What is the RECOMMENDED Size of Page File on a Windows 2000 Server. What percentage of RAM Should be Used for That ?

The recommended pagefile size is 1.5x the amount of RAM you have on board. ie. 256MB RAM = 384MB pagefile 512MB RAM = 768MB pagefile

Yes that is the standard answer with a limit of 4096[thats 4gig! Yea right ms, NOT !]. But what about folks with a gig or more of ram. Do you need that large of a pagefile? No you do not. In fact large page files slow your system down and waste disk space. What you want to do is "right size" your pagefile. In NT this was easy. You would go to the administration menu and nt diagnostics. You would click on the memory tab. Note the max used stat. I would run my server or workstation as normal for a month without rebooting. I would take the max stat add 10-20% and that is my pagefile size. This is FAR below the 1.5x standard. For example I have a SQL 7 financial server with 512meg of ram. It has been running on a 125meg pagefile for three years now. That is a big difference from 786 meg pagefile. Getting the max used in W2K is a bit more difficult. I use a combination of Windows Task manager and its performance tab and Performance monitor and the pagefile stats to get a proper size. For example on my W2K pro station I have 128meg of ram. Supposedly I should have a 192 meg pagefile. I have a 150 meg pagefile. I came to this number by taking the stats in task manager of commit and paged to give me a average. I made a 100 meg pagefile. Then I monitored it with performance monitor [which does use memory] and looked for events like messages about low virtual memory. I increased until no messages and performance monitor looked good with a little pagefile still not used. So don't always believe the "standard" recommendation. Paging to the drive is much slower then using Ram. Get the system to use the ram then the pagefile. If you have excessive paging or require a huge pagefile install Ram. You system will thank you for it by increase speed. FYI