Windows uses a portion of the hard disk as RAM, constantly swapping data between RAM and hard disk as required. The speed of your hard disk is in the order of 1000 times slower than that of your main memory. Inefficient use of the swap file could considerable slow down your system to a very great extent. One of the best ways to speed up the swap file usage is to create a permanent swap file. In a permanent swap file, the file used for swapping information has a fixed size and location on your hard disk. When a temporary swap file is used, the location and size of the file is determined by application being used and is not predictable. Also, since a temporary swap file is constantly written to and is not fixed in size, it would be highly fragmented across the partition that holds it. A better option is to create the swap file on a dedicated partition on your hard disk. By doing this, the swap file will never be fragmented since that partition is only being utilized by the swap file itself. You can configure the swap file size and location from Control Panel > System > Performance > Virtual Memory. The size of the swap file should be around 2.5 times the amount of RAM on the system.
This how you modify your swap file properties:
Right click on my computer and select properties the go to
advanced tab>performance settings>advanced tab> virtual memory >change
Tip: If your RAM is more than 1GB and you dont use applications which require huge ram like photoshop, maya, or any games then you can disable the swap file( paging file) for better performance.
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This article contains some very common misconceptions about the pagefile. Unless the system is under heavy memory pressure there will be no constant swapping to the pagefile. The virtual memory system uses many files on the harddisk, the pagefile being only one of them. The majority of this so called swapping (more properly called paging) does not involve the pagefile at all. There is nothing in Task Manager or Performance Monitor that will tell you this.
If your system has a reasonable amount of RAM use of the pagefile will be relatively small and have little impact on performance.
The use of a fixed pagefile is neither necessary nor desirable for optimum performance. All modern versions of Windows use what is known as a semi-fixed pagefile. The initial size is by default 1.5 time physical RAM and the maximum twice this value. If the initial size is adequate (highly probable) the pagefile will NEVER be resized and there will be NO fragmentation. If this initial portion was once free of fragmentation it will remain that way. If resizing is necessary only the extended portion MAY become fragmented. This resizing is done intelligently and normally imposes little impact on performance. In any event the pagefile will revert to it’s initial size after a reboot. The pagefile does not become fragmented over time.
A fixed pagefile offers little real benefit and a potentially serious problem. If the fixed size is adequate all will be well. However, if you have quessed too small you risk severe performance problems or application failures.
Recommendations:
Unless you have a very specific problem, leave the pagefile settings on default. With relatively rare exceptions these will be optimum or as near to optimum as to make no difference.
Windows designers know more about memory management and the pagefile than you do. If a fixed pagefile was superior it would be that way by default.
All of the above has been confirmed by experience on my own systems as well as others.
Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA
Larry Miller’s comment seems disrespectful to people who know about the subject, which is nothing more than advertising to a system that always works so deplorable.
He begins by saying that the swap file is used only when the system is required in memory. The truth is that the memory management of windows is so bad that the space is fragmented into small pieces quickly useless they can not contain a contiguous block of a few megs. Then start working the swap, despite having several times the available RAM than is needed. Even the use of software to defragment the ram does not solve the problem, going as far as having to reboot the machine because, having closed all the programs the system is incredibly slow. After doing so, we observe a striking difference in the speed of applications and the operating system itself.
It is true that many auxiliary files are used to swap to disk, and justly so the disk head has to move from one place to another as these temporary files can be anywhere in the partition (in addition to having hundreds or thousands of them), slowing the system to an unacceptable level. As if this were not enough, use the main swap file (pagefile) is intensive yet over 40% of the ram. Keep in mind that DLLs are downloaded to swap and get back on again and again. The task manager and performance monitor are the worst crap that has seen him give no useful information to system administrator. It is necessary to use specialized software to get an idea of what happens, because Microsoft decided to hide those details to users.
Inevitably use the swap file, because its memory management has always been abysmal. Why try to improve if users can buy more RAM?. If the system goes slow because the user is not put to ram the machine all it may contain. Win Vista Experience showed that even with gigs of ram the system was torture, and the disk light was on permanently by the excessive use of swap file.
The break down of that file is always given, because Windows assigns the new file space anywhere without a smart approach. In fact I have never been defragmented, it is always a disaster!. System performance drops significantly if applications are opened and closed (albeit on much ram) by the memory fragmentation that is due to the terrible algorithms used.
The use of a file whose size is dynamically adjusted by disk space issues and not because they improve performance. In fact always leaves much to be desired. The downsizing of the swap file is not as fast as it should, and can be used a multitude of separate clusters that require a large disk head movement, reducing its useful life.
The initial size is never good because you are always resizing and fragmented. The original file is not free of fragmentation, because it could not be a contiguous free space large enough to contain it. Placed where I can, but that it split into thousands of separate pieces (including because of the storms that left gaps everywhere). So the fragmentation is the rule, and that this next is a very rare and exceptional that I like to see some day …
The use of a fixed swap file would be nice if defragmented the outset, so that later you silly fragment assignment criterion space without windows. It would be possible using a dedicated partition for it, with the advantage that multiple windows systems could refer to that file sharing FIXED avoid repeating in each partition. In fact, it is very useful to have several specialized windows that have not problems with incompatible DLL version conflicts and others. Not to mention the windows registry is a nightmare when he begins to fill with keys, many of them orphans. A heavily loaded is Windows only candidate for a format and re-installation later (and well basis).
The recommendation to use the default configuration is the most inefficient can be done. For the swap file is not fragmented again and again to expand continuously by the inefficient use of RAM, preferably a fixed file from the beginning and defragmented large enough to meet our needs. So work better, but its overuse is inevitable in windows unless it has at least double the ram needed. But the additional spending could be as expensive as the entire record, and that because of unresolved flaws of windows.
The designers of Windows never did a good job of memory management. The above problems do not exist in other operating systems where memory management is absolutely superior. Nor is there some day hopes to improve home users because they impact more than a few eye-catching graphics kernel efficiently. And if your windows is wrong, it will not spend enough on a machine that has triple windows ensure that they do not cause problems as often.
My experience with Windows since its inception, and various unix and linux systems helping thousands of customers every day more convinced me that windows is still a big problem. Microsoft has long been embarrassing fiascoes with windows, and the situation does not improve at all. The fault always lies with the user (not the system), and then appears to deny people the shortcomings Audited windows and outright lying to the computing community.
Greetings.
Thanks for the tip…I’ve followed your direction and things are working faster.
I make my living online and I can’t believe I’m just now learning about the swap file. Thanks for the illumination.
Another thing that gets me is when I open a new tab in IE8 running Vista 64 bit, a Core i7 processor and 6 Giggs of DDR3 RAM, I have a terrible lag in my typing.
For example, once I open a new tab, I go up to my Google search default form in the browser, I’ll type two or three letters, then the cursor will leap over to the URL form. This drives me crazy.
It does not do it when I use my 64 bit browser. However, the 64 bit browser doesn’t have Flash, so I can’t use YouTube. Ah!