Paging File in Windows 11 - System managed or Custom Sized

swarfega said:

One program I used to use is Speccy from the makers of ccleaner, but it's not been updated since 2018 so won't have any information on Ryzen builds. Should be fine for your era machine though.

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Wouldn't that be similar to what HWinfo64 displays though? My machine is actually mid-2018. I have not migrated all my apps from my old machine yet so my tools are limited at the time even though it's been 2 years. But Speccy seems to provide less info than HWinfo64 as HWinfo64 at least tells me who made the display panel in this notebook. What I meant was that being a Astrophysicist and someone who knows their info without looking it up, the way they use model numbers and not the speed is harder to remember than before when you had the Pentium 4-3.2Ghz for example.

Not tried HWinfo64 for a long time so I'm not sure what it's current state is.

swarfega said:

hmm it didnt see my 3900x when I tried it a while ago.

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I have a 3900x. My most recent published report is in my sig. The only thing it doesn't do well is read the drive information from my RAID controller well. Hard Disk Sentinel seems to do a fine job there though.

This old chestnut crops up again and again, and you get a variety of responses, but none of the really get to the root of the issue.

Historically pagefiles were used to cope with programs needing more RAM that pc had installed, and most of the advice was to reserve (say) 1.5 x disk space than RAM.

However, in time, RAM has become much cheaper, so the dependence on pagefiling is less critical BUT it really depends on what user is doing e.g. some activities are very RAM hungry e.g. rendering large videos, or running huge database type applications, having lots of tabs, apps open etc.

The other factor is that now Windows 10/11 uses compressed memory to minimise diskpaging, offloading compressed memory if that physical RAM is needed.

The relaptionship between compressed memory and pagefiling is a dynamic one and so best managed by OS.


Also, people cite other chestnuts about reducing wear and tear on SSDs.

Again, perhaps some truth back in days of 1st Gen 64GB SSDs, but now most new ones are 512MB plus with much more wear and tear resilience, and the pagefile impact on wear is less significant to point of being almost irrelevant now.

So, there really is no serious driver to set pagefiles manually these days.

Ask yourself if you think you know better than the OS in setting pagefile size manually?

The crux of most peoples arguments is I have plenty of RAM, thus pagefiles are not relevant.

Of course, this is true EXCEPT for when it isn't!

In the end, its a bit like having a modern DSG automatic car vs a manual gearbox. Many claim you will get better 0-60 acceleration performance with a manual rather than a DSG. This may be true of the driver is a professional racing driver but for mere mortals, DSG acceleration will easily out perform manual acceleration operation anyday.

cereberus said:

The other factor is that now Windows 10/11 uses compressed memory to minimise diskpaging, offloading compressed memory if that physical RAM is needed.

The relaptionship between compressed memory and pagefiling is a dynamic one and so best managed by OS.


Also, people cite other chestnuts about reducing wear and tear on SSDs.

Again, perhaps some truth back in days of 1st Gen 64GB SSDs, but now most new ones are 512MB plus with much more wear and tear resilience, and the pagefile impact on wear is less significant to point of being almost irrelevant now.

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Extremely valid points. I haven't seen any notable performance gains from using a custom pagefile, and more often than not it was a performance loss.

Most SSD's made since the Evo 840 will outlive a platter drive. There are a few exceptions though. If you buy a cheap Kingston or Inland Professional, you really do get what you pay for. A cheap drive that won't last. Even then though, removing the pagefile isn't going to make a significant difference in lifespan.

Turned mine off for a couple days, cant say that I noticed any difference so turned it back on again.

I think the other factor is that there were some limitations with RAM which was not due to the cost as before, people used to run 16 bit and 32 bit OSes, with 32bit having a 4GB RAM limitation. I remember back during the Windows 95 days, there was actually a third party memory management tool that replaced the built in virtual memory and it worked better, forgot the name of it as it was not used on anything after 95/8/ME.