what's a swap file?

[sao95]

?

[John Prophet]

its also called a "paging" file.

When you "run out" of memory in your ram the system uses some of your hard drive to take whatever program you have open that you are not using out of ram.....it "swaps" a program out of ram and onto the hard drive to free up some ram for another program.

You can go into system monitor and see how much physical ram you have and how much you have available (not used yet etc) and also how much swap file you are using.

Remember that a hard drive is wayyyyyyy slower than RAM so you dont really wanna use much if any swap file. Its also called "virtual memory"

[Gettinbye]

Two performance tips in dealing with your swap file:
(A)If you have sufficient RAM to do so, minimizing page file usage will boost system performance(as mentioned by John P)
(B)If you have a small (1-3gig works well) hard drive, install it on a different IDE channel than your primary hard drive(the one with your operating system), and set your operating system to use the second hard drive for the swap file...you should get a decent overall boost in system performance...

[sao95]

thanks for info jp and gettinbye, someone tried to explain it to me the other day but what they said made no sense, again much appreciated

[trieder]

Also, if you have a slower disk, what you may want to do is lock the page file size. Select the setting "Let me manage my VM" or "Custom Size" (depending on your version of windows) then you want the initial or minimum size to be (if you can) at least equal to your ram (unless you have say 512+) and then also set the maximum size to this number as well (defragmenting your drive before doing this is a good idea, or if you're going to put it on another drive/partition then defrag isnt necessary as long as that drive/partition is clean). This will create a static page file which is a good idea for slower disks/computers because Windows will not be dynamically sizing it while you're trying to load programs. A good idea is to watch memory trends and see how much memory you use on a daily basis and set your swap accordingly.

[JohnE.]

Unless you have a separate IDE/SCSI/RAID controller available that is not shared with a CD-ROM/DVD, there is no performance benefit to placing the swapfile on a separate partition or hard disk and doing so may actually hurt performance. Read this excellent article for the full low down on the Windows swapfile: The Definitive Swapfile Optimization Guide.