re: Swapfile placement.
Monday, January 6, 2003 at 9:19 am
Windows Me Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Jack Gulley
(5917 messages posted)
But for the last 40 years, Computer Science has always taught that the memory
swapfile, should be at the head of the fastest, least used Physical Drive. For a
one Physical Drive system, this means the Primary Partition, not an Extended Partition
volume, unless you have first found a way to place the extended partition at the
start of the disk drive, which would slow down the C: Logical Drive.
By placing it on the D: drive in an Extended Partition:
1)the drive must seek a long way from the system files to the swapfile.
2)the swapfile is NOT located on the part of the disk drive with the highest data
transfer rate. Modern drives can place more data sectors on the outer tracks, hence
transfer more data per revolution of the disk and hence fewer seeks.
3)the system files and swap file are close together if the swapfile is on the C:
drive in this case.
fixing the Minimum to too large of value wastes a lot of space.
4)fixing the Maximum swapfile size slows or halts the system in the event that a
larger swapfile is needed (for say an oversize picture file editing). Best to leave
it open ended so that Windows ME can grow it dynamically if required.
For best performance, consider a second fast drive, with a small Primary partiton
that contains a bootable copy of Windows 9x for backup, and the fixed minimum length
swapfile that has been moved to the head of that partition by Nortons. This way
the swap file is now at the head of the fastest and least used drive, and also the
swapfile is very close to the FAT32 tables.
Check out
Memory Management.
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