile back on in about 10 minutes. Nothing I can remember happened bad I just did not see anything good from it either. I just kept hearing these guys talk of it and tried it but it just didn't seem right so I went back and turned it on.

So with 2GB ram what suggestions for all around use is best? Right now I have 2046.

 

[Papahyooie]

but then again, if you get any performance atall out of a couple of drives you already have sitting in the closet, then why not? And personally I think that doing benchmarks on them would not actually show the performance increase because youre only measuring the speed of the drives themselves, not the increase in multitasking you get from offloading the pagefile from your main drive. if your main drive is taking time out of file operations to handle the page file, thats a hit in performance no matter how small. Once again, its not a matter of "worth it" if you already have them sitting around, or if they only cost a buck. As far as space is concerned, its a page file so space is not the issue atall. I guess if you had a couple of brand new sata drives and raided them, then that would be even better, thats spending more money, and who wants to raid two 100gb+ hard drives just for a pagefile? thats wouldnt make any sense.

 

[Kursah]

but then again, if you get any performance atall out of a couple of drives you already have sitting in the closet, then why not? And personally I think that doing benchmarks on them would not actually show the performance increase because youre only measuring the speed of the drives themselves, not the increase in multitasking you get from offloading the pagefile from your main drive. if your main drive is taking time out of file operations to handle the page file, thats a hit in performance no matter how small. Once again, its not a matter of "worth it" if you already have them sitting around, or if they only cost a buck. As far as space is concerned, its a page file so space is not the issue atall. I guess if you had a couple of brand new sata drives and raided them, then that would be even better, thats spending more money, and who wants to raid two 100gb+ hard drives just for a pagefile? thats wouldnt make any sense.

True, but then what beyond the seat of the pants and claims of performance does shown any increase or decrease in claimed performance?

I agree if you have such drives sitting around then go for it and see if it works out, I can say truthflully that the WD400's built around 2004-2005 in raid0 were slower than a single wd6400aaks, not only by benches, but also by the "seat of the pants". Those were cheap 7200rpm, sataII, 8Mb cache drives. They ran quiet and cool, just like the 6400, but the 6400 had newer technology...fewer platters, improved heads and seek times, more cache, better implementation of SATAII, support for AHCI (only one of those WD400's supported early AHCI at the time), and other technologies that the older drives can't touch. This is where the difference lies imo, per drive. It's not all pretty, it's not all amazing, but there's a few that can definately show the difference by "seat of the pants" and benchmarks that can make a more affordable choice more worth it without raid being a consideration.

Excellent points. Nice to get all this extra info from everyone's experiences. I had actually tried turning the page file off and as far as "seat of the pants" feel goes I had pagefile back on in about 10 minutes. Nothing I can remember happened bad I just did not see anything good from it either. I just kept hearing these guys talk of it and tried it but it just didn't seem right so I went back and turned it on.

So with 2GB ram what suggestions for all around use is best? Right now I have 2046.

I would say 3072 min and max, iirc that's 3GB. I would go 1.5 up to 2gb, and 1:1 on 4gb...that's how I've always done it and I've had no qualms, issues or complaints on my rigs or others I've built.

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

but then again, if you get any performance atall out of a couple of drives you already have sitting in the closet, then why not? And personally I think that doing benchmarks on them would not actually show the performance increase because youre only measuring the speed of the drives themselves, not the increase in multitasking you get from offloading the pagefile from your main drive.

Pagefile read/write performance is directly tied to drive read and write performance.

Slow drive = slow read/write to page file.
Faster drive = faster page file.

 

[Papahyooie]

right but that still doesnt account for the offload from your main drive. If you offload it to a fast drive its better, but offloading it to a raid0 of slower drives, or even a single slower drive is still an offload.

Plus I suppose it has to be said that im coming from the viewpoint of cheap drives here. My main drive is a seagate 320 gig. Nothing special atall, not even worth checking to see what the model is. It has a 16mb cache thats all i know. If you've got fast drives in the first place, then this obviously wont apply atall.

 

[Kursah]

right but that still doesnt account for the offload from your main drive. If you offload it to a fast drive its better, but offloading it to a raid0 of slower drives, or even a single slower drive is still an offload.

The drive offload is late 90's stuff man, tbh, unless you truly feel a difference there really isn't one with modern drives from laptop to ssd's imo. That was an old Xp trick, and even then unless it was an older early Athlon/SDR or DDR or Intel P4 S423/RDR, SDR, DDR setup, it really didn't make THAT much of a difference. But it also depends on system feel and again what the user feels, not saying I don't believe you, if you swear by it good, but a couple old 8GB Xbox drives aren't really worth the cables, space and mess in a modern rig even with a single HDD even in this aspect from my experiece...and by modern I mean Core2 Duo/Quad/DDR2/P965+ stuff. If it feels good to you, that's all that matters!