On 28/11/2015 02:09, Johnny B Good wrote:
What's worse are the invented pagefile options available of which the
worst one (adjust pagefile size automatically - on the fly, both upwards
and downwards), is the default setting on new installs - including every
major OEM setup I've ever seen.

The other options are "System Managed" (whatever the **** that means)
and setting a minimum and a maximum size limit (there may be another one
but I'm just remembering this off the top of my head). On an HDD
installation, this default is really bad news since the constant resizing
activity magnifies the effect of file fragmentation as well as adding
extra overhead to the paging algorithm.

The other day I was somewhat surprised to find a PC with about 40 GB of
page file. I doubt anyone would have anticipated that high a usage - so
in that particular case, allowing it to grow might have prevented the
system falling over. (Though whether that would have been just once, or
repeatedly, is difficult to guess.) However, given the scale of hard
disc drives, even allowing 100 GB dedicated wouldn't have much impact on
most modern machines not using SSDs. (Also questions your suggestion
that the default OEM install would end up adjusting the page file size
downwards. This was a default OEM install. Page file still vaster than
needed.)

I have many times set up a partition exclusively for paging (in
Windows). From memory, if you have two page files, traffic goes to the
one with most space left. So a small C: drive page file just to get
going and a large paging partition ends up using the partition for most
swaps.

--
Rod