Moving files to end of secondary disk to make room for pagefile?

[9]

Hi everyone

I'm in the process of upgrading my PC hardware and OS (WinXP x64 to Vista Home Premium 64).

I use 2x 300gb drives in a RAID, with a 15gb partition for the OS and programs (such as Office and Photoshop) and the rest as a 560 ish partition where i install games, store music/videos/pictures, etc.
16384
My upgraded system will have 4GB physical RAM, and I intend to set my pagefile to 8192MB minimum, 11904MB maximum*. As my OS partition is rather small by current standards and I feel uncomfortable with resizing my partitions, I'm planning on putting my page file on my bigger secondary partition.


Here's where JkDefrag comes into the picture: I figured it would be best to run JkDefrag with the "-a 6" parameter to move all data on the 560gb partition to the end of the drive, then tell Vista to make a page file on the secondary partition, reboot, then do a normal JkDefrag to move all the data back.
I have another day before my new CPU and motherboard arrive, so I have plenty of time to do the -a 6 defrag beforehand.


I'm nowhere near an expert in these matters, so I'm looking for some thoughts and opions.




* Based on this article, it's recommended to set a large minimum size (1.5x to 2x your physical RAM size) and an even larger maximum size (3x physical RAM size) as the extra space taken if the page file has to expand beyond the minimum set will be freed upon reboot. In other words: it's better to have a temporarily fragmented page file than a page file that's too small, should you ever need that much memory.
Also, I understand there's a 16mb or so memory limit on Vista Home Premium (each Vista edition has a different limit), so I dont want my physical memory + virtual memory to exceed that limit.

[cquinn]

Well, to start the article you point to was published in May of 2004, and even then was probably considered obsolete by some computer enthusiasts.

The basic premise of having a swap file based on a multiple of the physical RAM came from the days when memory was far more expensive, and people expected to have a load of programs and data that would regularly exceed main memory, hence needing to swap on a regular basis. 

These days (even with the more modern and data intensive OSes) most people can afford to buy enough RAM that need for a swap file is almost eliminated.

With the system specs you are giving, the OS and most programs will run fine in RAM with room to spare, and would only need to use swap sparingly unless managing a dataset much larger than available RAM.  (Such as doing massive video editing, managing a large database, CAD/CAM work, or editing a large photoshop project with many multiple elements and layers.

You might first want to figure out how much pagefile usage your system is going thru right now; and set your pagefile minimum to a comfortable size corresponding to that average usage, with the maximum set to twice the minimum or a more realistic estimate of how much swap space the system actually needs to use.  You can use built in tools like the Task Manager and Performance Monitor:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889654 to build a consistent measurement. 

Having a page file that is too large can cause problems just as having one that is too small can.  It wastes HD space that can possibly be put to more productive use, and may cause the OS to allocate system resources unnecessarily in managing that swap space to no end.

[Lundholm]

Well said, cquinn. I also recommend Sysinternals Process Explorer. It gives a lot of useful information about paging.