About "mainMem.useNamedFile = FALSE" , Advantages? Shortcomings?

[luicst]

in .vmx file

mainMem.useNamedFile = TRUE

Advantages?

Shortcomings?

mainMem.useNamedFile = FALSE

Advantages?

Shortcomings?

[depping]

Welcome to the forums,

For VMX settings I always use the following website: http://www.sanbarrow.com/vmx/vmx-config-ini.html

mainMem.useNamedFile = "true"	creates a file the size of nominal RAM in working directory file uses random name
mainMem.useNamedFile = "false"	doesn't use named-file - use for VMs on USB-disks or other slow disks Windows: useNamedFile= "FALSE" causes memory to be backed by the host's swap space. Linux: useNamedFile= "FALSE" causes a hidden file to be created in a temporary directory, which is immediately deleted when you power off the VM

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator

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[ksc]

useNamedFile = TRUE makes suspend amd resume faster, and for this reason is the default. useNamedFile = FALSE can help if your host has many disks b/c the VM's I/O load might get spread across more drives. FALSE can also help if your filesystem suffers from file fragmentation problems (ext3 is the worst offender), or if the VM is on a removable drive and the host OS forces synchronous mode for removable drives.

There are so many variables involved that the best thing to do is really to try both and find out what works better. We autotune this setting somewhat, and the tuning does get better with each release.