adS
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A question to the PC gurus (I am an iSeries professional):

I have a PC (windows 7) with 16GB.
That should be enough for everything. Hence I decided to use no swap file at all.

I noticed that programs seem to fall asleep after some time: When I switch back to them it takes several seconds to wake them.

I have no idea why. Then I had an idea - use a swap file although I have so much RAM.

Now this strange effect has disappeared.
Does anybody know what is going on here?

Regards,

adS


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disoriented
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Not sure if at all relevant

http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

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adS
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disoriented wrote:
Not sure if at all relevant

http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

I am afraid it is not

adS

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Banjooie
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You decided you didn't need a swap file based on an arbitrary RAM point, and discovered removing it had side effects, which went away when you put the swap file back.

I believe this is where science tells you that your hypothesis is incorrect, and you do, in fact, need a swap file.

disoriented
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I think he wants to know why he needs a swap file.

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lepke1979
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Is it usually the same program that does this? Do you hear the hard drive spinning?

If I had to guess, while Windows isn't making use of a swap file. Perhaps the program itself stores data on the hard drive (in case of a crash or something) and when you try to use it again the waking up is it retrieving the data.

adS
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lepke1979 wrote:
Is it usually the same program that does this? Do you hear the hard drive spinning?

All programs and I never hear any spinning

If I had to guess, while Windows isn't making use of a swap file. Perhaps the program itself stores data on the hard drive (in case of a crash or something) and when you try to use it again the waking up is it retrieving the data.

Why should the situation improve with a swap file?

This is very strange.

By the way, my C: drive is an SSD.

Best wishes,

adS



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mrimer
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Ah, the old "no moving parts" trick.

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adS
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mrimer wrote:
Ah, the old "no moving parts" trick.

The problem is - you get used to it.

I even created (via the bios) a ram drive with 4GB which I use for temporary files.
This one is really fast

Best wishes,

adS



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lepke1979
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adS wrote:

Why should the situation improve with a swap file?

This is very strange.

By the way, my C: drive is an SSD.

Best wishes,

adS

Don't think it would necessarily improve anything. Just seeing it as a possibility. But since you have an SSD, can probably rule that out. So I got nothing.

At this point, I'll use tried and true IT answer on what the problem is: Virus attack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlbrL1H1ngs

disoriented
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http://superuser.com/questions/810170/should-i-disable-swap-file-if-i-have-lots-of-ram-or-should-i-move-it-to-a-virtua

Excerpt:

No matter how much RAM you have, you want the system to be able to use it efficiently. Having no paging file at all forces the operating system to use RAM inefficiently for two reasons. First, it can't make pages discardable, even if they haven't been either accessed or modified in a very long time, which forces the disk cache to be smaller. Second, it has to reserve physical RAM to back allocations that are very unlikely to ever require it (for example, a private, modifiable file mapping), leading to a case where you can have plenty of free physical RAM and yet allocations are refused to avoid overcommitting.

Consider, for example, if a program makes a writable, private memory mapping of a 4GB file. The OS has to reserve 4GB of RAM for this mapping, because the program could conceivably modify every byte and there's no place but RAM to store it. So immediately, 4GB of RAM is basically wasted (it can be used to cache clean disk pages, but that's about it).

You need to have a page file if you want to get the most out of your RAM, even if it's never used. It acts as an insurance policy that allows the operating system to actually use the RAM it has, rather than having to reserve it for possibilities that are extraordinarily unlikely.

The people who designed your operating system's behavior are not fools. Having a paging file gives the operating system more choices, and it won't make bad ones.

There's no point in trying to put a paging file in RAM. And if you have lots of RAM, the paging file is very unlikely to be used (it just needs to be there) so it doesn't particularly matter how fast the device it is on is.

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