Max for Pagefile?

This is out of MS support hope it helps
"To determine the size of the pagefile multiply the amount of physical RAM by 1.5 to a maximum of 4095MB"

Hi,

The above answer is about what you should set the pagefile size to be at 1.5Gb, but the pagefile size has nothing to do with the amount of paging your system will do.

As soon as your machine uses all of its physical memory, it'll have to page. Normal operations involve some paging too. Windows does that to run...

So the thing to watch in task manager is the "Commit Charge" in WinXP. I cant remember if it was called that on NT.

Once that number exceeds your physical memory, then paging starts severly affecting performance.

The size of the pagefile is more to do with the absolute maximum you can push your machine to, memory wise. You'd never knowingly do it in practice, though.

If it reaches the maximum pagefile size, it either "expands the pagefile" if you've set it to do that or crashes. Yeah, sure it theoretically doesn't necessarily crash as such, but you'll be spending the next hour waiting for your commands to run to shutdown and reboot.

One thing to note.Always make sure your pagefile is "contiguous". ie. not fragmented. A fragmented pagefile is an inefficient pagefile.

Caveat : It can pay to intentionally fragment the pagefile over multiple disks (one fragment per disk) as it reduces the IO bottleneck by allowing two simultaneous reads or write to it.

Cheers,
Tim.

NT 4.0's max pagefile is 4,096 MB (4 GB). However, this is per logical drive. In other words, you can have a 4GB pagefile on each of your drives. If you have more than one hard disk, it is better to split your pagefile across multiple disks, as this will speed performance.

As a general rule of thumb, MS recommends you set the pagefile to RAM X 1.5. So in your case your pagefile should be 1.5GB. I recommend that you set the min and max pagefile sizes to the same amount. This will cause your PC to allocate the full 1.5GB to paging at startup. This improves performance, as the NT will not have to search for and then reallocate more pagefile space once you reach the minimum limit.

Also, it is not a bad thing to have a large pagefile, especially if you have enough disk space. A small pagefile does not mean that you will have less paging. If your pagefile is 1.5GB, or 4GB, the performance will be the same.

NT 4.0's max pagefile is 4,096 MB (4 GB). However, this is per logical drive. In other words, you can have a 4GB pagefile on each of your drives. If you have more than one hard disk, it is better to split your pagefile across multiple disks, as thiswill speed performance.

As a general rule of thumb, MS recommends you set the pagefile to RAM X 1.5. So in your case your pagefile should be 1.5GB. I recommend that you set the min and max pagefile sizes to the same amount. This will cause your PC to allocate the full 1.5GB to paging at startup. This improves performance, as the NT will not have to search for and then reallocate more pagefile space once you reach the minimum limit.

Also, it is not a bad thing to have a large pagefile, especially if you have enough disk space. A small pagefile does not mean that you will have less paging. If your pagefile is 1.5GB, or 4GB, the performance will be the same.

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