Solved Questions about pagefile.sys

Sheikh · Jun 1, 2025

Hey guys
On a system with 64GB (2x32) DDR4 ram, do you recommend to deactivate pagefile on SSD to increase its lifetime?!
Is pagefile only a system reserved part or every time we restart pc, windows writes 2~8GB on C drive?
What about a system with 8GB (2x4) ram?
Is it better to delete pagefile before shutdown to decrease chance of windows/apps bugs after a long time of windows installation and let windows recreate it?
Any recommendations about pagefile except those comments with “leave it on default”. I want to understand its exact job and what’s inside of it.
The only thing I know is that pagefile is a virtual ram on ssd. What happens if pagefile is deactivated and ram gets full? Is it going to show us a BSOD? Hangs? What happens?

Thanks

garlin · Jun 1, 2025

Queue the inevitable flame wars on "I run perfectly w/o a pagefile". One, two, three...

Bree · Jun 1, 2025

Sheikh said:
Any recommendations about pagefile except those comments with “leave it on default”.

Well, I "leave it on default" - but with some understanding of why I do so.

The font of all knowledge about all things 'Windows' is Mark Russinovich, without whom we wouldn't have Sysinternals.

Sysinternals Suite - Sysinternals

The Windows Sysinternals troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single suite of tools.

learn.microsoft.com

Mark Eugene Russinovich (born December 22, 1966) is a Spanish-born American software engineer and author who serves as CTO of Microsoft Azure. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals before Microsoft acquired it in 2006.

Mark Russinovich - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Sheikh said:
I want to understand its exact job and what’s inside of it.

You can do no better than read what he has to say about the pagefile.

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory

learn.microsoft.com

garlin · Jun 1, 2025

Let's get the common hysteria out of the way:

1. Modern Windows runs fine w/o a page file.

2. But some Windows Virtual Memory parameters are scaled based on the page file's size. Not having one can do strange things, because Windows devs wrote Windows expecting to have one. [Mark Russinovich's comments]

3. The page file is where Windows commits crash dumps when a BSOD occurs. If you never want to understand why a BSOD occured, and don't want @zbook asking you to send him a bunch files, then disable the page file. To guarantee saving a crash file, the page file must at least equal the size of physical memory.

4. If you own large amounts of free memory relative to your Windows workload, not a whole lot of the page file gets written to.

Bree · Jun 1, 2025

garlin said:
3. The page file is where Windows commits crash dumps when a BSOD occurs.

Correct. Specifically, there has to be a pagefile on the C:\ drive for this to work.

Sheikh · Jun 1, 2025

After reading your comments, I have disabled it on my test laptop with 8GB ram to see what happens. Everything’s working fine but I don’t see any performance improvements at all. But still have this question, is pagefile deleted in shutdown process? If not, is force deletion of pagefile during shutdown a good idea or not?

I don’t care about BSOD or security issues as this machine is just a test pc. (e.g. disabled bitlocker to access C drive with linux if anything bad happened) The only advantages I’m searching for are 1. Hardware health 2. Speed and performance of windows core and 3. Stability of os and apps.

garlin · Jun 1, 2025

Page files are not deleted, or wiped clean. Windows (or your modern OS) keeps a separate memory page table tracking what data is stored in the page file. When it's time to restart Windows, the page file is considered as uninitialized data. The first time a page is committed (written) to the page file, the new contents overwrite what was previously there.

Whatever old data exists from before doesn't matter because those page blocks aren't in active use.

Only the security researchers care about having the page file destroyed or re-initialized because data from the previous Windows session could be leaked. Something in memory could have held confidential data at the time it was written to the page file.

Bottom line: if you have plenty of RAM vs. your headroom, having no page file isn't going to kill Windows. But don't complain either if weird memory or performance issues happen when you start running out of headroom. MS has known for decades people like to remove the page file.

Sheikh · Jun 1, 2025

Alright, after using two heavy apps, windows started to crash. Pagefile is necessary for this 8GB laptop. Deleting pagefile on shutdown sometimes leads to never ending shutdown process.
The best option here is to forget the SSD lifetime and let windows handle pagefile.

Sheikh · Jun 1, 2025

garlin said:
MS has known for decades people like to remove the page file.

What is their reason of deactivating pagefile? As we know from this thread, deactivating it has no performance benefits but some instabilities!

siliconbeaver · Jun 1, 2025

pagefile was introduced long time ago, when computer nominal RAM was 8 GB.

Your PC has 64GB. so you don't need to set pagefile 64GB. 8 GB is enough. but I wouldn't completely disable it.

Levitate11 · Jun 1, 2025

Sheikh said:
Alright, after using two heavy apps, windows started to crash. Pagefile is necessary for this 8GB laptop. Deleting pagefile on shutdown sometimes leads to never ending shutdown process.
The best option here is to forget the SSD lifetime and let windows handle pagefile.

Yeah, off the top of my head and pulled out of thin air... I would think 16gb is about the minimum to run w/o a page file. You can use somewhat north of 8gb with Windows, typical setup, and some apps. I know you stop a lot of services on your system per your other posts, but I'm guessing you're still close to the 8bg that you have when you are actively using multiple apps and files. So you need more to run with no paging.

garlin · Jun 1, 2025

Sheikh said:
What is their reason of deactivating pagefile? As we know from this thread, deactivating it has no performance benefits but some instabilities!

Because. The page file is stealing valuable disk space on their tiny disk drive. And it's MY MACHINE, DON'T TELL ME WHAT I NEED.

Sheikh · Jun 1, 2025

garlin said:
Because. The page file is stealing valuable disk space on their tiny disk drive. And it's MY MACHINE, DON'T TELL ME WHAT I NEED.

I think decreasing the size of pagefile is a better option than completely disabling it !

Sheikh · Jun 1, 2025

Levitate11 said:
Yeah, off the top of my head and pulled out of thin air... I would think 16gb is about the minimum to run w/o a page file. You can use somewhat north of 8gb with Windows, typical setup, and some apps. I know you stop a lot of services on your system per your other posts, but I'm guessing you're still close to the 8bg that you have when you are actively using multiple apps and files. So you need more to run with no paging.

Hmmm so, now I have followers and that means I’m a celebrity.

Levitate11 · Jun 1, 2025

Sheikh said:
What is their reason of deactivating pagefile? As we know from this thread, deactivating it has no performance benefits but some instabilities!

garlin said:
Because. The page file is stealing valuable disk space on their tiny disk drive. And it's MY MACHINE, DON'T TELL ME WHAT I NEED.

In the 'ol days, reading/writing to an spinning HD was far slower than writing to memory. So writing something out to the pagefile, and reading something back in, effectively slowed your system. Nowadays, with SSDs, the margin is comparatively minimal. So the performance boost isn't there. You had all the same dangers way back when, even more so, but the upside return was higher.

Nowadays it seems like a waste to worry about it.

Levitate11 · Jun 1, 2025

Sheikh said:
Hmmm so, now I have followers and that means I’m a celebrity.

Naw, I'm not following you... but I still have a few of the cameras and reloadable film reels left in my head from a former photographic memory. Nowadays I'm more like a well used SSD - cells that don't get used just fade away. But the new ones have a good charge.

garlin · Jun 1, 2025

Sheikh said:
I think decreasing the size of pagefile is a better option than completely disabling it !

No, the minimum size for a page file should equal physical RAM, so all crash dumps are preserved. The nominal rule is the page file is 1.5X the size of RAM, which is what Windows normally does (or close enough). Beyond that you don't need it any bigger, because that implies if you're using that much virtual paging space, you're into swapping territory and system performance is guaranteed to suck.

Paging doesn't make up for when you really run out of RAM. It just makes it more tolerable the closer you get to running out of memory. When you have two or more active (not idle) memory-hungry processes, then it gets more difficult for the paging model to dump unused pages to disk. Eventually the easy things to do don't happen, and now you wait the Windows spinning cursor hover over your frozen desktop.

Sheikh · Jun 1, 2025

Guys I’m very thankful for every single words you type to help me. And I’m so sorry that sometimes I can’t explain my questions as english is not my native language. But in this forum everyone tries to guide me and this means all you my friends are very kind. Thanks for the information you share with me.

Thread marked as solved.

garlin · Jun 1, 2025

Don't worry, In about a few weeks or months, someone will resurrect this thread to debate the finer points.

x509 · Jun 2, 2025

Bree said:
Well, I "leave it on default" - but with some understanding of why I do so.

The font of all knowledge about all things 'Windows' is Mark Russinovich, without whom we wouldn't have Sysinternals.

Sysinternals Suite - Sysinternals

The Windows Sysinternals troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single suite of tools.

learn.microsoft.com

Mark Russinovich - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

You can do no better than read what he has to say about the pagefile.

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory

learn.microsoft.com

More than I ever expected to learn about the pagefile. And silly me. I was settng the pagefile at 64B on 16 GB ram systems, and 128 GB on 64 GB systems.

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