up vote 3 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I cant find any documentation or articles online online for this...

how does Windows handle page files on multiple hard drives? Does windows treat them as a concatenation, writing to one till its full then moving to the next? Or does it treat them like a stripe, writing to each one incrementally? Does it write to the first one free? Or perhaps some other method?

link|improve this question
35% accept rate
1  
Very good question. My guess is Microsoft treats them as two separate page files and uses the drive that isn't in use. There is no way Microsoft would risk splitting whole pages among the drives. – surfasb Jan 18 at 3:37
Best speed would be to write to both, but not to split pages up, I think. – soandos Jan 18 at 3:42
From what I can see when I search on Google (no authentic links though), it seems to treat them like a stripe, which makes sense if you think about it. Though it's all guesswork. – Randolph West Jan 18 at 4:55
there is a test on the web (I couldnt find it) thier benchmark for a system that was starved to need paging to disk, was tiny tiny bits faster , not worth it for me. social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/hu/winservergen/thread/… – Psycogeek Jan 18 at 6:03
feedback

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote

The most relevant information I could find was an article on optimal configuration of the page file under Windows XP.

The article states that Windows will use the page file located on the volume with the least activity. This means that there is no pattern defined.

So, it is arguable that the most likely way that Windows handles multiple page files is by maintaining a table of where each memory page is located. Where a page winds up depends largely on which volume was least active when it got paged out.

link|improve this answer
interesting article. However does this still hold true? – Keltari Jan 18 at 14:46
There's no guarantee that this theory holds true at all, even for XP. It is based entirely on supposition. – Amazed Jan 18 at 17:40
It's doubtful they've changed their handling of multiple page files. I'd bet it still holds true. The memory manager isn't exactly something you make wholesale changes to every version. – surfasb Jan 18 at 20:36
@surfasb True, but as I said this is only speculation to begin with. – Amazed Jan 18 at 21:33
@Amazed: Plus I see little reason to change it. With the addition of Superfetch, it still makes more sense that the pagefile on the drive with the least activity will see the most action. – surfasb Jan 19 at 6:02
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.