Windows 7 Pagefile/Superfetch/ReadyBoot discussion

[zhangm Supervisor]

do they?

I guess you never used a unix based OS then?

I used to, but I quit after it turned me into an arrogant, condescending ******* with a superiority complex.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

do they?

I guess you never used a unix based OS then?

since you mentioned defrag I do tune that as well, I keep it on a schedule but reduce the frequency it runs, I may even turn it off at some point if I start using a 3rd party defragger.

Windows vista/7 are the only 2os's I know off that pre cache information.

That's because you don't know much about other OSes.

Caching data into free ram as you label it happens without superfetch. After my last post I opened a new IE window, I havent rebooted for about a day and last opened a IE window before I went to sleep some 10 or so hours agao, it was loaded from cache and I have superfetch disabled, superfetch is not required to load apps from cache.

There's a disk cache, yes. If you don't do much with your computer except run the same 4 apps, then it may stay populated with the things you use until you reboot, reducing app load times as you've indicated. But Superfetch populates the cache before things are used or after the cache has been flushed, such as after a reboot or after playing a game. Furthermore, the disk cache is only effective in certain situations and is limited in its size and freshness. While Superfetch has some impact on the disk cache, it also has other mechanisms of keeping data ready and brings substantial improvements to memory access patterns.

In Windows 7, Superfetch is used more extensively by things like the shell and indexer in order to better manage their memory usage patterns. Disabling it is highly discouraged.

Prefetching has nothing to do with Superfetch or disk caches. Prefetching reduces syscalls / switches to kernel mode as well as disk seeks.

[Chrysalis]

the only OS I havent used recently is apple mac's

I am very experience in both linux and freebsd. I assure you they do not 'pre' cache data. Sure they cache data but they do so passively. There seems to be some confusion here as I get the impression you guys think if superfetch is disabled the apps etc. do not get cached and always load from hdd.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Without the pagefile, even if you aren't using all available RAM for applications and you have extra left over, you're negatively impacting the responsiveness of your computer by having less RAM available for superfetch than you would otherwise with a reasonably sized pagefile.

Without lots of installed RAM, even if you don't need it, you're negatively impacting the responsiveness of your computer by having less RAM available for superfetch than you would otherwise with a reasonable amount of installed RAM.

See what I did there? It still hold that one can still run out of memory using a swap, just like one can run out of memory without using a swap. Enabling the swap can be compared to doubling your physical installed memory.

This is incorrect for several reasons. It's a vast oversimplification stemming from your lack of knowledge.

Not much of a tweak or anything awesome, but oddly I think many do not realize that snooping through the Task Scheduler might lead to an increase in performance and/or more control of your system,

Highly unlikely.

For example, SSD users,

Go to Microsoft -> Windows -> Defrag

Make sure that ScheduledDefrag is desabled.

Defrag of SSDs is disabled automatically.

Or,

Microsoft -> Windows -> Customer Experience Improvement Program.

If the user has consented to participate in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program, this job collects and sends usage data to Microsoft.

Please do not turn that off, and please opt into sending error reports. If there's one single thing that can help make your PC experience better, that is it. There is no measurable impact on performance.

[StarLion]

I am very experience in both linux and freebsd. I assure you they do not 'pre' cache data. Sure they cache data but they do so passively.

Which is sub-optimal. In fact, there are packages you can install that add precaching to these operating systems, which greatly increases their responsiveness.

There seems to be some confusion here as I get the impression you guys think if Superfetch is disabled the apps etc. do not get cached and always load from hdd.

Uh, we never said that. We know they'll stay in disk cache as long as possible, but that doesn't negate all the advantages we've listed of Superfetch.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

the only OS I havent used recently is apple mac's

I am very experience in both linux and freebsd. I assure you they do not 'pre' cache data. Sure they cache data but they do so passively. There seems to be some confusion here as I get the impression you guys think if superfetch is disabled the apps etc. do not get cached and always load from hdd.

Incorrect. I'm unsure if "swap prefetch" ever made it into the mainline Linux kernel, but I know it existed for a long time as a well maintained kernel patch. If it wasn't ever merged in, I'm sure it'll get there eventually.

Anyway, I'm not really sure what OSes with more primitive memory management have to do with this discussion.

[ToneKnee]

I think people are slightly confused between Vista's Superfetch and Window 7's. Vista's tried to cache anything that you used often, in some cases, videos and as soon as you exited a game, it would cache everything back into the memory and this caused problems sometimes with people with slow hard drives since getting back to Windows was a little sluggish.

Microsoft improved Superfetch in Windows 7 by caching programs into memory only when there was little system usage or if it was completely idle. It also caches the files that take the longest to load on a hard drive.

Superfetch is a great idea, it was good when it was first introduced in Vista, but obviously they improved it in Windows 7 after the problems some people were having. Disabling it or calling it a stupid feature is just flamebait and it's pretty obvious that people don't realise that free RAM is wasted RAM.

[sammy2]

I have all those features disabled...I like the result.

[Udedenkz]

@StartLion,

What do you expect from laptop hard drives? In what world do you live where everyone has a madly fast setup?

You are flaming my SSD.

It is very nice of you, you can't beat me, but sure you can laugh at my hard ware.

You are out of touch with reality if 100MB/s is slow for you.

This is an ignore game. You are ignoring my arguments, I am ingoring yours.

I already told you why. Yet you keep replying.

Maximum I worked with is a 600 DPI booklet, a few layers.

Also, if you really have application that are that performance hungry,

you shouldn't turn off the PF. Simple as you do not have enough memory without it.

I can say the same about you, you willingfully ignore my arguments.

Restating the same thing AGAIN. Ingored.

Right. Right-right-right. That is the more memory argument!! Ignored.

BS. I has so much **** loaded on my netbook. Disabling Norton for example helped me a lot.

I am not going to be sharing files over network.

I am not going to be using Networking features adide from TCP/IP for surfing the net.

I am not going to do any Peer 2 Peer.

I am not going to be using HomeGroups.

I am not going to be printing over a network.

Loading these at bootup is a waste of time.

Most of these are Automatic and get loaded at boot.

I have been reading your post.

Yes, I am ingoring anything that is a repeat of what you already said.

I am not. You didn't get my argument if you think so.

1. Sure.

2. Well can I keep my Mp4 collection inside the page file? Then it is not wasted space.

3. Ignored.

4. Nice.

I understand your argument and you even offered a valid reason to have the PF in this long post of yours.

You do not have enough RAM without the PF.

I put you on my ignore user list. Congrats.

You can think that you won if that makes you happy.

[soldier1st]

i think Chrysalis & Udedenkz are the same people as they both especialy Udedenkz seem to not understand how oses work so ALL his advice should be avoided as a safety net is far better than apps crashing and Udedenkz: Windows will NOT shut down the memory hogging app it will crash and will probably take windows itself with it which may corrupt your install. Udedenkz: plz stop posting as all your posting is the same old outdated BS that you been saying since the first post and starlion clearly asked YOU about why would one disable the pagefile and forever and forever you failed to answer HIS simple question till finaly you posted some kind of reason but he pointed out why Nobody should do it and i agree with him 100% as HIS points are all valid and when he was asked a question he did not put it off and answered it right away and if you say you dont care then why do you keep posting replies if you don't care, if someone didnt care they would not post a reply as they would not care but you replied so that means YOU DO CARE but YOU insist that YOU have to be right always which is what an arrogant/ignorant SOB would be which i believe you are and my advice is to go into therapy and heavy counseling and go on some meds that help you understand something.

[Udedenkz]

@soldier1st,

This is reply to this comment,

Windows will NOT shut down the memory hogging app it will crash and will probably take windows itself with it which may corrupt your install.

Just for the lols, I just now tried to crash my computer. You know there are these BS programs called RAM cleaners? Well I ran one. Pretty much what it did is allocated about 1.2 GB of RAM, then error, and I ended it with the Task Manager. I had ~80 MB RAM left - 96% was used.

So now I once again ran it, go my RAM down to 91MB available, but now I did not close it. I am just typing this message in Firefox. At this point I can't run any more threads - obviously - low memory. Windows also disabled Aero to save RAM. No crashing.

So there are two things that happen when you approach your memory limit,

- You can't run any more applications.

- Windows does stop the application that is taking up all your RAM to continue. "Access Violation at... "

- Windows disables fancy graphics to save memory.

- Furthermore Windows 7 starts removing icons, thumbnails, graphics to save memory.

- Video Thumbnails do not load, and I do not see icons in my Firefox.

I have 10 firefox tabs open, mostly Neowin.net. RAM cleaner got stopped by Windows 7 at 1,121,032K. Firefox is 103,584K.

So how do you actually crash Windows 7 without a Page File? Is there a certain way to do it? All I am getting is a bunch of signs that I am low on memory, but no BSOD as of yet. :)

[StarLion]

What do you expect from laptop hard drives? In what world do you live where everyone has a madly fast setup?

The only implication of my expectations is that they be overall faster than that SSD you have there.

That SSD has 120MB/s read speeds, 40MB/s write speeds, and 0.2ms access times (with spikes over 100ms if the drive is loaded).

The only thing that drive has going for it is sequential read speed, which isn't the most important factor for making a system responsive. In fact, the access times on that SSD can become so poor due to the stuttering issue, that it reduces your effective read speed by more than half.

Lets say you have a hard disk with a 10ms access time and an 80MB/s read speed. Such a hard disk can load 1MB in 0.0225 seconds.

Lets say you catch your SSD when it's writing anything to the drive. This means the drive has 100+ms access times (due to the stuttering issue) and 120MB/s read speeds. Reading 1MB from the drive takes 0.1083 seconds

Reading 1MB from the SSD took almost 1/10th of a second longer than the hard disk, even though the SSD has faster read speeds!

You are flaming my SSD.

Nope, just telling you the facts about it. Sorry if you don't like what you're hearing, not my fault you purchased it.

You are out of touch with reality if 100MB/s is slow for you.

As I explained above, raw sequential read performance isn't everything. Access times can make or break a drive's performance.

This is an ignore game. You are ignoring my arguments, I am ingoring yours.

I already told you why. Yet you keep replying.

See, that's the thing, I'm not ignoring you. I keep posting facts that correct your mindless FUD, and then you ignore the facts.

Your reasons for ignoring me are wholly invalid as well. You haven't backed yourself up with any facts as I have, you're simply saying "I'm right, you're wrong, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

Childish...

I can say the same about you, you willingfully ignore my arguments.

I've addressed all of your arguments. Sorry if you don't like the facts.

Restating the same thing AGAIN. Ingored.

Right. Right-right-right. That is the more memory argument!! Ignored.

*sigh* You still can't read, you're still wrong, and you're still ignoring facts.

BS. I has so much **** loaded on my netbook. Disabling Norton for example helped me a lot.

So you're running without an antivirus now as well? Oh boy, that could start a serious argument as well.

I have been reading your post.

Yes, I am ingoring anything that is a repeat of what you already said.

You don't see the conflict right there? How on earth can you claim to have been reading my posts when, just a second later, you claim you're ignoring me.

Also, I'm repeating correct information. Ignoring it wont change the facts. The best you could do is attempt to actually refute it rather than, once again, putting your fingers in your ears.

I understand your argument and you even offered a valid reason to have the PF in this long post of yours.

You do not have enough RAM without the PF.

Sorry, wrong. That's not the reason I've been putting forth. I don't know how you've still managed to miss it over, and over, and over.

There is no amount of memory you can add that will negate the benefits of the pagefile. These days, the pagefile is there to compliment memory management, which it will do no matter how much RAM you have installed.

The pagefile offers a place for Windows to dump old data and empty reserve space. It will do that with 1GB of RAM, it will do that with 4GB of RMA, it will do that with 8GB of RAM, etc. No matter how much RAM you add, the pagefile will help keep more of it clear for things that are actually useful.

I put you on my ignore user list. Congrats.

You can think that you won if that makes you happy.

...That's seriously you answer?

"I can't think of anything to refute your obviously factual information...so I'll just put you on ignore!"

Fingers-in-ears...no further proof needed.

[x-byte]

So how do you actually crash Windows 7 without a Page File? Is there a certain way to do it? All I am getting is a bunch of signs that I am low on memory, but no BSOD as of yet.?:))

You might not crash Windows. But removing the page file might break compatibility with some applications. This may have been improved since earlier Windows versions though. Although the symptoms you are getting just shows that you shouldn't disable it at all. The low memory situation is exactly what the page file is for.

[Sir Topham Hatt]

Tweaking software are useless today.

Even the Stardock "Tweak7" software?

Form the screenshots, I have seen some pretty useful tick boxes there.

[MagicAndre1981]

Windows will crash without a PF when a kernel mode driver tries to allocate more memory, than free memory is available.

[Joe User]

Windows will crash without a PF when a kernel mode driver tries to allocate more memory, than free memory is available.

Just to jump in here. For the average user, that situation is very rare after boot time.

Most users need the pagefile; however, there are a few that do not. If you have a 2+GB machine and your only applications are a browser, email and solitare, you can turn the pagefile off.

[hdood]

I think the conclusion here should be if you have a hard drive with only 2GB free (or whatever it was buddy had) and don't want to delete anything else and would rather have the space free, just disable the page file and experiment. If everything works fine, cool. For the rest of us it really doesn't matter, and we'll just leave it on.

[+allan MVC]

1) You should not "disable" the pagefile. There is NEVER an advantage to doing so.

2) You CANNOT disable the pagefile, only your ability to manage it. Windows OS's were designed to page. If you set the pagefile to zero the OS will create page space and you will never know it. Don't want it to take much space? Set it to a static size of 512 MB and forget about it. Otherwise leave it as system managed and forget about it. Either way, FORGET ABOUT IT.

3) These pagefile threads have always been: contentious, silly, and full of misinformation. We actually banned them on my forum 5 years ago. There is nothing mystical, magical, or even faintly important about the virtual memory settings. Leave them alone.

[hdood]

1) You should not "disable" the pagefile. There is NEVER an advantage to doing so.

It frees disk space, and is also necessary on systems running from RAM. There are legitimate reasons for not using it, although for most people there is no reason to.

2) You CANNOT disable the pagefile, only your ability to manage it. Windows OS's were designed to page. If you set the pagefile to zero the OS will create page space and you will never know it.

This is wrong. If you disable all page files, then they really are disabled. Windows never creates super secret page files on its own. Never. That Windows is designed to require one is also wrong.

I think this misconception originated with the fact that you see a "page faults" column in Task Manager, leading to people believing that this is counting how many times the machine is paging to/from disk. This is not what it is showing. The statistic shows all page faults, and this includes so called soft page faults which are when the page in question is not mapped into the process' address space but is still present in memory.

Another mistake people make is on the Performance tab. Here you see a "page file use" graph, which again leads people to believe that this is how much Windows is using the page file. A reasonable belief, perhaps, but they're completely wrong. What the graph shows is actually what's known in Windows as the commit charge. Simplified, this shows the total use of memory, and not just the page file.

The field that says "Paged" under Kernel Memory is also misleading. It doesn't show how much is actually present in the page file, it shows the amount of kernel data that could be paged to disk if necessary (things like the registry, for instance.) The "Nonpaged" field is the opposite, in other words the amount of data which can never be paged to disk under any circumstances.

3) These pagefile threads have always been: contentious, silly, and full of misinformation. We actually banned them on my forum 5 years ago.

Now that you know, you'll stop spreading misinformation yourself, I trust.

[+allan MVC]

1) Everything in my post above is correct

2) I will now gracefully bow out of this thread and allow all the rest of the experts to spread their, umm, knowledge

[hdood]

1) Everything in my post above is correct

2) I will now gracefully bow out of this thread and allow all the rest of the experts to spread their, umm, knowledge

No, it is not. It is completely wrong and outright misinformation. The very thing you accuse others of. You even mock them while doing it.

The only correct thing you said was that it's pointless to disable it on a normal system. That's it, the rest was wrong. I gave you the basic facts, which can easily be verified by anyone. Why not recognize that, and move on. Learn something new.

[StarLion]

No, it is not. It is completely wrong and outright misinformation.

Prove it...don't just yell "I'm right and you're wrong"

If you are indeed correct, then you should be able to find information to back yourself up. Right?

[hdood]

Prove it...don't just yell "I'm right and you're wrong"

If you are indeed correct, then you should be able to find information to back yourself up. Right?

When you choose the option that says no paging file (that is the actual name of it), it literally means that.

Would you like me to find a Microsoft site that says "Windows does not create secret page files?" Get real, we don't live in backwards land. It's the person that makes an outlandish claim that has to prove it. The onus is on them. That is how the real world works. I have explained how things actually are, and what I believe is the origin of the misconception that he has fallen victim to (the confusing terminology in the task manager in XP and earlier.)

[markwolfe Veteran]

It frees disk space, and is also necessary on systems running from RAM. There are legitimate reasons for not using it, although for most people there is no reason to.

...

:blink:

Clearing your internet cache frees up disk space, as does removing minesweeper, etc. These are much better suggestions for saving disk space.

And we are looking at, what? 500MB? If you have problems where paging goes to 5GB, you can set an upper limit that is more reasonable. That would also be a much better suggestion than disabling.

As far as RAM usage??? I am pretty sure that the code to swap to pagefile exists in RAM whether there is a pagefile or not. ;) So you aren't saving RAM, as it is loaded in anyhow. In fact, disabling the swap has the opposite effect on RAM that you claim! Think about it. When you disable the pagefile, it now has to keep data in RAM that is seldom accessed, instead of nicely sticking into a tiny bit of space on your hard drive.

I'm going to side with Allan here. Your suggestion is nonsensical. :yes:

[hdood]

:blink:

Clearing your internet cache frees up disk space, as does removing minesweeper, etc. These are much better suggestions for saving disk space.

And we are looking at, what? 500MB? If you have problems where paging goes to 5GB, you can set an upper limit that is more reasonable. That would also be a much better suggestion than disabling.

I agree. Personally I would delete something else. However, this guy seems insistent that he really only has <2GB of space left (it's a small SSD) and seems unwilling to delete anything else. In that case, disabling the page file frees some space. It may be stupid, but if that's what makes him happy, then fine.

As far as RAM usage??? I am pretty sure that the code to swap to pagefile exists in RAM whether there is a pagefile or not. ;) So you aren't saving RAM, as it is loaded in anyhow. In fact, disabling the swap has the opposite effect on RAM that you claim! Think about it. When you disable the pagefile, it now has to keep data in RAM that is seldom accessed, instead of nicely sticking into a tiny bit of space on your hard drive.

I think you misunderstood what I meant. I am talking about when you boot Windows from a RAM disk instead of a hard drive. It can be configured this way, and it's done in for instance the pre-installation environment (which is a small version of Windows) the installer runs in. Windows is designed to function in such an environment, although it's not one most people are familiar with.

I'm going to side with Allan here. Your suggestion is nonsensical. :yes:

I wasn't really making any suggestions. I was saying that he should just disable it if that's what makes him happy, and that it's not relevant for most other people. Hopefully you aren't agreeing with his claim that Windows creates secret page files even if you tell it not to. No OS that I know of will do that.