How can I improve I/O performance?

A. If your system is fairly I/O intensive, you may benefit from raising the I/O Page Lock Limit, which can increase the effective rate the OS reads or writes data to the hard disks.

First, benchmark your common tasks. See how long it takes to load and save large files, how long it takes to search a database or run a common program; just do your normal tasks, timing them to record how fast they are. Then follow these steps:

Unless you do little I/O, this should give you a significant boost inperformance.

I have recently learned that this value specifies the maximum amount ofapplication memory that can be locked into physical memory at any given point intime. Device drivers typically lock user buffers in order to transmit them to ahardware device. If the limit is exceeded an I/O operation will simply return aSTATUS_QUOTA_EXCEEDED error to the application. Thus, the value should only beraised if I/O operations begin returning this error, and it has absolutely noeffect on performance.