Registry settings
In Windows 9x there were a few extra settings to improve memory performance by adding/editing some lines in the system.ini, e.g. ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 would significantly reduce Virtual memory use. Windows 2000 has other settings available, although they are accessed via the registry rather than system.ini.
Click on Start, Run. Type in regedit & hit Enter. Go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]. You may add/edit the following entries as you see fit for your system. Some of these settings were obtained via various MS Knowledge Base articles.
ClearPageFileAtShutdown. This is a security related setting. Using this DWORD value you can "clear" the contents of the Page File when shutting down the machine. Right click on the entry & select Modify. A value of 1 enables this feature, 0 disables this. I'd recommend leaving this set to 0 unless you are truly highly security conscious. Performance is not affected, although shutting down will take longer as a result.
DisablePagingExecutive. Using this DWORD value, you can prevent pageable drivers & system code in the Windows NT Executive from being paged out to disk. Although this decreases the response time in systems with extremely large amounts of physical memory (RAM), it is critical that there is enough RAM installed. If you have enough RAM (128MB+ ideally) in your system then you can benefit from disabling Paging the NT Executive to the hard drive, with insufficient RAM performance may be adversely affected, so you may want to try this setting both enabled & disabled to see which is better. Right click on the entry & select Modify. A value of 1 disables Paging the NT Executive to the hard drive (faster), 0 enables Paging the NT Executive to the hard drive (slower).
IoPageLockLimit. Using this DWORD value you can specify the limit of the number of bytes that can be locked for I/O operations. Right click on the entry & select Modify. Select the Decimal button & enter in the amount (in bytes, e.g. 1024 = 1MB) that you wish to use. When this value is 0, the system uses the default (512K). The maximum value is about the equivalent of physical memory minus pad, which is 7 MB for a small system & grows as the amount of memory grows. For a 64 MB system, pad is about 16 MB; for a 512 MB system, pad is about 64 MB. Using values larger than the default (0) may improve performance. Right click on the entry & select Modify. Select the Decimal button. Try using values ranging from 1024 to 16384, in steps of 512.
LargeSystemCache. Using this DWORD value you can specify that the system favour the system-cache working set rather than the processes working set. This allows Windows 2000 to use RAM 4MB for disk caching purposes. The 4MB free is used for faster launching of new applications. By default in Windows 2000 Professional this is disabled, although in the Server version it is enabled by default. Right click on the entry & select Modify. A value of 1 enables the LargeSystemCache, 0 disables it. If you have a lot of RAM enabling this will be of great benefit to performance.
NonPagedPoolSize. This DWORD value specifies the size of the Non-paged pool in bytes. When this value is 0, the system uses the default size (based on RAM). The maximum value is about 80 percent of physical memory. I'd recommend leaving this at 0, so Windows 2000 can determine the size. |
