Q. What's the ideal page-file size?

A. It's common to base page-file size on a system's amount of physical RAM. A common recommendation is to set the page-file size at 1.5-times the system's RAM. In reality, the more RAM a system has, the less it requires page files. You should base your page-file size on the maximum amount of memory your system is committing. Your page-file size should equal your system's peak commit value (which covers the unlikely situation in which all the committed pages are written to the disk-based page files).

In Windows XP and Server 2003, you can find the peak-commit value under the Task Manager Performance tab. However, this option wasn't included in Windows Server 2008 and Vista. To determine Server 2008 and Vista peak-commit values, you have two options:

Download Process Explorer from the Microsoft "Process Explorer v11.20" web page. You'll need a program capable of opening .zip archives, such as WinZip or ZipGenius. Open the .zip file and double click procexp.exe. Click View on the toolbar and select System Information. Under Commit Charge (K), find the Peak value, as the following figure shows:
Use Performance Monitor to log the Memory - Committed Bytes counter, and review the log to find the Maximum value.

Make sure you run the server with all of its expected workloads to ensure it's using the maximum amount of memory while you're monitoring.

End of Article

Thank you for the counters and step-by-step. Also liked the article being tuned for current OS's as well as Vista.

According to the second edition of the RED HAT LINUX NETWORK TOOLKIT by Paul G. Sery it's considered a good rule of thumb to allocate 2.5 times the physical RAM to the swap partition for any demand-paged virtual memory Operating Systems.
This Windows KB goes into detail regarding 64-bit OS's, but much of it still applies: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889654.

There's plenty of opinions out there, but put simply your page file:
1. Should be able to accommodate a full dump of physical memory, so it can't be smaller than your total physical memory.
2. Should have a static size. I don't like keeping the default windows setting of having a different initial and maximum size as I'm suspicious of the amount of system resources being spent trying to continuously(?) caculate the optimal size for the stupid page file.

Personally I use the 2.5, but unless close scrutiny of the perfmon counters mentioned in this and other articles proves different I can't imagine it would make much of a difference.

Tallarico August 04, 2008 (Article Rating:

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Defrag your hard disk before setting a static size. That way, it's continuous. Additionally, the page file should reside on the fastest drive installed (usually the newest and usually the same drive as the OS).

ebraiter@videotron.ca August 06, 2008 (Article Rating:

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