Extreme Performance Boosting for Experts : RAM based

Hi,

since i am a wannabe geek at heart so i am asking this question..

On a 32-bit OS for example Vista basic..

If i turn off Pagefile & turn off Prefetch & upgrade RAM to 4 GB from 2 GB....

Will the comp performance increase? ..i think it will increase upto an extent because Harddisk wont be used to access Pagefiled data

What do u think?

 

No I do not think so. Why? well because the two features you are talking about do not interfere. For Pagefile/Swap, example if you accept what I said, then understand that what you think is slowing down your system will be further slowed down because all will have to be re-found by the application on the HDD and not in a convenient place with the benefit of Virtual memory, much slower. Prefetch is the same thing, will take longer to find and access. Swap puts the least used in it, Prefetch trys to anticipate what you might need, in theory never at the expense of current memory. One benefit I can see is more free RAM. Unused RAM is wasted RAM!

Edit: Oh yea performance will increase because you increased RAM.

 

Windows needs a pagefile no matter what... it'll hurt performance if you turn it off no matter how much ram you have. Don't ask why, it's just how MS made it.

Now, you can increase performance by deleting the pagefile on your windows hard drive and putting it on a different drive. Making it 3-4 GB rather then 2-4 GB should help also.

If you're really in the tweaking mood then you should go to TweakGuides.com and download their pdf file for tweaking Vista.

 

Why would it access pagefile data in the first place?
The entire point in the pagefile is that it's a sort of safety net. It serves as a backup, so if you run out of free memory, Windows will be alerted so it can dump some stuff to the pagefile.
That's it. As long as you don't run out of free memory, the pagefile won't be used.
Now, if you have 4GB of RAM, guess how often that will happen. So no, that won't affect performance. (on the other hand, some apps act really screwy if you disable the pagefile)

And prefetch? Uh, you do know that the entire point with prefetching is to *increase* performance, right?
The idea is that if you're going to need data from the harddrive anyway, the best you can do is load it before it's needed, so it doesn't slow you down.

This may come as a surprise to you, but by default, your OS is actually designed to run as fast as possible under the circumstances.

Nah, doesn't work like that. If it did, the speed would be pretty much the same, but in reality, applications will just crash if they can't get the virtual memory they need. The pagefile *is* the fallback. If that's not possible, there's no longer a way to keep running, and the app crashes.

 

How about moving the pagefile to a 2GB high speed SDcard? Do you think there will be any performance increase over having the pagefile in the same drive as Vista?

 

You mean not the same drive as Vista? Also, how is the SD card connected to the computer? USB? I'm pretty sure there would be a high hit on CPU usage after that. And you lose access to the SD slot for other use. If you eject your SD card by accident, goodbye page file. and then what happens?

 

I don't mean to nitpick but doesn't that sound contradictory? If an app is acting screwy because of a missing/disabled pagefile but yet, there is more than enough physical memory for the pagefile to not be used, then it would stand to reason that a pagefile is still needed?

 

Depends. You can try it, and see what happens, of course. But I'm not convinced it'd be worth it.
Is it connected over USB? Then you'd probably get lousy latency, even compared to a regular harddrive. Transfer speed would suffer too.

But try it, and tell us how it works out.

You're right. In theory, the pagefile should be completely transparent to applications. They shouldn't know or care if any of their data has been pushed to the pagefile.

And that's normally true. Unless, of course, the application actually asks Windows about the pagefile. It might ask Windows how big the pagefile is, where it's located, or specifically request to get some data paged.
If it does that, then obviously the pagefile is no longer invisible to the application. And then the application may not be able to handle if the pagefile doesn't exist.

You have to try pretty hard to make this scheme fail, but apparently some applications manage it.

 

You can't move the pagefile to a removable drive. Windows won't allow it. You should always have a pagefile, Windows was designed to run with it.

The reason behind it is because Windows likes to throw DLLs that aren't in use in there but might be used again later. It also likes to sometimes shadow some files in the the pagefile so when it needs to free up RAM really fast it can dump the older files out of the RAM fast. It's just better. If you have a lot of RAM you shouldn't be going to the swap, and it's better to be going to the swap than to be going looking in the drive for a file.

 

I removed the swap file on my T61 with 3 Gb of RAM (Windows Vista Business) and saw a significant improvement in speed. And I mean significant.

Unfortunately if I have a lot of programs anf firefox tabs (100+) open I would start to get messages from Windows about being low on memory.

But like I said, I experienced a significant increase in responsiveness with Windows Vista Business.

I'm now running with a 6 GB swap file and will try out a 512-1GB swap file to see what comes closer to the "no swap file" speed.