I have a dedicated Page File partition with min and max size set to the same size whic 99% fills the partition. All works well but I constantly get Low Disk Space warnings. I have changed the notification to Hide but it keeps on popping back-up. Any ideas - this is Win 8 (did the same thing in Win 7).

Ta

A.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

You're getting the message because you're using 99% of the available space.
It's Microsofts way of keeping you informed as to how your system is doing, as well as a way to tell you to go out and buy bigger hardware!
Try changing the swap file size to 95% of the available space.
Or reduce it in 1% decrements until the message goes away.

Or, if you really need a swap file that exact size, move it to a bigger partition, or make the partition bigger. Whatever is more practical.

HTH.

Stu.

Hi

There is a reg hack that can disable these warnings.

If you do a quick search in the net you should find it.

Here are a couple I found when looking:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67600-low-disk-space-warning-vista.html< /a>

http://brainwreckedtech.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/turning-off-low-disk-spac e-warnings-in-windows-vista-7/

Note: Manipulating your registry incorrectly can make bad things happen.....

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Sabbs

You're getting those messages for a reason. That reason will still be there if you switch them off.

Edited by andy cross (13/11/12 07:53 AM)

Quote andy cross:

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You're getting those messages for a reason. That reason will still be there if you switch them off.

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Thanks all.

Andy, I'm getting messages telling me that I have low disk space left on a dedicated page file partition that holds only a page file which is configured with both min and max limits to (almost) the size of the partition. You're absolutely correct but the message is a generic warning and in this case is redundant as that disk is intended to be permanently full.

A.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

Quote Andi:

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Quote andy cross:

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You're getting those messages for a reason. That reason will still be there if you switch them off.

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Thanks all.

Andy, I'm getting messages telling me that I have low disk space left on a dedicated page file partition that holds only a page file which is configured with both min and max limits to (almost) the size of the partition. You're absolutely correct but the message is a generic warning and in this case is redundant as that disk is intended to be permanently full.

A.

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There's a logic to your thinking, but it's not quite that simple.
Hard drives get more inefficient as they fill up.
They need space to breathe, so to speak.
The main reason for this is error handling.
As the drive ages, some sectors become unusable.
The OS should be able to manage this by ignoring that block and writing to a spare.
If you fill up the drive completely, the OS can't manage it efficiently, as it can't write info about bad sectors anywhere so when it hits them, it slows down to deal with the problem. The warning message is designed to happen in time for you to do something about it. Warning messages pop up for a reason.

Make the partition bigger, or the swap file smaller.
Allow at least 5% free space, even if you're never going to use it.
e.g. on a 4GB partition, set your swap file to a maximum of 3.6GB.

Stu.

Thanks for that, I figured that as the page file is the same size irrespective of how much data is paged out it wouldn't really matter?. I'll shrink it by 5% and see how we go. It's the page file by the way, not the swap file.

Thanks


A.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

Quote mpostor:

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There's a logic to your thinking, but it's not quite that simple.
Hard drives get more inefficient as they fill up.
They need space to breathe, so to speak.

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Not strictly true... File systems get more inefficient, not hard drives. Reliability of a drive has nothing to do with free space, it is down to physical defects from use or manufacturing weaknesses. If the file system only ever has one file (the page file) then Andi is absolutely right that the message is redundant.

Quote mpostor:

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The main reason for this is error handling.
As the drive ages, some sectors become unusable.
The OS should be able to manage this by ignoring that block and writing to a spare.

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Right idea, wrong culprit! What you say was true back in the days of Windows 98, but almost all drives now use SMART which handles this internally.
It is now the drive, not the operating system, that swaps out a damaged sector. Part of the hard drive is reserved and used by the drive firmware for this purpose.

Linux is happy to have a swap parition - it has no issue at all with you needing to keep free space on that partition (and doing it this way makes more sense anyway - Windows should have that option IMHO).

The 5% warning is there really because if you drop below that amount of free space on your main OS drive, it really does begin to have issues with performance. I like to keep at least 50Gb free on a Windows 7 drive - below that and I know it's time for a clean-up otherwise performance may start to get hit.

As for data drives, a 5% warning is sensible, as the last thing you want is to be working on a project and find you can't save it.

Windows just isn't designed to have a dedicated partition for a swap file, which is why it has the option to set its size limits and location etc. the way it does. Creating a dedicated partition for your swap file is therefore going to have the side-effect of an unwanted warning message unless you allow for that 5%, which will only ever be wasted space.

Edited by Magic Matt (14/11/12 07:12 PM)

Quote Andi:

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I have a dedicated Page File partition with min and max size set to the same size whic 99% fills the partition. All works well but I constantly get Low Disk Space warnings. I have changed the notification to Hide but it keeps on popping back-up. Any ideas - this is Win 8 (did the same thing in Win 7).

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Are you sure there's any benefit to doing this? There might have been, long ago, when RAM was in short supply and Windows was less effecient at using it for caching.

No I'm not, I'm not even quite convinced about the need for a PF with 12G of RAM. I turned it all off and experienced no noticeable issues. I have had the P drive in placed since XP days, it costs nothing, it avoids fragmentation on the C drive, makes the C drive quicker to image and avoids unnecessary writes when I move to SSD. To be honest I'm not even sure if all of that is true these days, but the cost of leaving it is still nil. Probably.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

As with anything, it depends upon how much RAM you use, and for what.

Things get complex depending on how the various applications are compiled, but it's entirely possible to have a 64bit program limited to 2Gb private address space, in which case it will start using the swap file if it requires more than 2Gb. All 32 bit programs are limited to 2Gb, regardless of whether or not you have a 64bit OS, so again if you use more than 2Gb within them they need the swap file.

As an example, the 32bit version of Photoshop on Windows 7 64bit with 24Gb RAM only uses 2Gb and needs the swap file when I start using a lot of layers etc. on large images. For this reason, I'm going to buy the 64bit Photoshop.

So having a swap file is still needed for some programs. As to whether or not it's useful to your music software, it will depend if it's a 32bit or 64bit version of the software, and whether is is compiled to be Large Address Aware.

Edited by Magic Matt (14/11/12 08:13 PM)

Thanks MM, all good info. Again, to be clear I'm talking about the Page File, not the Swap File.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

Quote Andi:

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Thanks MM, all good info. Again, to be clear I'm talking about the Page File, not the Swap File.

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They are interchangeable terms for the same thing (as far as Windows goes at least). Sorry for the confusion.

Quote Andi:

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Thanks MM, all good info. Again, to be clear I'm talking about the Page File, not the Swap File.

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Two names for the same thing, aren't they?

Nope, I have one of each.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

The difference between swapping and paging is that in the case of swapping an entire process can get swapped out of memory to disk, whereas in the case of paging individual pages of memory are paged to disk out of a process's current committed memory. Windows doesn't do swapping, it only does paging so it's unlikely that you've got both.

Moreover, only a part of a process's memory usage is actually backed by the page file: so-called image data which includes memory-mapped files and program code stored in executables and dlls isn't paged. That would be pointless since they're already stored on disk and therefore don't form part of the systems "commit charge". So given the amount of RAM people have now I think that you really have to be doing some very heavy workload to warrant going to town setting up the page file on it's own partition and so on.

I like the page file or swap file to be on their own partition, because it means you can put the partition on the part of the drive that is the fastest (pointless if you're using an SSD admittedly).

Not exactly "going to town", more of "it used to be there and it's still there": effort involved = nil, time involved = nil.

Wanna bet on the Page AND Swap files thing?

A.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

Quote Andi:

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Not exactly "going to town", more of "it used to be there and it's still there": effort involved = nil, time involved = nil.

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performance advantage = nil. I'd either put the page file on a different drive or keep it on the primary partition on the system drive together with the operating system files and eliminate the other partition.

Quote:

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Wanna bet on the Page AND Swap files thing?

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Sorry, I already put my money on Russinovich and Silberschatz. I won't try to convince you any further, though. I'll just say that anyone else reading this thread should take some of what's been said here on memory allocation and paging with a pinch of salt. This article on virtual memory is worth reading if you want to understand how it works. It's interesting stuff.

Cheers.

Quote Magic Matt:

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I like the page file or swap file to be on their own partition, because it means you can put the partition on the part of the drive that is the fastest (pointless if you're using an SSD admittedly).

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Putting the page file on a different drive is where the gains are. Anything after that is going to be of minimal advantage IMHO and if you're seeking such marginal gains you'd be better off just buying some more memory. There's no point to putting the page file in a different partition on the same drive since the disk just has to seek between that and the system partition which will just slow down disk access, if anything.

Quote Andi:

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Wanna bet on the Page AND Swap files thing?

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I'm intrigued to see how your going to try and win this bet.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote Pete Kaine:

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Quote Andi:

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Wanna bet on the Page AND Swap files thing?

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I'm intrigued to see how your going to try and win this bet.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

Edited by Andi (16/11/12 10:40 AM)

Quote Andi:

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Nope, I have one of each.

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Tell us how you arranged that, then?

From Fastest to Slowest, these are the configurations you can try:

• No swap file at all. Some software may fail.
  
• A static swap file on a separate hard drive (and preferably, controller) from Windows and frequently accessed data.
  
• A dynamic swap file on a separate hard drive (and preferably, controller) from Windows and frequently accessed data.
  
• A static swap file on a separate partition, but on the same physical hard drive as Windows.
  
• A dynamic swap file on a separate partition, but on the same physical hard drive as Windows.
  
• The Default: A dynamic swap file on the same partition and physical hard drive (usually C:) as Windows.
  

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Madman_Greg

Quote Rowboffin:

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Quote Magic Matt:

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I like the page file or swap file to be on their own partition, because it means you can put the partition on the part of the drive that is the fastest (pointless if you're using an SSD admittedly).

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Putting the page file on a different drive is where the gains are. Anything after that is going to be of minimal advantage IMHO and if you're seeking such marginal gains you'd be better off just buying some more memory. There's no point to putting the page file in a different partition on the same drive since the disk just has to seek between that and the system partition which will just slow down disk access, if anything.

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A second drive is preferable, and usually what I do - separate partition on a second drive. The laptop I mainly use, however, only has space for one physical drive.

Your assumption as to what happens in a single drive scenario however, is obviously based on theory rather than practice. I can tell you I get very roughly 20% better performance on average doing this with applications that use the paging/swap file. Obviously applications that don't need it get no advantage at all.

Adding more memory is pointless - simple fact is that most of these are 32bit apps, and will use the paging file when you need over 2Gb, even if the machine has 16Gb RAM or more.

Quote Exalted Wombat:

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Quote Andi:

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Nope, I have one of each.

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Tell us how you arranged that, then?

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Windows 8 has a swapfile.sys to suspecnd and resume Metro apps. If you don't have any Metro apps, it's pointless having it.

Quote Magic Matt:

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Your assumption as to what happens in a single drive scenario however, is obviously based on theory rather than practice. I can tell you I get very roughly 20% better performance on average doing this with applications that use the paging/swap file.

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From the usage of "very roughly" and "on average" I suspect that 20% figure is not based on any scientific measurement or benchmark and is more an indication of susceptibility to the placebo effect. Saying 20% is meaningless without any unit of measurement: 20% of what exactly? What measurements did you perform and what tools did you use? Which performance counters did you use to reach this conclusion? It is more likely that putting the page file on a separate partition on the same disk will have a detrimental effect simply because the disk now has to frequently seek between two more distant locations.

Quote:

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Adding more memory is pointless - simple fact is that most of these are 32bit apps, and will use the paging file when you need over 2Gb, even if the machine has 16Gb RAM or more.

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This is exactly the type of misinformation that I mentioned earlier. A 32-bit process simply cannot address more than 2GB of virtual memory (putting aside discussion of the Large Address Aware flag and the /3GB switch) and this limit has absolutely nothing to do with paging to disk. Paging is controlled by the memory manager on the basis of system-wide memory pressure. A single process's memory use alone doesn't trigger paging to disc, only it's contribution to the total. Read the Russinovich article I posted.

Most of this page file cargo-cult nonsense is premature optimisation, but if you are genuinely experiencing issues with paging to disk (and you've done the work to gather concrete evidence to establish that's actually your problem) then installing more system RAM is absolutely the best next step to take.

I missed that you're using Windows 8. Yes, there's a file called swapfile.sys although it's misnamed since what actually goes on under the hood is paging and not swapping by the accepted CS definition. When a Metro/"Modern" app is suspended its entire working set gets trimmed but that doesn't necessarily mean those pages get written to disk straightaway. They could just as easily soft-fault back into the process's working set just like any regular page before that happens. All pretty irrelevant anyway for musicians at this point I would have thought and not worth worrying about.

Quote Rowboffin:

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Quote Andi:

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Not exactly "going to town", more of "it used to be there and it's still there": effort involved = nil, time involved = nil.

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performance advantage = nil. I'd either put the page file on a different drive or keep it on the primary partition on the system drive together with the operating system files and eliminate the other partition.

Quote:

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Wanna bet on the Page AND Swap files thing?

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Sorry, I already put my money on Russinovich and Silberschatz. I won't try to convince you any further, though. I'll just say that anyone else reading this thread should take some of what's been said here on memory allocation and paging with a pinch of salt. This article on virtual memory is worth reading if you want to understand how it works. It's interesting stuff.

Cheers.

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No performance improvement for no effort nor cost seems acceptable Oh, not sure if I said earlier but the Page File partition IS on a different physical drive to the system drive.

A.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

Quote Rowboffin:

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Quote Magic Matt:

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Your assumption as to what happens in a single drive scenario however, is obviously based on theory rather than practice. I can tell you I get very roughly 20% better performance on average doing this with applications that use the paging/swap file.

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From the usage of "very roughly" and "on average" I suspect that 20% figure is not based on any scientific measurement or benchmark and is more an indication of susceptibility to the placebo effect. Saying 20% is meaningless without any unit of measurement: 20% of what exactly?

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No it's a rough figure because I can't be bothered to sift through the tons of benchmarks I've done previously on machines I've setup and run over several years, so pulled the figure from memory. I'm not going to go digging around in my benchmark archives and post all the exact figures here - simple fact is they're not as well organised as they probably should be, and it would take me ages to find them.

20% faster than letting Windows mess around with it, which is the "default" setting.

Quote Rowboffin:

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What measurements did you perform and what tools did you use?

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Photoshop - Opening and closing large files, running processing filters across multiple layers, running compound actions - I'm a graphics person. I mostly times these things with a stop-watch - seemed the easiest way.

I also timed various functions with multiple Virtual Machines running - not something I do a lot of, but I do develop simple cross-platform applications and I use Oracle VirtualBox to run WinXP, MacOS, CentOS5 for real-time debugging while developing under Win7.

Quote Rowboffin:

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Which performance counters did you use to reach this conclusion? It is more likely that putting the page file on a separate partition on the same disk will have a detrimental effect simply because the disk now has to frequently seek between two more distant locations.

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No offence intended, but I don't really care what you think is more likely, I just care what the machine does. It's a very simple philosophy I grant you, but I set it up, test it a few times, and if it works I keep it, and if it doesn't I change it. Usually that consists of loading a few memory intensive apps and files, and timing a before and after with the stopwatch. Not the most scientific possibly, but enough to eliminate any placebo effect.

Laptop is maxed out on 4Gb sadly, but nevertheless runs nice and snappy with a 16Gb Paging file on a seperate partition. Why so big? Because it works better than when I had it at 8Gb (when Windows would start really grinding if I was working on an exceptionally large project), and 24Gb was just wasteful. The partition is 24Gb, so that gives me a space to master DVD ISOs to before writing them too, which has proven useful.

I have a desktop machine that has the same CPU (same spec - desktop CPU obviously) - it has 16Gb RAM, and the extra RAM makes very little difference to the heavy large files. The biggest difference to that machine was moving the paging file to a separate drive... until I pulled a crafty trick...

Now I can accept it may be down to the way the applications are written or any number of esoteric factors that I don't know about, but when you get down to it, that's what works, so that's what I do, and I know the data is going into the paging file even when there's plenty of unused RAM because simple fact is if I open the Disk Editor and look at the sectors with the paging file on them, I can see the data.

As for the crafty trick - I've setup an 12Gb RAM drive and put the paging file on that (it's created every time I boot - I don't know how to make a RAM drive persistent). The result there is Photoshop and QuarkXpress now run like they've got a rocket up their backsides. This leaves me only 4Gb of main RAM, but it's not even marginally faster, it's like day and night.

So yeah, article all very interesting, but that doesn't seem to tally with the way Adobe Creative Suite, Corel Draw or QuarkXpress actually behave, which are the main applications that hit the paging file. Fortunately the new versions I'll eventually get are 64bit, so it will become an irrelevant debate anyway... I can't see me ever editing data in the several Tb arena. As for Dreamweaver, Sonar, Chrome, Outlook, Word... they never use enough RAM for it to make any difference anyway. Even running Steinberg TheGrand with the entire sample library in RAM seems happy.

If I were running lots of VSTs/SoftSynths with big sample libraries, I'd install those onto an SSD. You can get 120Gb SSDs for around £40 now, hence you can guess my next PC upgrade...

Quote Magic Matt:

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No offence intended, but I don't really care what you think is more likely, I just care what the machine does.

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No offence taken. Nor do I particularly care what you do with your page file: hey, it's your PC, knock yourself out. But if someone makes statements about the way memory management and disk access work that run counter to the established facts sourced from respected authorities then they can expect some pushback. I'm fine considering what I've said as theories in the scientific sense of a hypothesis supported by a sufficient weight of credible evidence, but that's clearly not what you meant when you dismissed me.

I also know enough about computers to know that it isn't often that you can make broad declarative statements like "If you do X then that will always and in all cases make performance noticeably worse", not least because of the vagueness of what is actually meant by "performance" and the unreliability of subjective impressions of it. But you can make statements of likelihood based on how a system actually works. I've spent some time load testing server applications and measuring this stuff properly is hard. The answer you get depends on what specific question you ask, how you ask it, what measurements you include and which you ignore. I've also worked on applications where developers have done the craziest things supposedly in the name of performance that were not in the least based in fact but at the end of the day the system as whole worked well enough and the end user was oblivious to what actually went on under the hood, so at best you could say they got away with it. Anyway, you can consider me as remaining unconvinced, and you're free to care as little as you like about that, but I'm happy to leave it at that.

I've been using SSDs for a couple of years now and they're a great investment as a primary drive, especially now that the figures for mean time to failure have improved such that they're comparable with spinning platters. I paired mine with a fast secondary 1TB spinning platter drive for data because I wanted the capacity. When SSDs fail they fail hard, though: they seem to go from working fine to thoroughly broken in an instant and nowhere in-between.

Quote Andi:

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No performance improvement for no effort nor cost seems acceptable Oh, not sure if I said earlier but the Page File partition IS on a different physical drive to the system drive.

A.

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On a different drive, eh? I thoroughly approve.

Quote Rowboffin:

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Quote Andi:

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No performance improvement for no effort nor cost seems acceptable Oh, not sure if I said earlier but the Page File partition IS on a different physical drive to the system drive.

A.

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On a different drive, eh? I thoroughly approve.

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So do I, in theory. Whether it makes any practical difference is another matter.

So much of what we "know" was laid down when we had computers with 100MB of RAM and needed SCSI drives in order to run a DAW at all...

My first DAW had 16kB RAM... the only equivelent you had to a paging file was to page things in and out of "Sideways RAM" which wasn't exactly elegant!

Seems insane to think that I can buy a 120Gb SSD for less than I paid back then for an extra 16k RAM pack.

How things have changed, eh?