Got 16GB RAM should I disable page file now?

Disco_P said:
No, I know for a fact skyrim crashes when you have no pagefile. Just a small one will do.
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Play Skyrim all the time without any crashes. And that's with a ton of mods loaded too. Not had a pagefile in 3 years.

NB. My machine has 32GB of RAM (as I use it for other purposes besides gaming), but I wouldn't have thought that extra 16GB would make any difference...
 
Useful for crash dump file and some software used to throw wobblies without one. No harm in having a GB or two.
 
Nope dont disable it as windows still uses the pagefile nomatter how much memory you have. I have just reduced my pagefile down to 4gb from 16gb.

Deus Ex said:
Reduce it to 2gb and stick it on a mechanical drive, not your ssd.
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Dont put it on your mechanical drive, leave it where it is, as it will lower the performance of windows. Dont know how much by though, but when windows wants to access the pagefile, it will be able to do it faster if its on the SSD.
 
Keep one on the SSD. I seem to remember an actual MSDN article/blog saying that it was ideal for an SSD, as reads from it are typically often, small and random and writes to it are typically less often, larger and contiguous.

Personally, I have 4GB on the SSD and a windows-managed one on a mechanical hard drive. To my way of thinking, that's the best of both worlds. Windows can still use loads of page file space if it wants to, but most of the time the size of the swap file on the SSD will be perfectly adequate.
 
There's no performance benefit to disabling it, but reducing its size at least means it's not occupying a huge amount of space on your drive. Leave it on the SSD too.
 
I normally create two partitions on my SSD. One partition for the OS and another small one for the pagefile. If you use a backup program to
make an image backup of your OS partition, having the pagefile on another partition saves you from having a more larger image backup size
due to your pagefile being on the same partition as your OS.
 
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Deus Ex said:
Reduce it to 2gb and stick it on a mechanical drive, not your ssd.
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2GB is fine but sticking it on a mechanical driver is bonkers. even this old article from 2009 recommends putting your pagefile on an SSD. i think i trust the word of windows developers over any forumites. :p

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
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Sylver123 said:
I normally create two partitions on my SSD. One partition for the OS and another small one for the pagefile. If you use a backup program to
make an image backup of your OS partition, having the pagefile on another partition saves you from having a more larger image backup size
due to your pagefile being on the same partition as your OS.
Click to expand...

Not necessary, any decent image backup program (E.G. Macrium) excludes the pagefile anyway. It is recreated by the OS after a restore.

Always have the pagefile on the SSD and just reduce its initial size if space is tight.
 
Don't disable page file, either keep at Windows Managed or reduce with a high maximum value. Most people would be fine with a 2GB initial size, then set a max of around 16GB, then your safe for almost any situation.

Page file access is striped, so if you have multiple HDD's/SSD's page files's should be placed on each physical drive. Never put multiple page files on different partitions on same physical drive.

If you mix page files on different physical disks, the page file access will be reduced to the speed of the slowest drive. So if mixing page file on SSD and HDD, access will bottle neck around the HDD.

SSD's are perfect for page files due to fast random access but be aware it will reduce life of SSD due to disk writes.

According to MS, optimum cluster size for page file is 64k. If you want absolute performance a dedicated partition formatted to 64k should be used for the page file. I tried this and noticed no difference however.

If you set a low initial page file on SSD, then let the page file increase. You will incur more SSD writes compared to having a larger initial page file.

I have 32GB of RAM and seen over 90GB of page file from a c# dataset I was using, regardless of your RAM if you run out of memory page file will be used.

If your in a server environment for performance you ideally want your page file on a physical disk separate from other high IO operations such as database, or VM IO.

Despite everything I have written above, there is perhaps to much fuss about page file. Most people with 8GB+ of RAM will maybe never notice if page file on SSD or HDD, but always keep page file enabled.
 
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