FireDaemon

Disable pagefile – will it increase Windows Server performance?

If you have a windows box as a server and you want to squeeze as much performance out of it as possible.  There is one very often overlooked tweak (pagefile).

Windows by default uses the pagefile as additional memory when your RAM runs out.  Because it uses the hard drive, it’s a lot slower than your RAM.

Disabling the pagefile will speed up everything on your server.

Microsoft recommends to not do this, but they fail to mention one important thing; the pagefile isn’t actually disabled – paging instead goes to your RAM.  You must have enough RAM to pull this off or else your server will slow to a crawl.  At least 2GB should be good (preferably 4GB). There is one caveat to this tweak though.

Everytime your server starts up it might take a little longer since everything gets paged to your memory.  But once its running, you’ll really notice a difference.  It’s especially noticeable when running applications that read/write to the hard drive a lot (like game servers).  I’ve been using this tweak for the last 5 years on a Windows 2003 Standard Server with no ill effects.

To disable page file do the following:

1. Right click my computer on desktop.
2. Select Properties.
3. Click “Advanced” tab.
4. In the Performance section, click the “Settings” button.
5. In the “Performance Options” window, click the “Advanced” tab.
6. In the “Virtual Memory” section, click the “Change” button.
7. Click the C drive from the drive list and click “No Paging File”.
8. Click the “Set” button next and click Yes on the next window.
9. Click Ok button and restart the computer.

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