Can a swap file be too big?

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup (More info?)

Rob Nicholson wrote:
> An idle question but can a Windows 2000 Professional swap file be too big?
> Mainly thinking from a performance angle here. When we were developing a
> program, there was a memory leak so we made the swap file huge until it was
> fixed - 3GB on a 256MB PC. The leak is fixed now but just wondered if
> there's any reason to reduce the swap file back down to more reasonable size
> (recommends ~400MB).
>

You almost answered your own question:

An excessively large swap file can mask the
misbehaviour of a leaking app. Sometimes you
might want to do that, but I suspect most people
would want the symptoms of a leaking app to become
obvious quickly so that they can take steps to
deal with the problem.

Other than things like that, so long as you are not
strapped for hard drive space there is no harm in
having a huge swap file.

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup (More info?)

Adding indices can usually dramatically speed up performance in database
applications.

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File System

Want to email me? Delete ntloader.

"Rob Nicholson" <informed@community.nospam> wrote in message
news:%23OYXsAWhEHA.536@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
> > might want to do that, but I suspect most people
> > would want the symptoms of a leaking app to become
>
> Well the problem was that the server that our server service was running
on
> had a memory leak somewhere so we had to increase the swap file so that
our
> server would run for more than a couple of days before the server ran out
of
> resources. We had a real problem convincing the customer it wasn't a
problem
> with our software even though the leak was obviously not in our
> executable...
>
> > Other than things like that, so long as you are not
> > strapped for hard drive space there is no harm in
> > having a huge swap file.
>
> We reduced the swap file back down but also adding some key indexes to the
> database (256MB), primarily foreign/parent keys. Since then, the server
> processes the main print run at about 3 times faster than before. I can't
> believe this is reduction in the swap file size so guess it's the
> re-indexing.
>
> Cheers, Rob.
>
>