

Odd, but effective, Windows Fix - EwanG
http://a1.blogspot.com/2012/06/my-fix-for-windows-8-freezes-and.html

======
cabirum
Default Power Options setting is to turn off hard drives after 20 mins. Any
r/w operation would require it to spin up which can take up to 30 secs, during
this time the app behind that becomes unresponsive. Seems like the possible
cause for me.

Anyway, disabling swapfile is not a fix, merely a way to hide symptoms of the
problem.

~~~
coffeeaddicted
Yeah, took around 5 seconds here to wake up when I right-clicked in VS because
of that. My swapfile is on a second HD which is not running much otherwise,
and this also caused me regular freezes. My workaround was increasing the time
to 60 minutes, which probably uses up some more power, but seems to be enough
to avoid running into this problem in my usual workflow.

~~~
EwanG
FWIW, but all my drives are set to timeoff "Never" because I would rather pay
a little more in electricity. Per one of the other comments, even if the drive
is spinning, Windows checks the page file first to see if it already "knows"
about the file. In many cases that check takes longer than a modern drive
would take to seek-find-copy. IMNSHO, Page files are an old solution that need
to be rethought given the newer hardware that many of us are using.

~~~
barrkel
No page file generally means apps crash hard when they reach the limit of
memory. On a multi-tasking OS not set up for making individual applications
hibernate, that's a recipe for data loss.

Back in the days of 16-bit Windows, we had this thing called cooperative
multitasking. It sucked. It meant that a single unresponsive application could
potentially lock up the entire system, and you'd lose all apps. Now, we have
preemptive multitasking. The OS calls the shots. Without a page file, we'd be
back into a similar situation re memory: a single app could consume most of
the system, and all other apps would fail on allocation - and most apps are
not written to be stable in the face of allocation failures. It's either that,
or background apps would need to be suspended or killed arbitrarily by the OS,
or some other kind of drastic limitations on productive work.

I have 16GB of memory in my system; but I regularly run utilities that consume
a large fraction of that (enough that the 12GB in my previous system was
starting to look pokey - and my prior system with 8GB IIRC, I had to run
utilities sequentially instead of in parallel to avoid page thrashing). The
advantage of having lots of memory is that you can write utilities that build
massive in-memory data structures. Problems are way easier to solve when you
can rely on being able to stuff everything into a big hash table, rather than
worry about temporary files on disk, or god forbid faffing around with a
database and losing orders of magnitude of performance.

Page files, even in the presence of large amounts of RAM, are what enable this
approach on workstations, in two ways: it means you won't suffer an app
crashing from out of memory as you skirt the line of maximum physical memory;
and secondly, and probably more importantly, page files backing allocated
pages means the OS is able to free up memory sooner for those applications
that demand it.

If you use your computer for casual use and don't stress it or do much
critical work with it (i.e. use it much like you would a phone or tablet), you
can get by just fine without a page file. But if you actually want to use the
thing, a page file is a very handy thing to have.

~~~
coffeeaddicted
I'm sure page files make sense. But if a page-file starts freezing
applications regularly for seconds with typical settings and hardware, all
while there is still sufficient main-memory, there seems to be some rework
necessary indeed.

~~~
barrkel
I've never had page file activity "freezing applications regularly for
seconds" since the late 90s. I'm not sure what's causing what you're talking
about; it sounds like a dodgy hard drive.

~~~
coffeeaddicted
Not dodgy, just a sleeping hard drive. Modern HD's sleep when unused and take
that long to wake up - that's not really unusual. People just don't notice
that as much if they have a single HD as that is usually active most of the
time you are working. But with 2 HD's (typical SSD + HDD combination) you
often have one HD sleeping and will run into this a lot more thereby. There's
ways to work around it - putting the page file on the HD which is more active
or not allowing the HD to sleep as often. But my favorite would still be to
simply prevent Windows from even using the page-file before the memory is at
least used up to 50% - which would nearly never happen on my system for
example.

~~~
barrkel
I don't let my HDDs sleep for this very reason (my main drive is indeed SSD).
Your heuristic would fail pretty badly on my machine; faced with an allocation
for 8GB (not unusual for my utilities), I would have to wait while about 6GB
of memory is paged out. That latency would be far worse than any delays from
paging.

------
rosstafarian
Mark Russinovitch did a great talk on how windows uses memory. I highly
recommend checking it out if you're curious about this sort of thing

[http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL405)
Mysteries of Memory Management Revealed,with Mark Russinovich (Part 1 of 2)

[http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL406)
part 2

------
donpdonp
The title is disturbingly close to "Fix windows with this one weird trick."

A couple years ago I googled for "windows vista thrashing" and found a number
of good guides that say what services to turn off and it was a huge
performance boost.

~~~
EwanG
Probably because I saw a posting on here some time ago (sorry I can't pull the
link off the top of my head) that explained why you saw "Odd" and "Weird" on
so many ads on the Weather Channel site. Given that this is my highest voted
HN submission in some time, and my highest single day visit to my blog, I'd
say that there was probably some science behind this :-)

~~~
reneherse
You just made me realize how much my "web annoyance" factor has actually gone
down since I installed ad blockers and don't have to see those "with one weird
trick" ads anymore. They're really the worst of the worst IMO. (But I am glad
that you were able to legitimately repurpose the phrase in this case.)

I'd love to see the article you mentioned, but I shudder to think of the
search results were I to go looking for it. ;)

------
JBiserkov
I've disabled the page file on all my systems since I had more than 128 MB
RAM. Increased performance every time. System has never crashed, individual
programs rarely do since Windows is pretty good about warning you. A funny
thing I noticed on my first XP box (256 mb): whenever I ran out of memory,
Winamp got killed. Don't know why, but it was no coincidence - I've reproduced
this a hundred times, showing it to friends, etc. there was no memory leak in
Winamp - it's memory usage was constant. Maybe the system figured out it had
no files open in write mode, so killing it would be harmless. Anyone heard of
something like this or have another explanation? Windows killed user processes
in reversed alphabetical order?! :)

tl;dr; determine peak usage, install twice the memory, DISABLE virtual memory,
profit!

~~~
codinghorror
this is, and has always been, a bad idea per <http://serverfault.com/a/23684>

~~~
keeperofdakeys
Of course this always depends on your use-case. If you have more ram then you
use (say double), you would never notice the effect of this behaviour. I have
a linux laptop with 8GB of ram, and no swap, since the SSD is rather small. It
takes a few days to fill up the ram (with file buffers). The programs I run
will never approach the amount of ram I have, so I am fine with no swap.

~~~
rosstafarian
windows doesn't have "swap" watch those videos i linked for more info on how
it works and a few people pasted <http://serverfault.com/a/2368> which has
excellent info.

There are many reasons to have a paging file even if you have plenty of ram.
If you get a bluescreen it has to use the paging file for the memory dump if
you want one, etc.

~~~
JBiserkov
>There are _many reasons_ to have a paging file even if you have plenty of
ram:

1\. _If_ you have a BSOD _and_ you want a memory dump

2\. e

3\. t

4\. c

5\. .

~~~
rosstafarian
Sorry but i didnt feel like going into the specifics of windows memory
management when i and others gave you the resources to learn more, so i listed
one common case that everyone can appreciate. As per your original post I find
that completely dubious saying windows never crashes after you disabled your
paging file. Windows generally bsod's because of 3rd party driver's(70% of the
time, and yes that's a real statistic). So i find it very hard to believe that
it never crashes let alone what your lack of page file has to do with
anything. Maybe it was blue screening and you where too busy making winamp
crash hundreds of times and posting snarky comments on HN to notice?

------
masenf
I'm not sure why the pagefile would even be in use if your system operates
with 4.5Gb free memory...

~~~
davux
From the comments:

<http://serverfault.com/a/23684>

~~~
codinghorror
I hope people read that link, because this "we don't need no steenking
pagefile!" meme comes up like clockwork every year and it's wrong every
time...

~~~
EwanG
It comes up every year because it's correct. I have read and am familiar with
the issue raised in the linked article, and respectfully disagree. I just
think that if I can edit a Video file, record my voice over, and have my email
running in the background without using all my RAM that it is time to take
another look at how modern OS should work with memory.

