Hey all,
We will be building a Windows 2008, 64 bit, server for a Data Warehousing implementation.
It will house 512 GB of RAM.
I can't see going by the standard of PageFile = 1.5 x RAM. I also can't see setting the system to take a full memory dump. Who would analyze it and how would we ever get it to MS?
Are there any best practices, or conventional wisdom, for mega-RAM installs wrt PageFile settings?
In Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 (http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017-4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/Perf-tun-srv.docx), MS recommends RAM * 1.5 for smaller servers, but agrees with Guenter that it is possible to eliminate the paging file for larger RAM installations.
For servers that have hundreds of gigabytes of memory, the elimination of the paging file is possible; otherwise, the paging file might be limited because of space constraints (available disk capacity). The benefit of a paging file of larger than 50 GB is unclear.
In the same document, MS also shares your position on the utility of very large memory dumps -- they are too large to effectively package, transfer, and analyze.
Regardless of your decision on whether or not to run a page file, note the observation that the benefit of a paging file larger than 50 GB is unclear. If you choose to use a paging file, this would make 50 GB a sensible upper limit.
with this big ram i dont think you even need a bigger ram. idea behind page file is swapping data between ram and disk in case of load with this big ram just leave it default or adjust it depeneding on machine use.
1.5 * ram is general
I would suggest no page size at all. This worked fine on all my production machines with >4GB of RAM. The page file will be used, even if you have enough RAM left, so the system will be slower than necessary. A Page File is only good if you plan peak system loads bigger than your RAM, and I don't think you'd do that on your machine.
Windows will warn you that it won't be able to store crash dumps then, but who would search through 512Gig for an application error ?
