senyac opened this issue on Mar 23, 2005 ยท 22 posts
yggdrasil posted Wed, 23 March 2005 at 4:58 PM
Under 32 bit Windows each individual program is limited to a 2GB address space, but you also need room for Windows' own workspace and if you are multi-tasking several programs, they can each have up to 2GB allocated. Windows tends to default to 1.5 times your physical RAM size (hence the 768 in your case). Setting it TOO large can sometimes be almost as bad as too small, since the program can get tied down in swapping data blocks into and out of memory. Also if you've got more than one hard disc, put it on the fastest one (and preferably not the same one that Windows is on). Defragmenting the disk before creating a swap file on it is also a good idea (and something you should do fairly regularly as part of general good housekeeping for Windows anyway) And decide on a size and set the min and max to that from the start. This will help prevent fragmentation which often occurs in a dynamically sized swap file and can really slow things down. However, like many Windows optimisations, there are no hard and fast rules, and what works well for one machine configuration can stink on another - experiment a bit until you find a setting that seems to work well for you and then leave it at that. Hope that helps
Mark