Smallest Swapfile Size for 98SE?

What's the smallest MINANDMAX size I can run happily with on an old P2 333MHz with 256 MB of SDRAM and the ConservativeSwapfileUsage tweak in effect?

Anybody have a guess, an opinion, or experience to report?

(In fact, when I let Windows "manage" it, it seems to always stay at zero.)

[EDIT] No games, and the only major RAM-gobblers are Eudora 6 and MSOffice 2000. [/EDIT]

 

The rule I always followed was 1.5 x ram in pc = min and max of SWAP file

 

The rule used to be 2.5x system RAM!
With RAM the size of 256 MB or more this rule is out-of-date - 512 MB swap file should do.
(I have Win98se, 512 MB RAM, and 512MB swapfile).

 

THx, mtm and Aurelius,

I thot somebody here had posted (on one of the other threads I was involved in) that he was doing just fine on a 10 MB swap on 98SE with 256.

If you have the ConservativeSwapfileUsage switch set, hypothetically Windows 98 should NEVER have any use for a swap of ANY size, when it's got 256 Mb to run on directly. That's the theory, anyhoo.

On mine, I see the flat line of zero size all the time, even when I check the swap usage while I have two docs open in Word 2000 and two docs open in WordPerfect9 and Eudora 6 running. Now, if any combo is going to kick in virtual memory usage, that combo oughta, but it doesn't, so I'm thinking tiny is OK.

Anybody else wanta jump in here?

 

you can make it real small, like 128MB....only thing it will do is a lot of hard drive thinking when it needs memory bad.

and Aurelius, the 1.5x rule is right from microsoft, of course take that how you want

 

The general rule is that you should not need more than 1.5x RAM. That rule is no longer applicable with today's high RAM counts. If you have more than 512 MB RAM, I suggest the following (for XP or 2k). I think this was Kodo's method, but I might've been Halo's.

Boot your machine normally. Now use your system as intensely as you can. Load lots of programs at once, especially those you tend to use at the same time. Make sure your turn on all the background bells-and-whistles you like running. Run your IM clinet(s), any file-sharing programs, anti-virus, web browser, media player, app quickstarts, etc. If you play games, try running them with your background processes running. Alternately, if you've got 2 weeks uptime, you can probaly avoid this step.

Now you want to check how much swap space you use. Open Task Manager, and click the Performance tab Look under Commit Charge. "Total" is how much swap space you're using at the moment. "Limit" is how much you have potentially available. Peak is the maximum you ever used during your current session. The Peak value is the one we're interested in. You can generally set your swap file to between 1.25 and 1.5 times your peak and be perfectly safe. Obviously, if Windows yells at you you'll need to increase the value.

Ultimately, of course, there isn't much reason to specify the swapfile size. I use it this method determine the size of the partition I wanted to make for my swap file, but I ended up making it 1GB anyways. There is no real performance gain from static versus dynamic sizing of the swap file. It usually tells you when it needs to resize, IIRC, but that might be for static sizes.

For Win98, Iwould cap out at ~384MB for a swap file, since there's no reason for a Win98 machine to have that much RAM in the first place (it is highly inefficient). My minimum would be dynamic. I wouldn't specify a size less than the RAM capacity (unless you have > 384 MB RAM).

 

Thanx for taking the time to write that up, chicken. I knew most of it, but you jogged my memory.

I think, now that I've heard from a few of you, that the right way for me to do it is (yikes! really? Have you thought this out?) let Windows manage it. I've tried your load-it-to-the-max method, chicken, and it still doesn't get out of the 256 MB hard memory it's got, so I think I'm just tinkering needlessly if I set a MinMax at some set figure.

Thanks for the wise counsel, all of you. Got me thinking at a higher level, anyway.

 

there is a reason to have a static swap file though. If you have a 1GB swap file you would want it all in the same spot on the hard drive. If you set it to let windows do it(dynamicly) then the swap file could end up broken up all over the hard drive. What I have done in the past is disable the swap file, reboot and do a defrag - then enable the swap file to my fixed size then reboot. this ensures that the swap file is in one spot and ensures optimal performance.

 

Thnx for that reminder and advice, guy!

 

This was probably the size of the Temporary Internet Folder (TIF) rather than the swap file but then again this doesn't tie in with the memory reference since TIF is not memory resident.

I have a Windows 98 machine with 256MB RAM and let Windows manage the swap space and I also have conservative swap file useage and rarely get any use of the swap space.

 

Thnx, Max,

I haven't seen the .swp file show any activity since I added the 128 MB chip to the two 64's my old P2 had before. (An old computer I inherited had the 128 in it). It used to get up to as high as 40-50 MB, but nothing at all since the addition of more RAM.

 

So it all comes to this:
it is best to have a large enough swap file, fixed min&max size (so it won't get fragmented), preferably located on a separate partition or hard drive (at the beginning of disk). Besides, if you configure your system correctly, only a small percentage of swapfile will be used.