Do you have the Page File On or Off?

Again usage pattern dependent. Super fetch is just a fancy term of 'predictive fetch' that is ,Windows guess what you would load in the future. By default Windows 7 cache things in a 'natural used base'. So your first time loading of say Excel would take a bit longer but if you close it and open Excel again, it is from cache anyway(unless some other programs squeeze it out from the cache).

If you have enough memory to cache your frequently used programs, they would all be in cache eventually and super fetch would not make much of a difference.

 

No SSD.
I notice very little gain in using superfetch. I turned it off after reading a large article about hard drive wear and program launch comparisons.
I initially loved not listening to the hard drive mucking about after booting and then after typical usage, noticed no tangible performance impact.
Noise is a big thing for me, and HDD's get under my skin.. Loud enough to hear, quiet enough to be always make me listen.

Actually, when doing multiple things at boot, I found it a touch quicker as my hdd wasn't reading this or that.

And yes, a few seconds less on boot is nice.

 

@clone63

your described issue is a Vista problem as far as I can tell. I used to disable super fetch on my Vista for the exact same reason. But Microsoft has tweaked super fetch in Windows 7 and the mentioned problems have mostly gone, I have it enabled now.

 

I kind of figured that after working with a couple W7 laptops and later realizing I wasn't bothered by superfetch.

I could still see disabling it if performance is mostly unaffected (or if I had a SSD which is probable by the time I bother going to 7) to keep ram on the empty side since I have no page file.

 

Every benchmark/ article I've seen has shown improvements when using Superfetch.

I'll leave it on =p

 

I can certainly provide at least another 20 like that... but also at least 20 saying it would be better to disable it.

and again - best and only way to find out whether it does anything (positive or negative) for you is disabling it yourself instead of reading articles all day.

 

All the original Battlefield games (1942 and expansions, Vietnam, etc), Command and Conquer Generals (and Zero Hour, Shockwave mod), Axis and Allies (2004 version), RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. Might look at others, but for right now that's some of the games I have installed on my laptop.

 

Hm, been lucky then, I've just never played those.

Thanks for the heads up!

 

When looking at web articles talking about the page file, you'll find very few (or none at all?) articles from msft and the major manufacturers talking about turning the page file off.

Conversly, many (all??) of the articles talking about shutting the page file off are from people with no affiliation with a manufacturer or software publisher. I believe that you'll also find that these articles frequently date from deep inside the XP-era (and now dated/obsolete in the Win7/Server2008 era) when the subject was open to some minor discussion.

This may or may not be significant.

 

FWIW, there was a link posted on one of Gracy123's thread which points directly to a Microsoft knowledge base which stays pretty clear that 'YOU CAN TURN PAGE FILE OFF' if you have enough memory.

Not that I would advocate one way or the other, just to make things clear that there is no technical/architectural reason that page file cannot be turned off.

 

I personally haven't really noticed any big differences in my computer's speed since turning if off but I also haven't had any problems that I can associate with it.

 

and the date of the KB article is???????

 

What exactly do you stand to gain by turning it off?

 

I can't imagine any of my PCs use it for much other than keeping legacy apps from complaining but I usually just keep a system managed size pagefile, despite having plenty of memory. I used to do the whole RAM * 1.5 max and min thing, but it seems kind of pointless these days.

 

I forgot but based on the wording, it is pretty recent as it said it applies to Windows 7 and something like that. In fact, it mentioned something that machine is running AD(the server service), it is not recommended to disable page file as AD use the page out as an indicator of when to release some memory it holds. Please do a search on the exact article.

Though the date still doesn't matter as the simple fact that YOU CAN DISABLE IT VIA THE ADVANCE TAB(since NT 3.0 and still present now) means there is no technical/architecture that it must be on(except say the above mentioned situation where it can affect AD's optimization routine of memory management).

 

512-2048MB variable size. Some games (i.e. Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War 2, Chaos Rising and Retribution) require a swap file of 1,5GB or more and I do play these games sometimes.

 

'can disable' and 'should disable' are separate things.

I'm at a loss to find a recent KB article that talks about shutting off the page file completely. Nothing newer than a low six digit number and referencing XP or lightly loaded Server 2003. Even then msft speaks of it as a technical possibility, not as a should-do.

There are a lot of references on the technet blogs and social boards, but it's still as a possibility, not as a should-do.

Maybe Gerry can jump in with his reference, Technet doesn't have the greatest search facility.

 

It seems to make sense that by turning it off you force applications to stay in RAM rather than use the HDD. Some applications page by default but if you have enough RAM there's no reason for them to.

Like I said, I've had 0 issues with it... and I can only think of how it would increase performance... and benchmarks seem to show that it does.

 

Pointless to argue about 'should' or 'shouldn't' which is subjective. Put the pros and cons of either case and let the person(whoever) to decide.

EDIT:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2021748

Personally, I would say the tune is pretty neutral.

The more RAM that you have available or is added to a computer, it generally tends to decrease the size of the page file needed. If you have enough RAM installed in your computer, you may not require a page file at all, unless one is required by a specific application. This all depends on how much virtual memory is used by your system and/or applications installed.

There is no specific recommendation for page file size. Your requirements will be based on the hardware and software that you use and the load that you put on the computer.

 

If you have enough memory for your common use you should do it.

 

That, personally i need said page file for Dawn of War II since the games keeps nagging you if you don't have it. Engineering programs when i was at university were also a reason.

 

Let me grab the rest of the big caveats in the article so it's actually the balanced pro-con that you wanted, emphases mine:

 

@woofer

fair enough and again an already discussed item in Gracy's threads(if you need memory dump, you need page file).

My bold is specifically for the tune.

Let me specify it the Nth time, There are reasons to enable or disable, so long people don't present it as a 'you are stupid to disable it' or 'you are stupid not to disable it' way, I would stay silence.

I myself have one machine disabled, one machine enabled so I am 2x stupid.

 

I agree 1000%

So silly how there's elitism about the strangest things...

 

Just leave it on, reduce it if you need the space, and run with it. I set mine to minimum 512MB to max 2048MB hasn't been an issues since and don't care about memory dump.

 

Not necessarily, paging from disk can still occur for non-modifiable sections. For instance code sections are generally non-modifiable sections.

With all the previous posts on pagefile I'm surprised a sticky hasn't been made. One that is subjective and unbiased, listing pro's and con's.