Increase hard disk speed by setting the paging files to a non-expanding optimal size. This will prevent the operating system from re-sizing the paging file. It will also decrease swapping to disk and reduce fragmentation of the paging file.
The paging file is used regardless of how much physical RAM is in the system. This makes this setting extremely important. Windows 2000 supports up to 16 simultaneous paging files and can read and write to multiple paging files simultaneously. There are many ways to configure this. Below are suggestions to configure the size and location of these files.
To estimate how many megabytes your paging file needs, load the applications you normally use. Open Task Manager (press control-alt-delete), click the Performance tab and find the Total Commit Charge. This is the amount of memory your system is using at the moment. Add 32MB to this and this is a good starting minimum virtual memory size. The optimal configuration is to set the minimum and maximum to the same size, preventing the OS from resizing the file. For example, if you regularly use 5 applications simultaneously and they consume 60MB counting memory used by the OS, a good setting would be to set the total of all paging files for 96MB. If this system has 64MB of physical memory, that would yield a total of 160MB of usable memory.
Additional consideration for Servers
Servers run multiple applications and provide resources to every client on your network. Each network client puts additional strain on memory and resources. If your server ran out of memory this would halt operations for the entire network. It is recommended that you add at least an additional 128MB or more to the size of the paging file.
This is a complicated decision and is limited by the number of drives in your PC. There are numerous ways to configure this with each solution giving differing levels of performance. Below are some suggestions.
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