How much ram req'd to delete swap file?

[Elmo Putney]

I'm considering a re-build of my NPVR box for a few reasons:

I need dvbs2 and t2
I want a smaller case
I didn't envisage 2 clients and HD when I put it together
The old one has been "up" for 4 years...wondering what the longevity is of a permanently powered up box?
I want to.

The motherboard I'm looking at only has 2 dimm slots and quotes 16GB as the maximum memory, I am assuming this would be enough to get rid of the swap file to avoid non-pvr related disk read/writes, but what can I look at/monitor on my current server to see if I'm going to exceed that?

I've got process explorer from sysinternals on my box, when I look at the Memory tab it reports several things:

Commit Charge
current
limit
peak

Physical Memory
total
available
system cache

Kernal memory
paged ws
paged virtual
nonpaged etc....


Paging
"more stuff"


Which one can I monitor to tell me if I deleted the page file I would or would not run out of memory...or is it more complicated than that?

[pBS]

it's way more complicated than that unfortunately...
normally win + npvr in operation never reaches a gig, but that doesn't mean you can get rid of swap file..
for very long and drawn out reasons, windows wants swap file space to back every program in memory, whether it's being used to offload it or not..

yes, you can get rid of the swap altogether, but then try to do a scandisk [chkdsk] on a drive and it'll run out of memory...[or defrag]
[unless drive is smaller than available memory]
and a few other oddities that wouldn't seem to be related..

to stop windows from unnecessary disk accesses, turn off win search service, drive indexing, and the boot optimizing defrag..
[that gets most of the disk accesses down]

[Elmo Putney]

long discussion on it here:http://serverfault.com/questions/23621/a...am-machine

some good learning in there

[imilne]

I've never run a swap file on any of my high memory systems and haven't noticed any issues. Two of them just have 4GB as well.

As for DVB-S2 and DVB-T2; why bother with the latter? You'll get (arguably) better quality with DVB2, the same channels, the cards are cheaper, and all of the HD stuff will be in Dolby Digital rather than AAC making your NPVR codec life a lot easier.

Iain

[gEd]

I've never run WITHOUT a swap file on any of my high memory (4GB/8GB) systems and haven't noticed any issues...Win7 is a great OS out of the box. It doesn't need hacking to make it behave well.
As explained above, swap doesn't "kick in" when a high watermark is reached. It is intrinsic to windows normal process and memory management.

Personally I would put the money spent trying to avoid the use of swap space, towards other components such as a top quality PSU (seasonic), Noctura fans, better case etc.

[johnsonx42]

You really shouldn't ever disable the swap file. All advice to do so is based on old information and gross misunderstanding of how windows memory management works. While it's true that doing so often has no apparent ill effect, it doesn't help anything either. A single-use machine like a HTPC is less likely to encounter any issues with swap disabled.

[mvallevand]

johnsonx42, typo on the last word?

Martin

[johnsonx42]

no, perhaps I softened my own point, but what I meant was that a general purpose system that runs lots of different programs is more likely to encounter problems with swap disabled. so therefore many people may say "I disabled swap on my single-use HTPC and have no problems so it must be a good idea", when it's not the sort of system that would tend to encounter such problems in the first place.

[mvallevand]

Ok thanks for the clarification since as a standalone sentence I disagreed. I still don't categorically agree now either since for the single-purpose machines HTPC, people (not the OP) quite often are penny-pinching on the RAM, CPU and the swap still might be more important just because of Win7 optimization.

Martin

[Elmo Putney]

why bother with the latter?

Dish won't be pointing at 28.2 - my wife is French

I am generally tending towards not getting rid of the swap file based on this discussion - though I might try it out just to see.