# Virtual memory with large RAM



## xkm1948 (May 15, 2016)

I just noticed today that after installing 128GB RAM Windows 10 decide to shovel 129GB of my SSD storage for virtual memory. I turned it down to 1GB as I feel I won't be running out of RAM any time soon. 

For you guys with 32GB or 64GB or 128GB RAM what size do you set?


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## Jetster (May 15, 2016)

Virtual memory is your physical memory combined with the page file. I leave the page file alone unless its larger then 4 Gb then I change it. But keep in mind you still need a page file for memory dumps. But 1 Gb is fine


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## AsRock (May 15, 2016)

My systems only have 12GB, 16GB and this one with 16GB but with windows 10 and is only 2.5GB on auto. Been no reason to touch it.

If you are using programs that could use the 128GB then you need to set what you think the absolute max you think you would need.

Trial and error.


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## Kursah (May 15, 2016)

AsRock said:


> My systems only have 12GB, 16GB and this one with 16GB but with windows 10 and is only 2.5GB on auto. Been no reason to touch it.
> 
> If you are using programs that could use the 128GB then you need to set what you think the absolute max you think you would need.
> 
> Trial and error.



+1, I'm on 16GB on my Win 10 Pro system and it's allocated 2432MB on auto. I've seen no reason to touch it.






My home-grade server has 24GB, running Server 2012 R2 Datacenter and has 3584MB utilized on Auto...again leaving it alone. 





+1 to what @AsRock stated, trial and error. Windows has done a pretty damn good job in my experience handling the size of the paging file, but I've yet to deploy/use a system with that much RAM. I don't fully utilize what I have in most cases even with VM's running.

Maybe there's a bug in Windows with that much RAM?


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## Frick (May 15, 2016)

AsRock said:


> My systems only have 12GB, 16GB and this one with 16GB but with windows 10 and is only 2.5GB on auto. Been no reason to touch it.



Same here.


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## Jetster (May 15, 2016)

I think its important to point out that is you use a program like Samsung Magician it can and will change your page file settings. Not a big deal unless you have limited space


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## Aquinus (May 15, 2016)

Unless you plan on running out of memory, I would disable it. Windows 10 through 7 will use physical memory as "swap space" when the page file is disabled and when there is an application requires swap space which simply keeps anything from getting swapped out so, the only thing that disabling it should do is prevent you from using more memory that you have. I do this with my machine with 16GB because I never run out but, I would disable it for 16GB or more. On the scale of 64 or 128GB, a 1GB swap file won't do you swat if you run out of memory so, you might as well disable it.

Side note: Ever since I built my current PC, I've never used swap space and have never encountered a problem from disabling it.


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## P4-630 (May 15, 2016)

Having 16GB and it's using 2432mb on auto, I just leave it as is.


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## Jetster (May 15, 2016)

I have run into problems when it is disabled. Running adobe apps I have run out of memory with 16Gb. If you reach your memory limit or have a crash you system will lock up. And you'll also come across applications that simply won't run properly if the pagefile is disabled. For instance, you really won't want to run a virtual machine on a box with no pagefile, and some defrag utilities will also fail. I doesn't hurt anything to leave it but take up a little space.


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## Aquinus (May 15, 2016)

Jetster said:


> And you'll also come across applications that simply won't run properly if the pagefile is disabled.


I'm calling BS on that one. When was the last time you actually encountered this problem, under what OS and, what application? This isn't Windows XP here. Modern Windows creates swap space in physical memory when there is no page file on the disk. That's why even though you disable the page file, there is still data that resides in it. However, if you look closer, that paged memory is consuming physical memory (basically, a page file is made in a ram disk internally.)


Jetster said:


> Running adobe apps I have run out of memory with 16Gb.


I would rather know that I'm running out of memory instead of tanking performance and with @xkm1948 having 128GB of memory, I think he would rather know when he's running out of memory instead of killing performance by hitting swap space. Also, for overflow to be important you need to have enough overflow to be worth while, so if the OP is running out of 128GB of memory, he'll probably need a whole lot more than 1GB of swap space, which is going to be very, very slow.

So I would argue that unless he knows that he's going to be using swap space or some weird legacy application that "requires" it to exist, I would disable it.


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## Jack1n (May 15, 2016)

The only thing i did was move it to my outer rim partition of my HDD.


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## trog100 (May 16, 2016)

xkm1948 said:


> I just noticed today that after installing 128GB RAM Windows 10 decide to shovel 129GB of my SSD storage for virtual memory. I turned it down to 1GB as I feel I won't be running out of RAM any time soon.
> 
> For you guys with 32GB or 64GB or 128GB RAM what size do you set?




i turn mine off.. the more real ram you have the more pretend ram windows thinks you need..

now for the discussion about why windows needs its virtual memory.. he he..

the bottom line is if you are in position where windows does need to use its pretend ram you need to buy some more real ram.. or your machine will run like shit..

back in the day.. windows was designed around the principle that no machine had enough real ram.. hence the swap file.. oddly enough now ram is cheap and some folks have loads.. 128 gigs for example windows still follows the same principle.. it thinks no machine has enough and can waste a huge chuck of drive space setting aside a huge swap file that will never be used.. he he

trog


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## Frick (May 16, 2016)

Hey now mine was set to 16GB for some reason. I just set it to 1GB.


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## Ferrum Master (May 16, 2016)

Funny, M$ implements memory compression to win10 to save more RAM...

No virtual memory breaks down many things. Windows kernel is constructed to rely on it. The swap size should be equal to your usual occupied space while browsing etc activities with the PC. ~ 3-4GB should be fine.


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## Frick (May 16, 2016)

Ferrum Master said:


> Funny, M$ implements memory compression to win10 to save more RAM...
> 
> No virtual memory breaks down many things. Windows kernel is constructed to rely on it. The swap size should be equal to your usual occupied space while browsing etc activities with the PC. ~ 3-4GB should be fine.



Seeing how many people run with it disabled (when having lots of RAM) this is evidentily not true. Me I have it on, just in case I use a strange ancient program that for some reason does something with it.


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## RejZoR (May 16, 2016)

I have it turned off with 32GB of RAM. Had the same setup (disabled paging) when I was using 18 GB of RAM on X58.


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## Ferrum Master (May 16, 2016)

Frick said:


> Seeing how many people run with it disabled (when having lots of RAM) this is evidentily not true. Me I have it on, just in case I use a strange ancient program that for some reason does something with it.



The most popular thing that randomly crashed without page file was... Skyrim...


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## jboydgolfer (May 16, 2016)

mine set itself to 16000+ Mb's as well. i just set it to 2000Mb's for max, and Min, and never look @ it again.


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## Ahhzz (May 16, 2016)

xkm1948 said:


> I just noticed today that after installing 128GB RAM Windows 10 decide to shovel 129GB of my SSD storage for virtual memory. I turned it down to 1GB as I feel I won't be running out of RAM any time soon.
> 
> For you guys with 32GB or 64GB or 128GB RAM what size do you set?


I'm at 32 physical, and 50 virt. seems to run fine


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## trog100 (May 16, 2016)

my own swap file size.. zero.. i always run this way and always make sure my machine dosnt need windows pretend ram.. i do it just to save C drive space no other reason.. i like a small easy to back up and restore operating system drive.. with loads of basic programs on my C drive is 30 gig used out 128 gig..

i truth i have more ram space (32 gig) than my entire operating system drive uses






trog


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## Aquinus (May 16, 2016)

Ferrum Master said:


> No virtual memory breaks down many things. Windows kernel is constructed to rely on it.


Wrong. I think you need to read my first post again:


Aquinus said:


> Modern Windows creates swap space in physical memory when there is no page file on the disk. That's why even though you disable the page file, there is still data that resides in it. However, if you look closer, that paged memory is consuming physical memory (basically, a page file is made in a ram disk internally.)


Unless you're going to be running of physical memory, then there is no reason to keep it on. Personally, I would rather know that I'm out of memory as opposed to running like crap because I don't have enough.


Ferrum Master said:


> The most popular thing that randomly crashed without page file was... Skyrim...


I also don't ever recall Skyrim crashing on me in eyefinity without a page file so, I'm assuming that you were actually running out of memory.


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## Ferrum Master (May 16, 2016)

Aquinus said:


> I'm assuming that you were actually running out of memory.



Not used ram, but allocated one. Virtual pool is reserved in between programs, it doesn't say it is usually filled. That's why there are crashes when they conflict and virtual pool without the swap file is not enough. The more greedy programs you use, the more pool is needed.


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## trog100 (May 16, 2016)

i have run without a swap file for the past 10 years or so.. mostly on a win XP 32 bit 4 gigs of ram machine.. no problems.. and it was originally a high end gaming machine when it was first built.. i used the same machine up until last year..

this shit all dates back twenty years or more.. ram was measured in mega not giga sizes and windows really did need it.. the stuff used to cost a fortune..

the message that crops up when you try and disable the swap file also hasnt changed for twenty years.. nether has windows assumption that any machine has enough of the real stuff..

if i never needed a swap file with 4 gigs of ram i for sure dont need one with 32 gigs.. windows is set up to have "virtual memory" limited only by the size of a hard drive.. windows uses the real ram first but if that isnt enough it "swaps" out to a hard drive.. the snag being pretend hard drive memory will turn any machine into a slow unusable piece of crap.. i doubt many folks on here have used a machine running on a swap file.. if they had they would know the downside.. he he

back in the day it all made sense.. now with cheap as chips ram it dosnt.. its just a waste of hard drive space.. the more real ram you have the more hard drive space gets wasted.. it hits home the worse when have a small fast ssd drive for the operating system and plenty of ram.. ether way given enough real ram it can be turned off..

enough ram for most purposes is probably  8 gigs.. my laptop only has 4 gigs and it never swap files.. i could turn that off but leave it on.. with only 4 gigs of ram windows dosnt waste much hard drive (ssd) space.. 

trog


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## xkm1948 (Jun 4, 2016)

Had my first crash since coming up to 128GB today. I turned off page file, assuming I would never run out RAM. During my work the genome assembler took a spike up to 122GB RAM usage and before I realized it showed me the blue screen, I lost about 500GB of work in progress. So lesson learned. No matter how big your RAM is, DO NOT TURN OFF the page file!


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## Solaris17 (Jun 4, 2016)

I run 32GB and this time on auto it makes my rig reserve 4.8GB, though honestly iv usually manually made it 4GB for YEARS, and I even ran without one for awhile.


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## qubit (Jun 4, 2016)

I'm surprised that Windows didn't try to create a 256GB page file lol, as it usually creates one of twice the RAM size by default.

I've been running 16GB RAM without a page file (other than the minimal one Windows creates anyway) since 2011 and I've never once come close to running out of RAM. With 128GB you're probably set for life.


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## Disparia (Jun 5, 2016)

After a couple weeks of no pagefile I went back to having one. Too often the low-memory warning triggered which was annoying at best or at worst Windows randomly closed something. The game clients I run commit a lot of memory up front so even though my usage tops out at 12GB, the committed amount is usually 18GB. On my 16GB system that means having a 2GB+ pagefile. Without a pagefile I was around 9GB actual usage and 15GB+ committed before Windows was like, "No, stop!".


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## qubit (Jun 6, 2016)

Jizzler said:


> After a couple weeks of no pagefile I went back to having one. Too often the low-memory warning triggered which was annoying at best or at worst Windows randomly closed something. The game clients I run commit a lot of memory up front so even though my usage tops out at 12GB, the committed amount is usually 18GB. On my 16GB system that means having a 2GB+ pagefile. Without a pagefile I was around 9GB actual usage and 15GB+ committed before Windows was like, "No, stop!".


That's interesting as I've got the same amount of memory as you and haven't encountered these problems. Which games are you running? I have a feeling I'm not running those ones.

It's also inevitable that as things progress, that 16GB will start to get eaten into and more will be needed.


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## Disparia (Jun 6, 2016)

qubit said:


> That's interesting as I've got the same amount of memory as you and haven't encountered these problems. Which games are you running? I have a feeling I'm not running those ones.
> 
> It's also inevitable that as things progress, that 16GB will start to get eaten into and more will be needed.



Sorry, meant to say "multiple clients at once" in the earlier post. I'll commonly have 3 Lord of the Rings clients going, which has never been a problem with a pagefile and is only sometimes a problem without one. Depends on how many other things I leave running, which could even be another game. Black Desert Online has a low resource mode when minimized to tray so that your character, your workers, etc, keep active in-game. It doesn't play well alongside the new Doom, but has no problem when also running LOTRO or Starcraft II (was recently on sale so I'm finally getting around to it).


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## Ferrum Master (Jun 6, 2016)

xkm1948 said:


> Had my first crash since coming up to 128GB today. I turned off page file, assuming I would never run out RAM. During my work the genome assembler took a spike up to 122GB RAM usage and before I realized it showed me the blue screen, I lost about 500GB of work in progress. So lesson learned. No matter how big your RAM is, DO NOT TURN OFF the page file!



At last voice of reason... learned the hard way. You should gospel it.


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## Mussels (Jun 6, 2016)

i've been manually setting my page file to 2GB since the XP days with no issues, 24GB of ram these days.


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## puma99dk| (Jun 6, 2016)

I learned over the yrs not totally disabled the pagefile bcs some Microsoft programs ain't really happy if u do, read that Office and so on still wants it enabled so i set it to like 1024mb or smth like that and it's fine.

Last friday I reinstalled Windows 10 Pro on my rig but I let it at auto with 16gigs of ram I don't need it a lot.


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## Toothless (Jun 6, 2016)

When i shut off my pagefile Windows started screaming at me when i used 11/16GB. 2GB pagefile fixed that.


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## xkm1948 (Jun 6, 2016)

I point the page file path to my largest hard drive instead of my SSD. Windows happily set up a 256GB file immediately.


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## xorbe (Jun 6, 2016)

I don't know about Windows methods, but at one time, Linux needed swap (page file) to enable on-demand paging of read-only binaries from disk.  They didn't actually get put in swap -- BUT if you disabled swap, then it was always loaded into ram, thus pressuring RAM even further.  Not sure how it is now.  Anyway, my takeaway is that I always leave at least 4GB for page file / swap.  If I get that deep into it, my machine is probably crawling anyway.

Shouldn't blue screen when you run out of ram, a process should be killed, ideally ... OOM can be tricky though, apparently.


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## trog100 (Jun 7, 2016)

i have been running without a page file for the last ten years.. most of them on a win XP system with only 4 gigs of ram.. 4 gigs was a lot back then..

i am now on a system with 32 gigs of ram with the page file turned off..

basically once windows actually starts to use its swap file its time to buy some more of the real stuff..

windows and its swap file is a relic of the past..

trog


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## Toothless (Jun 7, 2016)

trog100 said:


> i have been running without a page file for the last ten years.. most of them on a win XP system with only 4 gigs of ram.. 4 gigs was a lot back then..
> 
> i am now on a system with 32 gigs of ram with the page file turned off..
> 
> ...


Not everyone is elitest in ignorance as you are. Majority of us would rather not waste money and let things be as they are.


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## ViperXTR (Jun 7, 2016)

Usig 16GB ram, and 3Gb of pagefile, set on HDD instead of SSD (or should i put it back on SSD). Issues occurred when i tried disabling pagefile so i just put it back


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## natr0n (Jun 7, 2016)

I use 1024mb page file on asrocks xfast ram disk software. In my opinion any quality ramdisk program thats the best use for it.

Never any issues.


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## Jetster (Jun 7, 2016)

ViperXTR said:


> Usig 16GB ram, and 3Gb of pagefile, set on HDD instead of SSD (or should i put it back on SSD). Issues occurred when i tried disabling pagefile so i just put it back



Samsung suggests leaving it on your SSD


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## thesmokingman (Jun 7, 2016)

I always move the pagefile off my main ssd. I have an old 60gb ssd that I dedicate to swap duty.


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## xkm1948 (Jun 8, 2016)

trog100 said:


> i have been running without a page file for the last ten years.. most of them on a win XP system with only 4 gigs of ram.. 4 gigs was a lot back then..
> 
> i am now on a system with 32 gigs of ram with the page file turned off..
> 
> ...




In case you missed it, I can only put up to 128GB of RAM on X99, and it is already full of that.


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## scevism (Jun 8, 2016)

xkm1948 said:


> I point the page file path to my largest hard drive instead of my SSD. Windows happily set up a 256GB file immediately.


This is defo the best way.


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## scipio (Jun 8, 2016)

For what i do, gaming and work on microsoft access it doesnt matter


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## Jetster (Jun 8, 2016)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2860880

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com...pushing-the-limits-of-windows-virtual-memory/


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## Pill Monster (Aug 6, 2016)

The following thoughts have been on my mind for quite some time,

I've read Geoff Chappell's blog and atm am about halfway through _Windows Internals 6th _by Russunovich, and it's brilliant, I really recommend it.
Mark used to piss Microsoft right off so  I have great respect for him.

Just to set the record straight, a pagefile is "not required" in Windows and never has been. Regarding applications which "need" a pagefile, applications don't know even the pagefile exists.

^This is true. You will find the above in Mark R's book so feel free to look it up.


Below is mostly opinion, but with some truths thrown in.
Due to events which have happened over the last few years, and some personal observations I've concluded MS are not being totally honest with us neither are Intel. And AMD has been getting the short end.


Many MSDN blogs and TN blogs are tailored to suit Microsoft interests, and tbh - Intel.

*The reality:*
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/make-windows-7-and-vista-32-bit-x86-support-more-than-4gb-memory/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090706-00/?p=17623/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040822-00/?p=38093/
http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/windows/license/memory.htm


******

PAE and the PF is designed for x86 32 systems with 2GB sliced of for the kernel and a total of 2GB or less left for everything else. Or any platform with barely any ram. Like all Intel until around ~2008.
AMD64 and IA64 platforms can both support up to 2TB of RAM and likely more expert MS hasn't tested past 2TB.

TBh I don't understand the point of a PF because if you can map section objects from a hard drive what is the difference between that and a pagefile? Why use one, you're mapping the same pages twice.
Maybe someone else who knows WMM can throw in 2c?

Also, has anyone ever been able to make sense of "Windows Memory Limitations" on MSDN? 
I've been in the industry for nearly 20 years and even I don't understand them. Can you?

An example:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-nz/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx
If those are MS Technical References the authors need to find a new line of work.


Wasn't till I read Geoff's Chappel's blog cited above I realised hey, I'm really not stupid after all!  
Geoff said it years ago; the MS articles on memory limits and PAE are deliberately ambiguous.  


Why can't MSDN seem to make it clear?











During 2004-2008 Intel did not have a single chipset which could handle over 4GB, except Xeon which was specifically designed for servers and astronomically expensive.  In 2004 AMD released Athlon64 which was both cheaper than Xeon and could support about as much RAM as you could throw at it.  At the same time XP users found they could install 8GB or RAM on their shiny new nForce4 board and the OS would use it.
This is because up until then XP had always been shipped with the PAE kernel enabled, the Client and Server versions of XP  are exactly the same, except for the PAE kernel, it ships with both.

Obviously this did not sit well with Microsoft, because hell if end users could now access all that RAM on XP why would why anyone bother upgrading to Vista?  Or XP Enterprise/Server versions.
It also did not sit well with Intel who at the time were busy paying of OEM vendors like Dell and HP in attempt to destroy AMD for good.

Consequently along came SP2,  low and behold after updating end users running XP Client on Xeon or AMD64 could no longer use over 4GB even though 10 mins before they had 6-8GB installed.
MS eventually made some vague comments that disabling PAE was to "prevent crashes from buggy drivers which expect 64 bit addresses" and in the clients best interest.
The curious part was although MS were concerned by this, at the same time they were busy promoting 64bit Vista as the second coming of Christ.   No, no, nothing contradictory aboiut that.

Another point I'd like to make is regarding the 2008 "Pushing windows memory limits" Technet blog, which I'm convinced (I hope) Russunovich didn't write since it has Alex Ionescu's name on the meminfo screenshot.


*****
There is a paragraph about halfway down the page with a screenshot of meminfo and a claim along the lines of "look see in 64bit Vista all my 4GB of RAM shows up".

Directly below it for comparison is another meminfo screenshot  with "I bought a gaming system with 2GB of VRAM but because it came with 32bit Vista I have only 2-5 or 3.5GB of RAM available." Whatever it was.


I'm sorry, but that claim is bullshit.

The "Boutique Gaming system" with "32bit Vista" is  in fact an Intel 945 laptop with onboard 8400 GPU and only supports 4GB RAM maximum.





In the top "Vista 64" screenshot the command prompt line  *CLEARLY STATES  AMD64.*

It's an AMD64 chipset with remapping, obviously it will support over 4GB.  The extra 500MB RAM has nothing whatsoever to do with the OS.  Is this misleading the public? You decide.

I posted a comment on Technet last week questioning the screenshot, and it was promptly deleted.
Some time later all the "Anonymous" spam posts appeared,  which you will see below the main article. 



P.S: Russunovich never claimed "the PF shouldn't be disabled no matter how much RAM is installed" he said "it can be disabled but it's not recommended".
That was written nearly 10years ago in 2008.
What he didn't - or probably couldn't - say was "it's not recommended on x86 IA32 systems which have sweet FA ram available.

*Windows Internals 6th Edition*  states Windows can run without a pagefile and the key to performance is physical memory. You have to read between the lines sometimes,
I think with 2TB available we can assume it's safe. but ofc check support with your vendor.  


Thanks,  I'm interested in any comments.   Please no flaming.


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## trog100 (Aug 7, 2016)

my understanding of all this is very simple.. it all started off many years ago and was based on the premise that no machine would have enough ram.. back then this was basically true..

to get around this something called "virtual memory" was created.. virtual memory is a mixture of real ram and hard disk space.. to windows its all the same.. the only snag being that storage drive space is massively slower to read and write from than ram.. 

windows for obvious reasons will use its ram memory first then it will resort to what used to be called its swap file.. when it does this the entire system slows down to crawl but at least keeps going..

now most windows machines do have enough ram and and the original premise that no machine can have enough ram is history.. quite why this isnt common knowledge i havnt a clue.. it should be.. 

when as in most cases a machine has enough real memory (ram) the whole virtual memory thing is redundant.. there is no need for it.. 

trog


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## Pill Monster (Aug 8, 2016)

trog100 said:


> my understanding of all this is very simple.. it all started off many years ago and was based on the premise that no machine would have enough ram.. back then this was basically true..
> 
> to get around this something called "virtual memory" was created.. virtual memory is a mixture of real ram and hard disk space.. to windows its all the same.. the only snag being that storage drive space is massively slower to read and write from than ram..
> 
> ...



On a side note, the AMD64 screenshot above also appears in Internals 6th, but with one notable difference:

The image is cropped to remove the "AMD64" line.  lol

I hope Russunovich didn't do that. 
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/solutions/digital-marketing/


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## krull (Aug 8, 2016)

well... for gaming 32gb and virtual mem of and registry tweak disable virtualitzation. enought for windows 7 and 2008 r2.  64 on more moder S.O.

online continued gaming (no logoff) 64gb for win7 and 2008 r2. win 8.1 and up really don't know exatly when but always stops an app ¿¿128//256?? I never has such ram quantity for playing.. don't know


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## d265f2785 (Oct 17, 2016)

I have 32 GB ram and 32 GB swap (about 6 GB of it is on a ssd (this one has a high priority so is the first one to get used), the rest on a normal hard drive). I also have zswap enabled (lz4 compression z3fold alocator (which means it can write up to 3 pages of ram to 1 swap page if they  compress well enough)) and both swap partitions are encrypted. The only time I've seen it hit the swap heavily is when running a dedupe on a huge btrfs raid array.

edit:
the dedupe was using close to 20 gb, chromium with a few hundred tabs another 10 gb, handbrake transcoding a few videos a gb or so, random shit running in the background a few more gb, and a few virtual machines (including one in which I was playing nfs underground) were taking another 10gb or so. Surprisingly the system didn't feel slow...


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## FireFox (Oct 17, 2016)

Move on guys this is not the Windows XP's age anymore.


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## Mussels (Oct 17, 2016)

hell even two days ago, a memory leak in a program (i use sleep mode a lot - so a months worth of leaking) ate 8GB of page file despite having ~10GB of ram free.

if you disable your page file, windows just turns it back on sneakily and treats the minimum as 0MB.


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## Jetster (Oct 17, 2016)

Knoxx29 said:


> Move on guys this is not the Windows XP's age anymore.



lol


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## newtekie1 (Oct 18, 2016)

Mussels said:


> hell even two days ago, a memory leak in a program (i use sleep mode a lot - so a months worth of leaking) ate 8GB of page file despite having ~10GB of ram free.
> 
> if you disable your page file, windows just turns it back on sneakily and treats the minimum as 0MB.



Yep, I really see no point in turning it off completely.  I keep a small 4GB page file on my SSD.


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## eidairaman1 (Oct 19, 2016)

AsRock said:


> My systems only have 12GB, 16GB and this one with 16GB but with windows 10 and is only 2.5GB on auto. Been no reason to touch it.
> 
> If you are using programs that could use the 128GB then you need to set what you think the absolute max you think you would need.
> 
> Trial and error.



I lock mine down 4096 or 8192, i don't let it stretch back n forth


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## slozomby (Oct 19, 2016)

since I'm not really worried about running out of disk space I don't bother to mess with it on my gaming rig and laptop, both 16gb systems. on huge memory systems like my sql servers I keep it at 1gb so If for some reason it does bluescreen I can get the minidump.


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## RejZoR (Oct 19, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> Yep, I really see no point in turning it off completely.  I keep a small 4GB page file on my SSD.



I used to disable it, but that also kills any ability to have debugging of crashes or BSOD's. Setting pagefile to 16MB and changing Startup and Recovery to Small Memory Dump (256KB) will give you basic debugging capabilities without the need to have massive pagefile on your SSD drive. I mean, in my case, I have 32GB of RAM which in 90% of cases doesn't get utilized past 30-50%. There is really no point in paging anything on disk on my system, I have RAM there to be used as much as possible.


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## SomeOne99h (Oct 19, 2016)

Mussels said:


> hell even two days ago, a memory leak in a program (i use sleep mode a lot - so a months worth of leaking) ate 8GB of page file despite having ~10GB of ram free.
> if you disable your page file, windows just turns it back on sneakily and treats the minimum as 0MB.


I have the page file disabled AND deleted. Disk defragment software wouldn't see it. Despite that, when I use computer monitoring software like AIDA and other software, they actually tell me that I  have some amount of page file which is so weird. I guess it is because -as I have read in Microsoft pages long ago- that *Windows usage of page file is by design*. Which I think why Windows sneakly uses it because it is a must for Windows.


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## P4-630 (Oct 19, 2016)

NO pagefile is asking for a application/game to crash.
I let windows manage it, I have 16GB ram and my pagefile is just 2432Mb.


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## SomeOne99h (Oct 19, 2016)

P4-630 said:


> NO pagefile is asking for a application/game to crash.
> I let windows manage it, I have 16GB ram and my pagefile is just 2432Mb.


I remember the old game Age of Empire (the first one) wouldn't work probably without page file as stated by Microsoft. Also, Comapny of Hoeres (the first one), enabling page file fixed stuttering for some. Heck, I "think' I have heard that disabling page file might cause issues with Skyrim but I am not sure if my memory is misleading me on this one.

I didn't have stuttering issue with Company of Heroes with page file disabled, but I think if we find some issues with an application or a game, we should consider enabling page file as part of troubleshooting.


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## xkm1948 (Nov 3, 2016)

With improved assembly algorithm memory usage have been significant reduced. A regular RNASeq assembly used to take ~105GB of RAM, now it is down to ~38GB of RAM. Not too bad.


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## freddyzdead (Nov 11, 2016)

I get pretty tired of all the dire warnings to not disable virtual memory under any circumstance.  I wouldn't go and do that without mininum of 16G of RAM, which is what I have, but having done so, I can tell you that Windows (8.1) just uses RAM as page file.  All it means is that your RAM isn't as big as it was before.  Example: my setup at the moment.  3 browsers running (browsers are notorious memory hogs, the more tabs you have open, the more they use.) AVIDemux is encoding a movie. Few file manager windows open.  There is no pagefile.  Task Manager reports 3.8G in use, 5G cached data, 6.3G free.  1G is hardware reserved (Video, I suppose).  So, why do I need a pagefile?  I am giving up 5G of RAM so my 1TB Samsung SSD doesn't get all that unnecessary data written to it.  Seems like a pretty good trade to me.  Now, what I do notice is that when the movie is finished encoding, the cache part of the memory doesn't shrink.  That might take some looking into.

I read an article on Ars Technica saying that SSDs will take hugely more data written to them than what people think, so stop worrying about how big your pagefile is.  But the SSDs they were testing were failing after ~700TB being written to them.  To me, that is not a huge amount of data over the life of the device.  In this case, the drives were all around 250GB, which means they were effectively filled up about 2800 times before wearing out.  If the drive is being hammered day in, day out with a 16GB pagefile, how long would it take to add up to 1TB? You might do it in a day, it seems to me.  The point is, SSDs wear out, RAM doesn't.

Anyway, I experience no issues without a pagefile, Windows hasn't warned me about anything in that regard; I just don't worry about it.  If I ran a lot more stuff it could get to be a problem, but I don't.  It's already been mentioned here that the pagefile had its beginnings when typical PCs had 2 - 8 MEGAbytes of RAM, and 4 megs of it would cost you a couple of hundred dollars.  This is why your 386SX-16 ran so slowly, because it was swapping huge amounts of data back and forth to the 40MB hard disk.


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## Disparia (Nov 11, 2016)

But, the pre-fetch cache doesn't get written to the pagefile. This is data Windows reads in because it's predicting that it will be used in the future. It didn't shrink when your movie finished encoding because that part of memory had nothing to do with anything you were doing at the time, otherwise it would have been counted as part of "in use" memory.

Not saying the pagefile is absolutely necessary, just that the of it's being "hammered" is a bit extreme. If it was being hammered then it was necessary to have one, but since your usage is low (relative to the amount of memory your have) and you can do without a pagefile, then very little was being written to it.


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