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I am using Windows Server 2008 Enterprise. I heard it is better to store page file on the same disk as OS (normally disk C), is that correct? If so, any document about this point?

thanks in advance, George

George2
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    George2: You've asked this question 3 times here now, haven't you? – joeqwerty Jul 01 '10 at 02:21
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    @joeqwerty: Hrmph... looks like he has. I wish I'd looked before answering. It sure looks like he's really, really worried about his pagefile. – Evan Anderson Jul 01 '10 at 02:36
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    @Evan: I'd say so... – joeqwerty Jul 01 '10 at 02:53
  • I asked, but I think I am not asking in the correct words (sorry English is not my native language). And I have not got any documents for this topic. This is why I want to re-write and ask. Thank you! – George2 Jul 01 '10 at 03:28
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    from the sounds of it I'd think you should get familiar with both support.microsoft.com and technet.com. This question has been asked an answered a million times. Both of these links will provide any answer that your looking for. To me Serverfault is for when you don't have time and or don't care to fully understand the technology that you are using. I don't put you in the later category, I'm pretty sure your trying to understand things. Serverfault.com is nice but the advice pertaining to the entire Microsoft stack is worth what you are paying for it, in other words not much! – tony roth Jul 01 '10 at 05:43

1 Answers1

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The best place to store the paging file is on a volume that allows for fast, random access. If your server's workload is such that there's not a lot of random IO occurring on the volume where the OS is located then putting the pagefile there is fine. Ideally, you'll have enough physical RAM that you're not paging a lot so it won't matter than much anyway.

If you're planning a workload that will involve any quantity of paging and random IO on the OS volume then you might want to consider a paging volume on a dedicated spindle.

In several documents re: application performance improvement Microsoft makes statements re: putting the pagefile on a dedicated volume. In Operating System Optimizations for BizTalk Server, just as an example, they state:

Isolate the paging file onto one or more dedicated physical drives that are configured as either RAID-0 (striping) or RAID-1 (mirroring) arrays, or on single disks without RAID - By using a dedicated disk or drive array where PAGEFILE.SYS is the only file on the entire volume, the paging file will not become fragmented, which will also improve performance.

You'll find statements like that in documents relating to SQL Server, Exchange, and general OS performance. The pagefile, assuming paging is occurring, is a sink for random IO capacity.

Be warned, though, that if you don't have a pagefile on the OS volume at least the size of physical memory + 1MB the OS won't be able to write complete physical memory dumps in the event of a crash. If full memory dumps aren't important to you then you can get away with a smaller pagefile on the OS volume. Small memory dumps can be written into smaller page files, though. See KB254649 for details and for information about the "rules" in Windows Vista, Server 2008, and 7.

Evan Anderson
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