pagefile guru's ..i have a question

[Xtreme Barton]

i currently have a few partitions setup.

c: OS
d: programs
e: America's Army


i only have my pagefile for xp partition set. but i got to thinking about it ..

would it hurt my hd performance to have it setup this way ?? i was thinking it might be working harder to use pagefile and read game etc.. on two different partitions ..




what would be the ideal way to have it installed ?

 

[tuskenraider]

You're not getting any benefit partitioning your drive that way unless you frequently reimage your OS partition with a program like Ghost. And even then, if you're adding programs to D:\ and reimaging C:\, the program really won't be installed in Windows if you're not constantly updating your image. Hope that's not confusing. It's all one drive so C:\ is best for your pagefile since it is likely on the outer portion of the hard drive platter(faster access). If you have lots of data(mp3's, office files, etc), put all that on a second partition and keep your OS and programs on a first. Having E:\ for AA is more of a hinderance than benefit. Now if you had a second drive to put the pagefile on..........that would be better.

 

[Xtreme Barton]

yeah i was thinking all i need is a second partition for downloads ..

 

[uOpt]

You should always have paging space on all drives, and set priorities according to the drive's speed.

There is no such thing as a "clash" between reading game data and using the paging space.

Because the OS will write to paging space when it was out of free pages, and if the starting game was the only thing going on, then the game demanded more free pages. As a result the whole system (the game if the game was the only major ativity) is stalled anyway until a good chunk of the pageout activity completes. So there will be no game material reading ging on during pageout.

You always try to speed up pageout activity as much as possible an you can pretty much ignore any other activity. In practice that means you want paging space on all drives.

 

[telexen]

I always laugh at people who think it's better to install programs on a different partition than Windows.

 

[Xtreme Barton]

I always laugh at people who think it's better to install programs on a different partition than Windows.

thats why your not cool
for real though .. do you really laugh .. is it out loud . as in LOL ??

no but seriously ...

if it has to access a completely different partition to run program and then keep back and forth with the os and what ever pagefile it uses ..

i just thought it was weird.. having a game that may use pagefile on a different partition because the os uses a pagefile too.. so i figured it would be back and forth to much ..

 

[NO1B4ME]

I always laugh at people who think it's better to install programs on a different partition than Windows.

I agree, I would put the games with the OS system, not seperate.

 

[Snugglebear]

It depends on how often you have to blow away the windows partition. There's something to be said for keeping data and programs (whether they be saved games, settings, or truly important data) on a separate partition from the OS. It also eases the transition should another physical disk be added and the data migrated over. It's not going to give you a performance boost, though. I think the belief that this does boost performance harkens back to the days when OSes used fixed disk access algorithms.

As for keeping multiple page files, the only real downside is the associated filesystem overhead. More pagefile activity means more MFT manipulation, and in a B-tree based system with journaling, that will generate a fair bit of non-contiguous I/O and other overhead.

If you really want better performance, stick the pagefile on a separate physical disk. I've done this before and it really speeds up large applications.

 

[meionm]

It doesn't really matter on which partition you put pagefile as long it is on the same hard drive, it has no performance effect because it still remains on the same hard drive. The only benefit of having pagefile moved is if a user has two seperate hard drives. Even then the benefit of that is real small.

 

[Snugglebear]

It doesn't really matter on which partition you put pagefile as long it is on the same hard drive, it has no performance effect because it still remains on the same hard drive. The only benefit of having pagefile moved is if a user has two seperate hard drives. Even then the benefit of that is real small.

Use applications that require lots of VM; it makes a big difference when the amount of VM required is in the multi-GB range.

 

[epidemic]

I format every few months to keep everything clean. I believe that this is a good reason to split up the drive into two partitions. I leave usually leave 20 gigs free for Windows and programs like office, since it will need to be reinstalled with a format. When I format, most of the games that I have do not require any type of reinstall. This saves a huge amount of time. I can have my OS back up and running in an hour or so and be playing games.