Pagefile needed for rendering…?

[John Rofrano]

I had one of my PC’s set up with no page file and 16GB of memory and didn’t have any problems. You could always allocate the smallest page file size that Microsoft recommends. Pagefiles are really unnecessary with the abundance of memory on computers these days.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Nick Mcmahon]

I thought my 6gb of memory on this old machine woulda been enough…. apparently not… I’m sure I read in the optimisation guide that I could move it to a Hard disk…? but I need to understand exactly what removing (or moving) the pagefile from the SSD will do for it. The guide doesn’t go into full explanation of exactly what benefit you get cos it was one of several tweaks that all together make for an optimised SSD… so I need to do some research.

Nick… BASE1268

3…2…1…C ya

[Dave Osbun]

You should have 8gb of RAM as a minimum. Personally, 16gb is really where you need to be (at a minimum) with modern video editing workstations. With the price of RAM so cheap nowadays, it’s best run with 16gb at least.

Dave

[Nick Mcmahon]

My new machine has 16 and will soon enough have 32… it’s my old one that this pagefile is seemingly an issue when i disable it and try to render in SVP…. do you think 8gb would solve it..?

Nick… BASE1268

3…2…1…C ya

[Kell Hymer]

[Nick McMahon] “Reading thru an SSD optimisation guide on Windows (7 & 8) it justifies turning off the pagefiling system cos systems now have much more memory available in comparison to when the pagefile was designed.”

Good thing you are on a creative forum and not on a hardware/tech forum. Otherwise you might have started a war on this thread! For some bizarre reason, this is a volatile topic among PC enthusiasts. The debate to set a page file or not is as passionate as political debates; everyone and their mother has a opinion, but 99.9% of them have no freaking idea what they are even talking about. Having said that, I will now proceed to give my opinion…lol.

6GB is certainly not enough. I often fully saturate the 32GB on my machine. The windows page file acts as a buffer by reserving a portion of your HDD or SSD as a dedicated overflow in the event you saturate your RAM. This space acts as a virtual memory, albeit significantly slower than your RAM. If Windows detects that you are running out of memory, it will begin dumping memory to the page file to avoid a system crash.

Feel free to skip this paragraph if you are already familiar with how a page file works. Think of it this way, your hard drive or SSD is like a massive library of books. Your RAM is your desk space where you read the books. If your desk is small, you can only open one book at a time. If you need to cross reference a topic in your studies, you must close your current book, put it back on the library shelf, retrieve the reference book, place it on your desk, and read. Now that you have done that, you return the reference book to the shelf and then go and grab the original title and return to you desk. Repeat this process each time you need to reference another book. To speed things up, a large desk is required. With it, you can retrieve multiple books from the shelves and lay them all out for quick access to cross reference as needed. Suppose you decided to conduct a study on the rational of politicians (sorry, I’m on a kick here 🙂 ). If you do not completely fry your brain (CPU) in the process, you may find that even with a large desk, you still do not have sufficient working space. The page file is the equivalent of clearing some library shelf space near your desk to stage, if needed, some of the books you are referencing. Accessing them is not as fast as accessing the data on your desk, but it is much easier than walking the isles of the library to retrieve and return the same books over and over.

There are 3 primary reasons that disabling or limiting the page file size will “optimize” your SSD:

First = Space. SSDs have come down in price but even now, the cost per GB is far more expensive than it is on an HDD. As such, most SSDs do not have a large capacity. Allocating a page file renders that chunk of data unusable for any other purpose, thus limiting precious storage space for your files.

Second = Performance. Similar to HDDS, SSD performance (data transfer speeds) begins to drop as the drive becomes full. I read somewhere that performance degradation begins once 50% of the disk is filled but I do not know if that is an accurate number. After some point, the more data on the drive, the slower it gets. I have experienced this first hand. The performance drops are significant. The page file adds to the utilized space on the SSD. This was a much more serious concern in the early days when SSDs had limited capacity and did not manage garbage effectively. Modern SSDs now have TRIM to manage garbage. TRIM is a complicated subject but to keep it simple, imagine if you never took out the trash (deleted files) and instead piled it all into some corner in your house. Sooner than later, the clutter would build up making it difficult to move around your house. TRIM takes out the trash (manages deleted files).

Third = Durability. This is arguably the biggest concern of page file use on an SSD. SSD technology has improved significantly, making this less of a concern. However, the cells in an SSD can only handle so many read and write operations. A page file located on an SSD has the potential to wear out the drive faster with an unusually high amount of read and writes as it is treating it like RAM. While this is a legitimate concern, the life span of an SSD significantly exceeds that of an HDD. SSDs will last 10 to 20 years under typical use. The best bet is to set up the page file on separate HDD, or a dedicated caching (32 or 64 GB) SSD if you wish the page file to be fast

[Nick McMahon] “I did so and only came across an issue when i tried to render a vegas project and it crashed at 6% claiming I didn’t have enough memory to complete the task. Turned the pagefile back on with automatic setting and problem disappeared.”

This is not surprising. With enough RAM, Windows will usually function just fine without the page file, however, many programs require a page file, even if the allocated space is minimal. If a page file is not found, some programs may crash or may not even start. 6GB alone is not enough for both Windows and Sony Vegas. Vegas “might” be stable with no page file and more RAM. I have noticed that Vegas, or even my PC, will crash when I use all 32GB of RAM w/o ever using my 4GB page file. This could simply be because the RAM used to preview or pre-render creates a large data file, rather than smaller chunks of data, that are too large to move to the page file, but I am not sure.

In short:

Get more RAM. Get a lot more RAM.

Do not disable the page file

Allocate only a small amount of disk space to the page file or set the page file up on another (dedicated) drive if your SSD has limited capacity.

Keeping the page file on the SSD is generally not an issue unless you plan on using it for 15 years without upgrading SSDs during that time. Note that having a large page file, but limited RAM, will result in a more rapid degradation of your SSD.

Hope that helps!

Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)

[Nick Mcmahon]

[Kell Hymer] “Hope that helps!”

Indeed the tech forums are full of super highly strung geeks who all have their own opinion and believe they are right… echoes of a religion me thinks… 🙂

Awesome explanation Kell… no-one could possibly fail to comprehend exactly what the pagefile is and how your OS uses it…. the time you took to write that is very much appreciated and I hope others benefit from it.

I have my new laptop here now as well as this old one…. only a few days old but currently in the process of taking it apart to modify it even more.

Came with 16 gb but going to double it to 32gb…. plus I’m planning on installing an mSATA drive AND moving the hybrid to an external enclosure via USB 3.0 and replacing internally with an SSD exactly the same size as the mSATA… my theory was to be able to try using a software RAID 0 stripe on these 2 solid state configs and get super lightning speed access to data with a partition on the permantly attached hybrid HDD for daily incremental imaging for recovery if either of the SSD’s go bust.

Do you have any experience with RAID 0 and as such any tips setting this up…? I have no idea if it will even work between the mSATA and a standard SSD… but I see no reason why it wouldn’t providing they are exactly the same capacity.

Nick… BASE1268

3…2…1…C ya

[Kell Hymer]

I do have some experience with RAIDs but it’s not extensive. The RAIDs I set up were all hardware RAIDs. Software may be different but RAIDs typically require that the HDDs not only be the same capacity, but usually the exact same make and model. There may be exceptions, but it’s risky. I set up one with different HDDs and every time I did, it worked fine for days to a few weeks before it failed. It didn’t like 2 different drives.

To best answer your question, tell me what your goal is. Why do you want to set up a RAID?

Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)

[John Rofrano]

[Nick McMahon] “Do you have any experience with RAID 0 and as such any tips setting this up…? I have no idea if it will even work between the mSATA and a standard SSD… but I see no reason why it wouldn’t providing they are exactly the same capacity.”

In theory you can use any two drives of any capacity and it will use the capacity of the smaller one. In practice, I would only use identical capacity drives from the same manufacturer as Kell recommended. Personally, I use the same model number drives (i.e., i don’t mix model numbers even within the same manufacturer)

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Nick Mcmahon]

[John Rofrano] ” Personally, I use the same model number drives (i.e., i don’t mix model numbers even within the same manufacturer)”

Thanks John… a bit more reading and some phone discussions with the incredibly helpful guys who are going to build my new workstation laptop had brought me to that conclusion.

However… I now need to re-phrase the question about RAID and ask it specific to SVP because I was making assumptions that RAID data access makes everything improve in terms of efficiency.

So…. In what way does having faster access to data via RAID 0 improve overall performance of SVP….? (based on my assumption it would)

Nick… BASE1268

3…2…1…C ya

[John Rofrano]

[Nick McMahon] “So…. In what way does having faster access to data via RAID 0 improve overall performance of SVP….? (based on my assumption it would)”

First you need to determine that Disk I/O is a bottleneck in your system with regard to SVP. Then using a faster disk subsystem (i.e., RAID 0) would fix that problem for you. It will do very little for SVP itself, it will help in loading large video files faster. So, for example, if you are shooting multi-camara 4K and editing is slow because loading multiple streams of 4K video from your hard drive is slow, then using a RAID will help. A RAID 0 will roughly double your throughput.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com