Pixinsight pc component help

[Nova2000]

Hello 

I am planning on building a pc as my old one is pretty outdated. 

The parts I'm planning to use are

I5 8400 6cores 

8gb ram

1tb hdd

240 Kingston ssd

And gpu etc

Will pixinsight give me faster speeds if I out it on ssd? Will my ram and cpu handle pixinsight well? I have already used the trial on my older pc which is i3 5gen. It was slow. And as I've used trial I don't feel I can get it again. 

[Dr_Ju_ju]

Pixinsight mainly runs everything in ram, so I'd suggest increasing your ram to 16GB & make the SSD the boot device with all software loaded on it. The Hdd would be for data storage.

I'd also recommend splitting the SSD into multiple partitions, especially for a dedicated pagefile drive, as even though it will be using the same device, its' unlikely to get fragmented on its own partition, unlike when its on the main system partition.

[wimvb]

The pixinsight website has recommended specs. You could start there.

http://pixinsight.com/sysreq/index.html

[Nova2000]

13 hours ago, Dr_Ju_ju said:

Pixinsight mainly runs everything in ram, so I'd suggest increasing your ram to 16GB & make the SSD the boot device with all software loaded on it. The Hdd would be for data storage.

I'd also recommend splitting the SSD into multiple partitions, especially for a dedicated pagefile drive, as even though it will be using the same device, its' unlikely to get fragmented on its own partition, unlike when its on the main system partition.

Hi 

I did not get what you meant  by page file drive. OK ill get the ram 

Thankyou 

?

[Dr_Ju_ju]

The pagefile.sys & swapfile.sys files are Windows system files that usually live on the root of the C:\ drive, and are part of the memory management system.

While swapfile.sys is a static size of approx.  240 Mb, the pagefile.sys file, will shrink and grow as the system and running applications needs it. Its size is closely equivalent to the installed RAM, i.e. 4Gb ram ~ 2-4 Gb pagefile.sys etc. 

This leads to fragmentation of the file, which can slow the performance of the computer, as the file is constantly being accessed.

To get around this slowdown, you can either,

1: Run without a pagefile.sys file and rely only on the installed RAM. Usually needs at least 8Gb ram to make it worthwhile, but will depend on how many applications the PC will be running, if lots, then then there may be issues\slowdowns as the running applications request memory. 

2: Create a dedicated partition\disk, e.g. drive d:\ or p:\ etc. and configure\move the pagefile.sys file to that disk, and let it be 'system managed'. This will eliminate the fragmentation of the file, but it will still shrink and grow as needed.

3: As above, but fix the size of the file to slightly more than the installed RAM, e.g. if 4Gb installed RAM, then set the file size to 4.2Gb. 

In the 'Server' world, its' this last option that is mainly used, and would even spec. the hardware to have 2 dedicated pagefile drives in a raid mirroring configuration, to achieve the best performance, especially for large Database systems.

Even in the Unix\Linux world the same mechanisms are used to manage their memory.swap files..

 

[3rd_rock_resident]

The pagefile is used when your pc runs out of memory.   When you are doing stuff that requires more memory than you have inustalled, windows starts to use the file on your hd as an extension of your memory (yes, thats a simplistic explanation).   windows will move things out of memory onto the hdd in order to free up memory.   Since the hdd is much slower than memory, using the pagefile at all is a performance hit.   If you get into a situation where you really need a lot more memory than you have you can find that windows spends more time shuffling data between memory and the hdd than it does running the program.   Thats why you can find that increasing memory has a huge impact on the performance of the pc.

 

As i understand it, in win 8 and win10 the swapfile is used to swap out windows apps - the metro style apps rather than desktop programs - in a similar way to how android handles app swapping.

[sloz1664]

For a slight increase in price you could get a 2TB hard drive. If your budget can afford and your PC can accommodate, I'd also get an additional 2TB drive for backup purposes.

Steve