I read that having your pagefile.sys, assuming you have one, on a seperate drive/partition would help in the case that it does end up being used. I assume then that if I make a "Pagefile Partition", that it should partition off of a different drive other than the OS? And also, I made one but deleted it and gonna re-make one to remove the annoying "low disk space" notification that keeps showing up...I made the pagefile partition a little above 5gb, going by the recommended size of (a constant value, same initial and max size) 4979mb (I don't need a full memory dump), and of course i'd keep getting low disk space, which I assume I could ignore since the pagefile.sys would only be 1 size, but yeah I was going to make the partition above the low space limit threshold.
Theres only one case for establishing a partition just for the page file, and thats if you're doing so to put the page file in the fastest region of the drive (the first partition). if this is an ssd, there is no benefit to a fixed size pagefile, fixed size page files are beneficial for large pagefiles on mechanical hdd's only where you can defrag them into a contiguous size and have it placed in the center of the drive.
Oh ok, and correct me if I'm wrong, but a pagefile really is only needed when the RAM usage exceeds the physical amount. And if I never use the full 32gb, maybe roughly half (16-20gb max), that would be the maximum size I would need to make the pagefile if I wanted to do a memory dump.
Actually there is benefit - more performance: 1 - another (dedicated ) partition on the same disk - dedicated partition will have less simultaneous operations (plus a benefit of less risk of damage); 2 - partition on another disk - obvious performance benefit because of parallelism; 3 - several partitions on several disks - increased parallelism because each time OS should use less loaded disk.
eh I been using a set 1GB pagefile on my SSD that runs on my OS for years and before that I was doing 1GB on my HDD. with my 16gb ram I have never see that page file used. I just have pagefile there for legacy games that need pagefile to run, more ram you system has more it will generally use, but at same time I never see the system use all my ram, with 4gb ram im sure you will run into problems and need pagefile but 16-32gb? most likely not unless you doing something that heavy on memory photo/video/audio editing? I mean obviously if you want full memory dump you gona need huge page file, but last i check there are ways around needing pagefile for that dump which requires registry editing, which probably buried in the that pagefile sticky
Consumer HDD's are all still single actuator so there is no activity benefit to speak of in this way. Paging IO is higher priority than other disk io so it'll always take precedence and block other access. Head crashes can cross partitions quite readily. And able to read/write to each on simultaneously so memory IO isn't a blocker.
I do those 3 things but haven't been able to push my memory usage to max yet. Could be the software i'm using, or i dunno
I was not talking about HDD heads. I was talking about file system. Dedicated page file partition has less simultaneous file system operations. It is like an example with two apps working with one shared file vs two apps working each with its own file.
Ah, i see what you're saying but on disk it doesn't really work out, the File system's structure and partition addresses are still contained within the MBR or GPT record and the idea of using a partition to hold the pagefile will run into issues when that partition wants to update the journals or logs which will likely end up fragmenting the page file. Arstechnica used to have this indepth article including numbers why it was pointless but it goes to 404 now :\
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_basics.htm Since each volume - a formatted partition - has its own file system structure the less file operations on partition the less concurrency. GPT or MBR can`t include file system info - they only need to point to partitions.
Partitioning a HDD which has a single actuator arm to position the heads regardless of how many there are (1 per platter) does not remove from concurrency. Windows performing reads or writes in Partition 1 will still need to update the journal, MFT, MFT Mirror and Attributes list. and a Page in or Out to pagefile.sys on partition 2 is a blocking event, which will take priority over access to anything on partition 1. Another thing is that SATA and devices made for it are half duplex, unlike SAS and SCSI, which is why no hdd maker went all in on making multi actuator sata drivers If all your data is at the outer edge of the disk, and the pagefile is in a partition on the inside of the disk, thats a fair jump to make just to switch between memory io and normal disk access.