tweak windows 7 virtual memory and cache / caching settings

Question

im on windows 7 64 bit, with 4gb of memory

whenever i copy or deal with a big ammount of data, windows swaps out everything from memory to the virtual memory swapfile, to make room to data cache.

the problem is: i dont really need caching of this data im copying, its being copied only once, cacheing this data won't help me. on the other hand, swapping out the programs will give me a big lag time whenever i want to use those open programs again.

what i want: restrict data cache to a certain ammount, lets say 1gb, or reserve a certain ammount of memory, lets say 2gb, exclusively for running programs memory.

my swap file is on a separate partition, but i still have problems with swapping time.

Answer 1

Setting the pagefile to 0 GB does not prevent Windows from paging. Most paging does not involve the pagefile at all and this will continue, even with no pagefile. Paging is as normal and necessary in Windows as breathing is to you and I. Almost all disk IO is done with paging. Disabling the pagefile unbalances the memory management system and generally results in more paging, not less.

Don't confuse the pagefile and cache, they are used for very different purposes.

Answer 2

I kind of worked around this problem by using an utility called TeraCopy, that replaces windows copy/move. It have an option to disable write cache, so Windows don't start swapping out running programs memory to give space to cache.

Answer 3

I generally make my swap file equal to 0gb, this way windows is forced to use all of ram, always, and never swap

even when you have 2gb being used, with cache turned on, windows will still write to disk if data in ram is old by a certain amount, so it slows down later

see if making cache set to 0gb works for you it doesn't work for everyone