Page File Size Settings in Windows for Systems With High Amounts of RAM?

The rule of thumb used to be that page file (both minimum and maximum to minimize fragmentation) should be twice the size of actual RAM.

These days, with servers routinely having 2 or more gigs of RAM, I find this size of a page file to be excessive.

I typically cap page file size at 1024MB regardless of physical RAM nowadays, however, I just saw a knowledgebase article on Veritas website that suggests that the page file should still be twice RAM.

Am I wrong in thinking that this is ridiculous and that your server will be on it's knees crawling long before it ever gets close to using that much pagefile?

If I am wrong and there are good documented reasons why pagefiles should still be double size of RAM, let me know.

Comments

[Bryan Price]

Beats me. I had a server with 4 gigs of memory, but it was running OS/2 Warp, and had a hell of a time getting it to boot (creating a 1 gig virtual drive on the boot floppies eventually got it to boot without having to take memory out). But after installation of Warp, it didn't seem to be a problem. Considering that it ended up just being a file server, I'm sure it never got much into the page file.

[David]

I've had the same personal preference for some time, though I'll set the min/max pagefile size no higher than 2048 MB. It would be great to see some validation out there about page file allocation for 2GB+ RAM systems.

[Some random dude]

AFAIK there's three reasons why you want to set the pagefile size to 2 x physical RAM. The first reason is to reduce the performance hit from pagefile fragmentation. The second reason is to guarantee enough space is available if your server is configured to do a core dump when it crashes. The third reason is because a full pagefile will almost certainly result in your processes & applications crashing - not a great situation for any server!

[Harry]

I have heard from an O/S Engineer that Microsoft has announced that systems with 1GB RAM or more do not actually need the page file... I am not quite sure if Microsoft has made such a claim, but in my system which has 768MB of RAM I have set the paging file at 256MB and everything runs smoothly. I really believe that computers with large amounts of RAM DO NOT need the page file. Ever since I reduced my page file from 1024MB to 256MB my computer runs faster (I do not get as much data written on the Page File as I did before reducing its size, thus accessing faster the data, which is now mostly written on the RAM) And never ever forget : A typical IDE HDD at 7200 RMP needs 8,9ms to seek data... RAM needs only a few ns :P

[IT Bloger - Michael]

I need 3 GB page size for our server.
because I have a MS SQL Sever.
it needs that.

[banji]

I have also never had more than 1024Mb of RAM, though that was on PCs running Linux, I figured that anymore virtual memory and the time the drive spent being read/written to negated any improvement in speed.