How To Improve Your Swapfile Performance

A response to comment #2
This tip is based on a complete misunderstanding of how XP manages memory. It is commonly believed that XP is pagefile happy, it uses the pagefile much too soon and much too often than is either necessary or desireable. Wrong on all counts.

This belief is usually based on the information given in Task Manager. The "Available" physical memory is usually thought of as free memory. This is incorrect, the majority of this memory is actually in use, for caching, etc., but is available for immediate use if necessary.

The field "PF Usage" does not represent data written to the pagefile. It represents potential use. The size that is actually used is much smaller. Much of what is written is done during idle time and has no impact on performance.

Bottom line: XP manages memory very well on it's own. Most "tweaks" that supposedly improve memory performance actually impair it in most cases. They are based on a faulty understanding of how XP works. The descriptions of these tweaks is usually hopelessly wrong.

Larry Miller

@Larry Miller
Then Is there a way to archieve the same effect under XP or Vista (besides disabling the swap-file)?

The author does not mention this but this setting is for Windows 98 and ME only. It will do nothing in XP or any other NT platform OS. In these systems the system.ini file is maintained for compatibility with old 16 bit applications only.  Most settings will be ignored. Even in Windows 98 the setting did not work as described.  It did not prevent swap file usage until physical memory was exhausted, it simply used it less.