Rod L. Short Posted July 3, 2020 Share Posted July 3, 2020 What's the recommended size for the virtual memory/paging file? Should it be the same on the C drive and the audio drive? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azslow3 Posted July 3, 2020 Share Posted July 3, 2020 IMHO. If you have sufficient RAM, disable it. Note that Windows can crash in case it hits RAM limit in this case, also overall disk performance can be reduced. If you need it, put it on fastest disk may be after checking this disk access does not introduce extra system latency. The explanation. When Windows "think" it does not need something in RAM (and that something is not marked "keep it in RAM please..."), it can dump it to the disk. That happens not only when RAM is really full, but almost always. That free RAM for something Windows "think" is more important, including disk cache. Real-time aware apps, drivers, etc. should mark related RAM properly. But "should" does not mean "do". When a part of dumped data are required again, they have to be loaded from the disk. That always take "infinite" time from CPU perspective. And if that is required to continue with real-time (audio) activity, you get audio click/pop/drop. How bad/ok/fine it is you can check in Latency Monitor, it shows "missed pages" and (indirectly) related activity. Some disks/controllers can be worse then other in terms of "response time", unrelated to how fast they can transfer data. So the fastest can be not the best choice. I have i7 XPS (already a bit "old"), it is worse computer for audio which I have used. DELL has messed something in ACPI (hardware), and that trigger huge (several ms) "pauses" in the system. That does not affect anyone except audio applications with low latency, so there are no known universal fixes for that. Some people claim disabling some ACPI drivers helps, I personally only have luck by disabling any networking and background tasks when I need low audio latency (also RME drivers are more forgiving, Roland was freezing the whole system while keeping irritating cry sound on the interface output). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rod L. Short Posted July 3, 2020 Author Share Posted July 3, 2020 I have 32 ghz RAM (2666 mhz PCH 21300), so, should I need a paging file at all? I really don't understand a lot about it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul H Posted July 3, 2020 Share Posted July 3, 2020 I thimk it only matters when you've not got a lot of RAM installed. Having said that... in every version of CW/Sonar I've had, I've never changed it from whatever the default is . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StudioNSFW Posted July 4, 2020 Share Posted July 4, 2020 23 hours ago, Rod L. Short said: I have 32 ghz RAM (2666 mhz PCH 21300), so, should I need a paging file at all? I really don't understand a lot about it. You probably have 32 GB ram, not gHz... gHz is a frequency reading And, yeah, with 32 GB RAM, your system should never be paging to disk at all. Page file was something you had to do in olden days when RAM was limited and very expensive - back then the guide line was a page file at least equal to or up to 2x the amount of installed RAM (That was official word for NT4) . Even back then, if you found your system was paging to disk much it meant a RAM increase was urgently needed, as paging to disk is a order of magnitude slower or more than reading from the memory buss. The page file just existed to keep the system from crashing completely. But if you are able to eat 32 GB of RAM doing ANYTHING in windows...just, wow. You'd be fine to just disable it entirely. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rod L. Short Posted July 4, 2020 Author Share Posted July 4, 2020 11 minutes ago, StudioNSFW said: You probably have 32 GB ram, not gHz... gHz is a frequency reading Oops! Ha ha! Typo! I'll have to fix that. That's kind of what I was thinking about the paging file, based on some things I had been hearing. Gonna give it a try. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris.r Posted July 4, 2020 Share Posted July 4, 2020 On 7/3/2020 at 11:48 AM, azslow3 said: also overall disk performance can be reduced you mean when I disable paging or leave it enabled? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StudioNSFW Posted July 4, 2020 Share Posted July 4, 2020 He would mean if paging is enabled - the issue is something called "Spindle contention" and is not nearly so much of a problem with SSD storage media. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris.r Posted July 4, 2020 Share Posted July 4, 2020 Thanks, I would think so, but the context suggests the opposite. And having years of experience with Windows, I could see it having bad impact on the system performance when disabling paging even with huge RAM memory, who knows. And this may even change from update to update. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azslow3 Posted July 6, 2020 Share Posted July 6, 2020 On 7/4/2020 at 8:41 PM, chris.r said: Thanks, I would think so, but the context suggests the opposite. And having years of experience with Windows, I could see it having bad impact on the system performance when disabling paging even with huge RAM memory, who knows. And this may even change from update to update. With relatively small RAM and no paging, the system can use only small amount for disk caching. The performance suffer significantly, especially with conventional HDD. With increased RAM and SSD the difference is getting smaller. Paging on (fast) SSD is absolutely no problem for anything except for audio applications, nothing else needs 1-2ms "warranty for execution". Note that far from every SSD is fast, there are PCI-e M2 SSDs with real speed 80-100 MB/Sec. Applications are different, one sample based instrument can consume 8+ GB. And if someone wants complete orchestra, 32GB can be filled rather quick. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mgustavo Posted August 27, 2020 Share Posted August 27, 2020 Hi, I'd like to comment I recently added 4 GB RAM to my notebook and also disabled paging file. In general it is faster but also CbB startup is faster either. I had this issue where CbB first start took more than 1 minute long, but now it's faster too! : ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glenn Stanton Posted August 28, 2020 Share Posted August 28, 2020 as a safety measure, leave the paging file at 1024Mb (1Gb) so if you run out of RAM the system can still support vital functions and let you turn things down (hopefully without crashing). otherwise, there is little impact on large RAM systems from having the paging file - however set it manually to approximate the same size as if it was system managed (e.g. if the system managed paging file is 3166Mb, maybe set it to min/max of 3072 or 4096). 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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