I think your assumptions are incorrect.

Post #127,213

11/21/03 11:41:51 PM

Hi Carl,

Given the amount of memory in the machine, and how little is running at startup, I'd expect the swap file size to be 0, or so.

Remember the documents from the anti-trust trial where MS people were talking about developing new "MIPS-eating" applications so they could sell more Windows licenses? Keep that in mind when thinking about Windows. They want to stress the system so that you feel you have to buy a new machine. :-)

With that in mind, it becomes more understandable that MS likes to maximize the cache size even at the expense of having more stuff in the swap file. NT was notorious for dumping stuff out of RAM to the swap file just to keep a big cache available so that it would seem the system was faster at loading programs.

[link|http://www.epinions.com/content_1812045956|This] post on epinions says that the minimum swap file size should be about 292 MB for Win98. YMMV.

HTH.

Cheers,
Scott.

Post #127,219

by cforde

11/22/03 1:01:50 AM

assumptions

it could well be that my assumptions are wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.

My interest is more than academic though because system performance is terrible. It won't even play a CD smoothly. I can see that bumping up the swap file size will help, but in my uninformed opinion that's just covering up the underlying problem. Starting an application causes the swap file size to grow. It seems to me something has grabbed most of the memory in the system and is starving the other applications.

In the article you linked to the point about CD & CD/RW drives is very interesting because this machine does have a CD & CD/RW drive. I don't know how they are configured. But I will find out. :-)

Have fun,
Carl Forde

Post #127,236

by static

11/22/03 6:40:14 AM

Windows can do screwy things with swap.

It genuinely needs some, BTW, due to quirk in the memory management algorithms (details are very difficult to find, I'm afraid), but that doesn't mean it will be in use. Plus applications can explicitly allocate swap.

It might be time to do a re-install. 2K Server had a weird quirk in some installations where it's quiscient state took more and more memory until it was re-installed. Rebooting didn't help.

Wade.

Is it enough to love
Is it enough to breathe
Somebody rip my heart out
And leave me here to bleed

Is it enough to die
Somebody save my life
I'd rather be Anything but Ordinary
Please

-- "Anything but Ordinary" by Avril Lavigne.

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