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appropriate sizing for pagefile.sys with awe

  • December 15, 2005 at 3:17 pm

    #111570

    Hello all,

    We are in the process of purchasing an additional 8 gigabytes of ram for a windows 2003 server running ms sql 2000 enterprise edition. We are currently using awe to address the 8 gig that we have installed now. in total after the new ram is installed we will have 16gb.

    If we install this ram, how should we expect to size the pagefile? All of the research I have done indicates that the pagefile should be sized to 1.5 x the amount of physical ram in the machine. I cant imagine that we'd need to burn 24 gigs of ram on a page file.

    My thought is that since the os can only address 4gb that the page file should remain at 6gb regardless of whether or not we add ram.

    any thoughts?

    Thanks and Regards,

    Robert Schnettler

  • December 16, 2005 at 12:09 am

    #609966

    Hi Robert,

    Though 1.5 times the amount of physical RAM is recommended, maximum allowed size for any one instance of pagefile.sys on a machine is limited to 4GB. So, you can create several Pagefile.sys files and place them on different physical disks drives. This will also improve performance.

    Also you can monitor how PageFile.sys is used in production with the help of Performance Monitor. Check  % Usage counter to resize the PageFile.sys.

     

    Thanks & Regards,
    Ramanathan M.

  • December 16, 2005 at 9:11 am

    #610094

    I would think the more ram installed on a machine, the LESS swapfile you would need?

  • December 16, 2005 at 9:45 am

    #610102

    Thanks guys!

  • December 16, 2005 at 9:51 am

    #610105

    "I would think the more ram installed on a machine, the LESS swapfile you would need?"

    I think that in general the rule of thumb is to estimate and then scale back based on perfmon stats. we arent currently doing much paging at all, but it is probably best to have enough swap to ingest a kernel dump and with 16gb of ram, I'm not exactly sure what that would entail. knowing of a 4gb hard limit is very handy as it gives an agreed upon frame of reference that all involved can work with as our scale grows.

    I appreciate the timely replies.

    Robert Schnettler

  • December 16, 2005 at 10:19 am

    #610116

    actually, as I'm continuing to research, I have discovered that a 32 bit x86 system running the PAE kernel can have up to a 16 terabytes in size.

  • December 16, 2005 at 2:52 pm

    #610173

    actually, as I'm continuing to research, I have discovered that a 32 bit x86 system running the PAE kernel can have a pagefile that is up to 16 terabytes in size.

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