Virtual memory with large RAM

[FireFox]

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

 

[Mussels]

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.

 

[Jetster]

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

lol

 

[newtekie1]

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.

 

[eidairaman1]

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

 

[slozomby]

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.

 

[RejZoR]

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.

 

[SomeOne99h]

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.

 

[P4-630]

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.

 

[SomeOne99h]

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.

 

[xkm1948]

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.

 

[freddyzdead]

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.

 

[Disparia]

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.