Best paging file setting w/ 2gig memory?

[carpenoctem]

Many of the documents available about tuning XP for music talk about setting the paging file/virtual memory to one size. Some say disable it altogether, and others say make it 1.5 or 2x your amount of RAM, UP TO 512 meg. Since many of these documents are a few years old, I was wondering what the current consensus is on how to set it for a system like mine, with 2 gigs of RAM.

I've been running with it disabled, and was considering experimenting with a different setting, but want to make sure I don't make it unnecessarily large.

Also, 2 questions: Does the paging file only need to be created on drives/partitions with applications on them, or also on audio/sample drives?
And do you only need one per disk (on root partition) regardless of number of partitions on that disk?

Thanks!

[fizbin]

When I had 2GB ram i set it to 2048mb minimum and 2048mb maximum. Your computer doesn't even really need that much from my understanding, except that in the case of a crash where it performs a memory dump (effectively buying you nothing though I think) - in that case you should have at least as much pagefile set as you have RAM. Setting the minimum and maximum pagefile sizes to be the same prevents the computer from resizing it on the fly.

You need only one page file - usually on the system drive. If for some reason you computer is paging a lot then it might have better performance on a different drive. If it is going to the page file a lot on a workstation though, you've got a different problem (usually not enough RAM), however 2GB should be plenty. I'd just leave it on your system drive.

Jay

[carpenoctem]

Thanks for the info. I'll try a 512 or 768m initial setting and see how that works out, and work my way up to 2048 if there's a need.

[PeterMcC]

interesting,
I have 2 gigs of ram and peeps told me the bets way was to use "system managed"

which btw set itself to the golden rule of 1.5 (3068/3068)

I recently started to use more ram hungry vsti's and may experiment with a lower setting.

let me know what you find out.

peter