I've seen reading several approaches to this, but wanted to hear what people are actually doing in the field when it comes to sizing the swap file [pagefile.sys] on Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2 & 2016. I know Microsoft's old guidelines for a 32-bit OS with maximum 4GB RAM recommended sizing the swap file at 1.5-2x RAM. Now, with 64-bit OS and lets say minimum 16GB RAM, these guidelines seem wasteful of disk space; also you
shouldn't be relying on the swap file as there's nothing slower than disk if you're swapping to/from memory. Should we just size the swap file to capture the dump if the server crashes? I've manually been setting most of my servers to minimum 4GB and maximum 6GB to conserve disk space, but my application development team complains they're experiencing performance problems because the swap file is too small, but if they're relying on swap to improve performance, it doesn't matter how
large the file is, it'll be slow. I'm on target here, aren't I? Thank you. check Best Answer
checkBest Answer
Point 1
Microsoft recommends 1.5 times the physical memory so the memory can be saved to the page file in the event of a crash. This was important before Windows 7 came out since Windows had a lot of driver issues [BSOD]. I challenge anyone to acknowledge that they have EVER sent a swap file dump to Microsoft or used such a dump in any way before Microsoft actually had them capture a dump using other methods.
Sizing the page file based on memory size is just dumb. Even Microsoft has changed their recommendations for sizing when systems have 64 GB or more memory. They recommend 8 GB page file size in these cases.
Point 2
Paging memory to disk is a good way to reduce overall system performance - especially when your machine is virtualized. Why page memory to disk both on the VM and the host when both the VM and the host are likely to use file cache for the page file?
Personal recommendations:
Use a page file because some programs force it. Try to set at 300 MB. If that causes issues, set it to 1 GB in size. No more than that.
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