Windows vista disable kernel paging
Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It only takes a minute to sign up. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Any reason not to do it or any general thoughts about it? Edit: for clarification, this is not disabling general RAM paging.
This is disabling having kernel memory paged or at least parts of it, as Charlls noted. If you do this you have to live with the fact that you have moved the a large portion of the Kernel to RAM. At first this this is good. You avoid Paging of the Kernel and the system may experience an increase in performance on those kernel related tasks.
But what if your applications use a lot of RAM? Even if the executable is small, it may allocate large amounts of RAM during execution that extend well beyond its physical size on disk practically all software does this. So, with less RAM available because the Kernel is taking some of it away, you will be experiencing this time paging of your applications.
That is, you have a more responsive system to kernel related tasks and a less responsive system to daily application usage. Since your computer usage pattern, I predict, is based mostly around application usage, you may instead feel a decrease in general performance.
Kernel size varies. Windows 7 may boast an even larger Kernel. This I say from memory only, from what I seem to remember being their memory dumps. You will be taking away a considerable large chunk of memory.
It should be noted that this setting effects only a small portion of the kernel. Windows will only page this out if the memory is needed for other purposes. A portion of the kernel can never be paged under any circumstances while others will remain pageable.
How much is actually paged out at any given time is impossible to tell. Windows simply does not make this information available outside the system.
I think the decision to do this should be based on how much system memory you have and also what applications you typically run. As I type this my 8Gb Windows 7 bit system has the following stats:. In practice I'll have to see how it turns out as I haven't tried it. I'm guessing the parts of the kernel that are paged are probably not used all that frequently hence the reason they are paged and the chances of running a big app that wants to use the memory may be higher than the chances I'll do something that needs to access those areas of the kernel.
It would be interesting to hear some experiences from users with 8Gb or more RAM on the effect of disabling the paging of Kernel memory. You should read this article to have a comprehension about why not turn off kernal paging : Understanding the windows pagefile. Anyone with a shred of proper computer expertise with Windows or appropriate OS knows that there are MANY things you can tweak to get better performance.
MS does not enable all these tweaks so the OS is compatible to the widest range of hardware configurations. Even the windows 8 kernel doesn't take THAT much memory.
Anythings else that's idle will get swapped if you load a large program. This setting is useful for debugging drivers as it ensures that all kernel code and data is always memory resident. Also on 64 bit Windows by forcing the kernel into RAM, then it will allow proper kernel stack traces.
Larry Miller says:. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Search for:. Related Posts Description of soft and hard page faults Description of the kernel memory area in Windows NT Configure the page file for best performance Use process affinity to lock application to a single core Description of the hard disk cache. Meta Log in Entries feed Comments feed.
But what if your applications use a lot of RAM? Even if the executable is small, it may allocate large amounts of RAM during execution that extend well beyond its physical size on disk practically all software does this. So, with less RAM available because the Kernel is taking some of it away, you will be experiencing this time paging of your applications.
That is, you have a more responsive system to kernel related tasks and a less responsive system to daily application usage.
Since your computer usage pattern, I predict, is based mostly around application usage, you may instead feel a decrease in general performance.