Pagefile size?

allan said:

I swear, we had the same topic (more times than I can count) with essentially the same responses, arguments, fallacies, and facts almost 25 years ago on tweakxp.com (later tweaks.com). In the end, the bottom line was ALWAYS: it's your computer, do whatever you want. It really won't make much of a difference (if any) for 99.9% of users.

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And you're posting why? If it doesn't make any difference, what's your point?

MisterEd said:

My desktop has 32GB RAM and a. pagefile.sys of 12GB.
If I select No Paging file and reboot then I found that Windows had deleted pagefile.sys.
If I set pagefile back to automatic and reboot then the pagefile.sys is recreated again with a size of 12GB.
BTW, this computer also has a 12GB hiberfil.sys file. Windows won't let me delete this file even though hibernation is disabled.

My laptop has 32GB RAM and a pagefile.sys of 5GB. I wonder what the difference is? Also, it has no hiberfil.sys file.

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I'm not sure why it makes such a large hiberfil.sys for you even with it disabled. I booted up my mini PC with 16GB of RAM, and looked at root file sizes. It has a pagefile.sys of only 1GB and again, no hyberfil.sys. You need to turn off fast startup and then open an admin command prompt and enter powercfg -h off to finally kill off the file.

gunrunnerjohn said:

And you're posting why? If it doesn't make any difference, what's your point?

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Sorry, am I not allowed to post a comment? At least I wasn't rude.

The bottom line is, even if you have a workstation or server with, say, 256GB RAM or above, you still need a page file. If you are out of disk space, you can always replace your disks with a larger, unless you have a tablet with fixed storage. For example my HP Stream 7 tablet has Intel Atom Z series CPU, 1GB RAM and 32GB storage running Windows 10 32-bit. I struggle to have 1GB free disk space. Oh suddenly your PC feels like a super computer, doesn't it? Think there is always worse and be grateful with what you have.

When the memory bus was raised from 32 to 64 bit, most people thought it wouldn't need any further growth (at least in a predictable future). With the module sizes then, it would mean you'd need not 4, 8 or 128 modules, you'd need billions of memory modules to fill a single 64 bit map.

With current memory modules, it wouldn't be billions, it would be hundreds or tenths of millions, what doesn't move the 64 bit picture even a nm.

But there's other picture that has been moved. It's the feasibility of running out of physical memory in high RAM systems w/o doing memory intensive things. We're too used to gaussian curves that extend towards infinite and anything could happen even if little probable.

Anything??? Car drivers are precise enough with the throttle when driving in nearly empty roads. What if they weren't? Mach 2? This is aprox 2400 km/h, 20-25 times faster than "normal". From 3 to 64 GB. My point is you need more than a car to need or reach Mach 2 and more than a normal computer/use to fill 64 GB or even 32 (VMs is accumulating the memory needs of several devices in one physical device...).

This memory growth doesn't way affect the solidity of the 64 bit bus, but it affects the quantitative need for paging (there's a programmatic/standard need in some cases, even with theoretically 4 TB). I'm neither running a server nor a database nor VMs in my 32 GB computer (with DDR3, valid but not exactly modern). If I do it in the future, I'll likely need a pagefile but not now.

The real reason is that there are some specific Windows functions that still use the page file by design, for instance, crash dumps. While it's true that the major reason for the page file was as memory overflow, it's not the only reason.

Mark Russinovich, creator of the Sysinternals toolkit and a former Windows technical instructor (before he became CTO of MS Azure cloud services), wrote a long article explaining why Windows virtual memory behaves the way it does. It's worth a read on why having a page file is better, and why sometimes not having a page works at all.

How Big Should I Make the Paging File?

The bottom line is Windows is written to assume the page file exists, and will selectively allocate physical and virtual memory based on how it's being consumed and how much page space is assigned. When the math doesn't line up, bad things can happen in terms of performance or crashing.

garlin said:

Windows will never shrink an existing page file.

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I'm pretty sure this isn't true. I've seen examples mentioned elsewhere where it did shrink after a restart, in various circumstances, but who knows what the actual algorithm for this is.

garlin said:

Mark Russinovich, creator of the Sysinternals toolkit and a former Windows technical instructor (before he became CTO of MS Azure cloud services), wrote a long article explaining why Windows virtual memory behaves the way it does. It's worth a read on why having a page file is better, and why sometimes not having a page works at all.

How Big Should I Make the Paging File?

The bottom line is Windows is written to assume the page file exists, and will selectively allocate physical and virtual memory based on how it's being consumed and how much page space is assigned. When the math doesn't line up, bad things can happen in terms of performance or crashing.

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His discussion of the Testlimit utility is great, but, unfortunately, he still doesn't explain what *specific* calculations Windows uses to determine the "Currently allocated" size of the page file when it is set to "System managed size". (To be sure, I'm not talking about the minimum or maximum size, but the currently allocated size.) I guess only the Windows source code knows.

Personally, I have 32 GB in all my systems, including mom's PC, and the pagefile is practically never used. I even use VM's, but memory is not an issue anymore at least for now. When I added RAM is didn't notice speed increase because my systems are fast enough. What I have noticed is that Windows used to leave the paging file at 3 GB... increasing to 32 GB toned it down to 2 GB... I guess Windows doesn't need as much now huh?

Increasing RAM is like having a bigger desk to set your papers in, but you don't get faster loading times because that depends on the CPU, and SSD.

Your CPU is not bad at all, you should be having a pretty decent and fast system. I game on that with a RX 6600 XT, and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't see your SSD model there, but, if you made the mistake of having an old spinner drive, you are impacting your performance. That's the best I can think of.

Other than that, just leave Windows to manage the paging file, you don't need to mess with that unless you want the OS to hang or crash. Windows need the paging file to dump logs and still do some stuff.

The vast majority of people just need to leave the paging file as system managed.

On my 16 GB RAM laptop the currently allocated is at 1 GB, recommended is 3 GB, from that you can conclude system managed is doing it's job.

"Increasing RAM is like having a bigger desk to set your papers in, but you don't get faster loading times because that depends on the CPU, and SSD."

Not really, Pre-fetch and Super Pre-fetch are the main factors in load times, very noticeable on HDD, obviously less so on an SSD.
Also modern CPUs even the low end ones increase their clock speed loading an app.

I have set mine to always work at Turbo Boost speed.

cereberus said:

The rule of thumb 3xRAM is so ancient and only applied to pcs when RAM was much lower.

Quite why MS allow the above is a mystery to me as you could get a pagefile of 96GB if you had 32GB RAM. It would really take some doing to grow that large e.g. running 5 x 16 GB fixed allocated RAM VMs plus Host needs simultaneously. For most of us, this is science fiction LOL.

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No, not science fiction. Simply flat out fantasy horror. On my mains I tend to go the "other" way and run with RAM disk just for kicks. This is not to say that RAM disk doesn't have its own issues but when you have the memory to play around with it can be rather fun. Why mess about with page files when your memory can serve as a hard drive instead?

i have the swap file within RAM that way the swap file runs at the same speed as the RAM which is faster then SSD. also this way the swap file is deleted every reboot/start up and gets reconstructed afresh. i give the swap file 10% of the available RAM, i have 64GB of RAM so the swap file is 6.4GB.

this works for me.
best of luck, Steve ..

XxXxX said:

i have the swap file within RAM that way the swap file runs at the same speed as the RAM which is faster then SSD. also this way the swap file is deleted every reboot/start up and gets reconstructed afresh. i give the swap file 10% of the available RAM, i have 64GB of RAM so the swap file is 6.4GB.

this works for me.
best of luck, Steve ..

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Swap is different from paging -- swap usually copies a WHOLE users address space on to the swap area which means when used a lot more data has to be transferred from the swap device to internal RAM -- even with fast Nvme devices internal RAM is still orders of magnitude faster than SWAP.

Paging on the other hand just means chunks of memory - that aren't being used by an application can be "borrowed" by another process -- so the chunk of memory allocated to the original application can be written to the paging device while the other process can "grab" the chunk of RAM released -- far less data transfers needed (IN NORMAL SITUATIONS !!!!).

But beware -- if too many apps are running concurrently and / or not enough RAM in the system a condition known as "Thrashing" can occur. This causes almost all of the OS to keep attempting to write / re-write "chunks" of data to the paging device --on slower paging devices this will probably show up as a nearly continuous LED light on the disk access mechanism and almost zero response on the system.

For suggested system paging file sizes - I'd just leave Windows to do its own thing here -- there's all sorts of really complex algorithms such as LRU (Least Recently Used etc) plus some complex A.I database keeping details of what the user's most common tasks are so the OS can build some type of "Guessing Prefetch" -- i.e if it knows you use photoshop almost every login then at start up much of that application's start sequencies will be on the paging device where it's still a load quicker to load into RAM than from the application data on a standard OS disk.

In Linux distros Swapping / paging are essentially "interchangeable" as it's really "paging". Most sensible Linux distros can use internal RAM for this -- typically it's "ZRAM" -- in this case look at /dev/sram0 and a good default is to allocate 50% of RAM size -- so in this case 8GB.

e,.g as here on a 16 GB RAM minipc running Fedora 42 (KDE version) with a Windows 11 8GB VM



As Linux is mega efficient in "swap / paging" as my W11 VM is fairly quiescent at the moment there's zero activity on SWAP (/dev/zram0). The RAM allocation is due to 8GB for the Windows 11VM and the rest for the Linux Host.



I'm sure the same in other "proper" Linux distros -- For speed etc I prefer ArchLinux but for generic testing Fedora just works -- the "Big boys" at Redhat and IBM have mega experience in this stuff and it generally works !!! -


Cheers
jimbo

i haven't had any problems with it to date but then again i would say that my system is underutilised.
the system nowadays seem to be able to handle anything i can throw at them without much of a worry.

best of luck, Steve ..

My "tiny" 16GB RAM doesn't have enough room for a large enough RAM disk

spapakons said:

My "tiny" 16GB RAM doesn't have enough room for a large enough RAM disk

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Not sure why

Running 8GB Win11 VM on KVM/QEMU on Fedora 42 Host -- you can see almost ZERO cpu needed when W11 is essentially quiesced -- i.e not running any active user tasks but just logged on -- (in fact far better than HYPER-V - which itself isn't bad) on a modest 16 GB Mini PC. N100 CPU - almost Zero overhead when W11 VM is essentially "quiesced", -Hyper-V doesn't give anything like the same VM performance on "quiesced systems - much more overhead. !!!

Both though are very OK when the Guest system has actual work to do !!!.

Looks like somewhere your system is a bit hosed up. !!!








Cheers
jimbo

By enough room, I mean being able to create at 8GB RAM disk or more. If I do that I won't be able to get more than 2GB free for anything else when I render any videos.

Not sure of the differences between page file and swap file but I found it kind of interesting observing the virtual memory use on my three machines. I let Windows mange all three machines, one with 64GB RAM, one with 32GB RAM, and one with 16GB RAM. The intel 64 and 32 GB machines both use swap files of nearly the same size as the total RAM and always use almost the same percentage of virtual memory as my actual RAM in use. That struck me as kind of odd especially with 64GB. The 16GB machine is a Snapdragon ARM64 and I heard ARM64 uses a higher percent of RAM which I've come to believe as mine always has 70-81 percent RAM in use with a smaller swap file of say 35-45 virtual memory in use.