virtual memory in NT40

**brunix** · March 6th, 2002, 09:28 PM

Can the virtual memory in NT4.0 be placed on any partition?
I have this partition setup

C: [MS-DOS-6] [available 345 MB] fat
D: [NT 40] 267 – 317 [available 1079 MB] ntfs
E: [Data] [available 850 MB] ntfs
F: [Shared] [available 1950 MB] fat

I have 13743 MB of hard drive space available.

I thought I would add a 500 MB partition to act as the swap file.
Will this work?

Brunix

**hirschY** · March 6th, 2002, 10:24 PM

Unless its on a seperate HD, it wont really make a difference.
But if you want to isolate it, make a partition, or use any one that is NTFS and place it there.

**korgul** · March 6th, 2002, 10:29 PM

I would add a sencond drive and then put the swap file on that.

I had done this with win98 and noticed a big differance

korgul

**NDC** · March 6th, 2002, 10:42 PM

Under circumstances where your system is actually using the page file heavily, it will make a difference having the page file on a dedicated partition from my experience. Although having the page file on a seperate hard disk would be idea...

**BFlurie** · March 6th, 2002, 11:15 PM

Mine's at the top of the D partition. Since C is very small, it resides very close to where most of the "action" is, but can't fill up C. I set mine @ a min of 160MB, which it normally won't even come close, but set the max to 512, which it'll use up during a heavy stress test or graphics app.

**brunix** · March 8th, 2002, 06:43 PM

I don't do much more than surf and download files. I wouldn't think that I am taxing the system.

I am very new to NT and did get Norton defrag. It seem like the system is boged down sometimes. I should look for some memory monitors. It sounds like the standard setup ahould work fine.

**PonzSpyder** · March 8th, 2002, 07:03 PM

I set mine @ a min of 160MB, which it normally won't even come close, but set the max to 512

It may be a good practice to set both the min and max numbers at the same size that way it isnt constantly changing and taking up more time to adjust to the new size, if it is always the same size it will also help the swap file (page file) itself from getting fragmented over time.

**BFlurie** · March 9th, 2002, 12:46 AM

The 160 MB swapfile always remains in one chunk at the top of D drive -- it never gets fragmented (W95 uses it too). The rare occasion when more is needed, a new "piece" of pagefile.sys gets tacked on to the end of the D drive files, but when I shut down the heavy-duty app, the extra piece gets deleted. So, in essence, it is a fixed-sized swapfile unless I purposely stress-test it or manipulate alot of big images. So this is a "half" fixed-size swapfile.
I've been experimenting w/this kind of thing for years, and this is my solution.

**PonzSpyder** · March 9th, 2002, 02:09 AM

You may be right BFlurie, but just for $hit$ and giggles, give this proggie out a try and see what it turns up. It seemed to help out our NT box at work a bit.

PageDefrag

PageDefrag works on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

EDIT: Oh yeah, BTW, It's free for download

Download Here

**lynchmob** · March 9th, 2002, 07:05 AM

When I used NT4,I set the min and max size at 384MB.I also ran Speedisk and checked the swapfile option to place it in a permanent place at the front of the hdd.My uses for NT were similiar to yours,Brunix,and I experienced little in the way of slowdown,though I did had 256MB of sdram.
lynch

**BFlurie** · March 9th, 2002, 06:56 PM

Just FYI, there's a big difference between "Swapfile in use" and Swapfile size. If you let Windoz do it automatically, it starts out w/a Win386.swp (or Pagefile.sys) of zero bytes & increases its size on the fly as needed. If you control it & specify a min/max, the win386.swp will start out at your min size, but initially none is being used -- it's an empty file. Windows will use whatever portion that it needs until it's almost filled up & then increase its size however it needs -- unless it's a fixed size -- min=max. When the swapfile requirement is released by closing the program(s) using it, its size will fall back to either your min, or whatever Windows decides if it's controlling it.

The best way to see this is Sysmon in W9X monitoring "Swapfile size" & "Swapfile in Use", or in NT4, C:\WINNT\system32\winmsd.exe, & on the memory tab, Swapfile Total (swapfile size), and Swapfile In Use.

**brunix** · March 10th, 2002, 12:00 PM

I understand that win98 uses a open file for memory and that you can set it to virtual memory and the size. If you set the min&max to the same size the system will shutdown or dump faster at shutdown.

It looks like NT uses a set file size by default. This is the mod one does to 98 to help performance. Norton defrag shows the files spread across to partition with space for the memory file in the front. If this is what is happining there would be no real improvement with a swap partition with a prearranged space for the memory. I think this is what BFlurie is telling me.