Speeding up filesystem performance under Windows Vista/Server

Got a lot of spare RAM and want to put it to good use? If you have some spare memory on your Windows Vista or Server2008 system and have to deal with frequent file access .. say you need to compile your development project every once in a while .. you might want to tune your system a bit.

Again there is little to be gathered from the Microsoft documentation as it’s not very specific on this topic (at least I’m unable to find anything in an reasonable amount of time).

To increase the amount of memory available to the NTFS start up the command line with administrator privileges.
The command fsutil behavior query memoryusage will show you the current setting of your system with “0″ or “1″ being the default behavior.

from the documentation of fsutil: … Configures the internal cache levels of NTFS paged pool and NTFS non-paged pool memory. Set to 1 or 2. When set to 1 (the default), NTFS uses the default amount of paged pool memory. When set to 2, NTFS increases the size of its lookaside lists and memory thresholds. A lookaside list is a pool of fixed-size kernel memory buffers that the kernel and device drivers create as private memory caches for file system operations, such as reading a file. …

So, changing the value to “2″ should tell the NTFS handler to use more memory. To do that we make use of our administrative console again:
fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2



Alternatively you can change the setting in the registry directly using regedit.

As of yet, I for myself have to see if the change of settings actually does something noticeable. If you have gained some experience (positive or bad) feel free to comment. I’d love to hear from you.