Windows 7 Pagefile/Superfetch/ReadyBoot discussion

[Chrysalis]

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.

If you reffering to me.

1 - I said for people with large amounts of ram the ram issue is minor to non existant.

2 - I never said superfetch was a complete waste of time but rather I expect it does more harm than good on a overall basis, logically thinking pre caching can only suit specific usage patterns. The issue is more to do with load on the hdd rather than ram as far as I am concerned. Since to copy that data into ram it has to load it of the hdd.

3 - I also acknowledged the algorithm was improved in windows 7 this was very noticeable, I also know this because I have spoken to some senior developers at microsoft who more or less confirmed they got it wrong in vista but windows 7 will handle it a lot better.

So having things cached is great.

However superfetch is not required to utilise cache, if you want higher utilisation of ram enable the largesystem cache reg setting.

Caching at the expense of not having things swapped? bad.

superfetch increases the likelyhood of swapping. So bad in a ram constrained environment.

superfetch can cause your hdd to be used when the system is otherwise idle, for some of us this is bad.

I have read the documents, I have had discussions with developers, and boot time optimisation is not handled by superfetch, superfetch kicks in when you see the desktop. Prefetch and another new feature handles boot optimisation. Incidently I am also not telling everyone to turn off superfetch only people who have 1 gig or less ram. I hope this clears some things up on my point of view.

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.

we are not the same person + I said disabling the pagefile is pointless :)

[Brandon Live Veteran]

If you reffering to me.

1 - I said for people with large amounts of ram the ram issue is minor to non existant.

2 - I never said superfetch was a complete waste of time but rather I expect it does more harm than good on a overall basis, logically thinking pre caching can only suit specific usage patterns. The issue is more to do with load on the hdd rather than ram as far as I am concerned. Since to copy that data into ram it has to load it of the hdd.

SuperFetch is only partly about pre-caching data. And it's actually extremely good at pre-caching the right stuff. We have instrumentation of this. It is almost never a waste.

But SuperFetch does a lot more than that. One important aspect we've discussed in this thread is that it pulls pages from the page file back into memory when memory becomes available.

3 - I also acknowledged the algorithm was improved in windows 7 this was very noticeable, I also know this because I have spoken to some senior developers at microsoft who more or less confirmed they got it wrong in vista but windows 7 will handle it a lot better.

Most everything worked great in Vista. The main change for Windows 7 is that it is less aggressive about trying to populate all of your free RAM with cache data (which, on large memory system, results in a lot of I/O). Some of this is more about perceived performance than actual performance (people think if their hard drive is making noise or the light is blinking, that things are going slower even if they aren't). But some of it is real as well...

So having things cached is great.

However superfetch is not required to utilise cache, if you want higher utilisation of ram enable the largesystem cache reg setting.

Don't change arbitrary registry keys. There's no need, the default system caching strategy has been extremely well tested and tuned.

Caching at the expense of not having things swapped? bad.

Not sure what this means.

superfetch increases the likelyhood of swapping. So bad in a ram constrained environment.

Absolutely untrue. You clearly do not understand what SuperFetch does. It explicitly reduces the chances that pages are in the page file. That is its entire purpose.

I have read the documents, I have had discussions with developers, and boot time optimisation is not handled by superfetch, superfetch kicks in when you see the desktop. Prefetch and another new feature handles boot optimisation. Incidently I am also not telling everyone to turn off superfetch only people who have 1 gig or less ram. I hope this clears some things up on my point of view.

Right, prefetch and SuperFetch are not related in any way.

[Mineria]

Been running without ReadyBoot, ReadyBoost, Superfetch and Pagefile for quite some time now.

Since far before I made my first reply in this thread.

So far I did not have any issues with it on my system.

Always enough memory, always fast boot times and even fast app loading times.

I did measure my boot and load times, and it is faster on my system this way, so nothing to discuss.

With my SSD Windows 7 disables ReadyBoot, ReadyBoost, Superfetch and automatic defrag anyway, so no point in turning it back on.

As for what people should do, let them try and collect their own results.

In the end they can do what ever that suits them best.

[techguy77]

Lets just set some ground rules here:

1. NEVER disable the pagefile:

Disabling the pagefile can cause all sorts of problems and strange issues. Some applications will simply refuse to start without a pagefile.

IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW MUCH RAM YOU HAVE, do not disable it. If you really must, change it to a small fixed size of around 500MB.

2. NEVER disable SuperFetch:

This is an idle-time service that uses otherwise free resources. Turning this off will only hurt performance (even if you have an SSD).

3. NEVER disable Readyboost:

This is another idle time service; turning this off will hurt boot times (even if you don't have a flash drive dedicated to ReadyBoost).

1. Not true

2. Not true

3. Not true

SuperFetch is only partly about pre-caching data. And it's actually extremely good at pre-caching the right stuff. We have instrumentation of this. It is almost never a waste.

But SuperFetch does a lot more than that. One important aspect we've discussed in this thread is that it pulls pages from the page file back into memory when memory becomes available.

Most everything worked great in Vista. The main change for Windows 7 is that it is less aggressive about trying to populate all of your free RAM with cache data (which, on large memory system, results in a lot of I/O). Some of this is more about perceived performance than actual performance (people think if their hard drive is making noise or the light is blinking, that things are going slower even if they aren't). But some of it is real as well...

Don't change arbitrary registry keys. There's no need, the default system caching strategy has been extremely well tested and tuned.

Not sure what this means.

Absolutely untrue. You clearly do not understand what SuperFetch does. It explicitly reduces the chances that pages are in the page file. That is its entire purpose.

Right, prefetch and SuperFetch are not related in any way.

Ok. So how come my system does not suffer any performance problems after disabling superfetch, infact there is no a single difference? I don't know technical details of Superfetch technology, can you explain to me why MS disables superfetch if system runs on SSD?