re: Chunksize
Friday, February 18, 2005 at 2:52 am
Windows Me Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Jack Gulley
(5917 messages posted)
I played around with the Chunksize setting at one point. Not because I was really
interested in optimizing the system, but because of one application I was running
that does a huge amount of disk read/writes to a large number of files and was real
slow. The short story was that I found it made very little difference.
Only when I forced the disk drive down to using 8K cluster size and set chunksize
to match did I see any noticeable improvement at all. But such small cluster sizes
caused other problems.
I also found that as I increased memory size, any differences in performance due
to changing chunksize became even more negligible. Mainly because actual SwapFile
usage decreased.
This prompted me to increase my system memory size. At 640MB of ram the performance
problem almost went away, as the whole application and all of its data now could
fit into memory and Windows ME's disk cache. I was no longer using the SwapFile.
This then prompted me to write my own version of the application which ran 24
times faster. Right now I have to live with it running slower because the current
system board is not reliable with more than 512MB of memory, and the application
runs best with over 700MB. (1GB of ram was nice while it lasted until the system
board and processor went out day.)
I also found one web page where the chunksize was tested and he found much the
same results. See: Chunksize Optimization Guide. Note he was doing this on Windows
98 with only 128MB of ram, and not where the improved SwapFile and disk cache logic
of Windows ME makes almost all SwapFile optimization unnecessary.
In theory, if you were trying to run Windows ME on a 64MB or smaller system, setting
the chunksize to 4096 bytes to match the page swap size should give you the best
performance, but even then I suspect it would still be almost a negligible difference.
So for Windows ME, my answer to almost all SwapFile optimization questions is:
Let Windows ME handle it, defrag the swapfile when you can, and add more RAM.
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