Question about performance impact based on location of swap file
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Thread: Question about performance impact based on location of swap file

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
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    886

    Question about performance impact based on location of swap file

    So, I have a rather convoluted Frankenstein setup. My original system setup had two SSDs in RAID0 as the OS drive (I know I know...), since I had 32GB of ram the default Swap and Hibernation file sizes took up a lot of space on those SSDs, so I disabled hibernate and manually set the swap file to have a max size of 8GB since in my tests even when I intentionally overloaded the system with as many tasks as I would ever do at once it never hit even 6GB of usage.... granted this was when I first built it years ago.

    Few years later I was having issues, and assuming it was the SSD, imaged the OS to a spare 5400RPM HDD I had of the same size as the array at the time..... on top of the massive impact to performance this caused, I was getting out of memory errors. Windows REALLY loves to use Swap even if you have tons of RAM free.... so due to both the performance impact and how I had low free space left, I got a cheap 128GB SSD and tossed my swap file on there, with no size limits anymore.

    Anyway, much later I finally confirmed my SSDs were fine, so I imaged the HDD back to the SSD array. But now I am wondering what to do with the Swap file. The SSDs in RAID0 are using up the only two SATA6Gb ports on my motherboard, so the SSD that's housing the swap (and some other app's temp folders) is running off of only SATA3Gb.

    Would the fact that the OS drive (that also holds all my apps and games) is constantly reading and writing and running several programs at once while the Swap SSD is only housing the Swap file and other temp files make any difference in swap performance in making it a better candidate to have my Swap file on? Or would the impact of the Swap file also being on the same SSD as a heavily used make it more beneficial to put the Swap file on a different drive, even if that drive is using Sata 3Gb instead of Sata 6Gb?

    Or would any difference in Swap performance if I go either route be so negligible that it does not matter?
    Last edited by Cyber Akuma; September 8th, 2019 at 06:54 PM.
    "A train station is where a train stops. A bus station is where a bus stops. On my desk I have a workstation..." - William Faulkner

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Sep 1999
    Location
    Largo, Fl.
    Posts
    22,322
    Set it and forget it... Let Windows manage the size so you can move on with life...

    Computers are so fast these days that squeezing another .003 percent of performance no longer matters.... Unless you simply don't have anything else to do.
    If you're happy and you know it......it's your meds.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2000
    Location
    Idaho Falls, Idaho, USA
    Posts
    18,063
    If your swap file is on the SSD, then you should have decent performance regardless of what else it is doing, especially if it is not used much. Try it there and see if performance appears adequate.

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