Pagefile usage

Reiver · 7 Feb 2006 at 18:40

I have 2GBs of RAM but when i open task manager it says my PF usage is about 270mb at desktop. Opening a program it jumps to 300MBs+ I thought that with that much RAM the page file wouldn't be used at all.
Playing HL2 PF usage goes up over 800MBs which might explain the stuttering problems i've been having during HDD access. Why is this happening?

malfunkshun · 7 Feb 2006 at 19:10

windows will always dump some of the kernel to the page file unless you tell it not to. I guess it does the same with other apps.

Dunky · 7 Feb 2006 at 21:20

Virtual Memory is not an 'overflow car park', Windows does use it to hold 'pages' of memory (it's really a spot where Windows can prepare pages in one place so that when a 'page' of data is required, Windows knows exactly where to go to find it). 800MB when HL2 is running is probably about right, page file is probably holding the data for the next level or scene.

CoXeY · 7 Feb 2006 at 21:33

When looking at the Performance tab of Task Manager the two figures you want to be interested in are "Total Physical Memory" and "Peak Commit Charge".

If the Peak Commit Charge exceeds the Total Physical Memory then you know the system does not have enough RAM and is therefore "paging" (thus hindering performance).

CoXeY

Reiver · 7 Feb 2006 at 21:51

So there's nothing out of the ordinary there? Cheers for the replies.