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paging file size?

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8 replies

by flyingknees

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This is a long one but here's my dilemma:

I have a Dell Powervault NAS appliance containing 4 x 37.2GB drives and 392MB of RAM. These drives are all dynamic volumes. They're Disk 0, 1, 2 and 3.

Disk 0 and 1 each contain two partitions - C and E. We'll get back to E partition in a bit.
The C partitions are mirrored between Disk 0 and 1

Disk 2 and 3 contain two partitions as well - D and E.
The D partition is mirrored between Disk 2 and 3.

The E partition is a RAID-5 Volume spanning across all 4 disks.

How or exactly where do I put my pagefile(s)? And what size should my pagefile(s) be???

Thanks

8 replies

by sgt_shultz

i would put it in its own partition on a separate controller from my system stuff.
usually i let windows manage the size. i'd play with performance monitoring with it at the auto and with a hard setting. here is how you get it to go bigger than 4gb
How to overcome 4,095-MB paging file size limit in Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/237740/en-us

by flyingknees

Thanks but I don't have the option right now to expand to another drive or even fit another one in there. My memory right now is only 392MB.

by cmiller5400

Anywhere you want... ;) Just pick a partition that has the least amount of activity. I assume that you will not be storing much data on c: so that would be a fine place since you can not change the structure of the drives as of now.

by pedro.v

Microsoft stipulates that for standard systems a paging file should be set to minimal 1.5 x amount of RAM and max 3 x amount of RAM

For best performance, place your paging file on a different physical device than your OS partition

So I'd either go for your RAID 5 volume E or your D which is fully separate. Differences are simple: either you use 4 physical disks and get advantage there, but you have your OS/Applications accessing C slowing it down
Or you put it on D, with no slowdown from the OS but only 1 physical device in speed...

depends on your setup... if it's that important: try both suggestions, monitor with performance monitor, pick the best one

by b_pope

Well your in a pickle with your current setup, not enough RAM & no way to use another HD for the pagefile.

While MS still recommends a 1.5X RAM pagefile, it's not needed today, not since the 3.1 days. I couldn't image using a 3.5GB pagefile on my PC with 2GB of RAM, seems sort of silly don't you think! The reason you use more RAM is to eliminate the slower HD based pagefile & increase your performance, not make the pagefile bigger & waste HD space needlessly!

Unless you actually try to troubleshoot stop errors make sure your memory dump is set to "small 64kb" then you'll never need to worry about having a to little pagefile to complete the dump. If you do need the memory dumps set it for kernel-mode which requires about 1/3 of system memory in use at time of dump, MS even recommends only doing kernel-mode dumps

If you must make a pagefile on C:\ try to keep it in the 600MB area if you have the space.

In any event your going to take a performance hit having the pagefile within your raid5 setup & below is why.

RAID 5's distributed parity requires a lot of calculations. Moving the paging file to a RAID 5 array will greatly increase the amount of calculations the RAID controller has to do. This greatly reduces its performance. Again, the paging file will not benefit from the additional data redundancy offered by RAID 5.

Therefore, it is recommended that you do not put your paging file in a RAID 5 array. You should place the paging file on a separate hard disk.

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