Pagefile

paradisiac · 22 Jan 2011 at 13:19

is there an ideal size this should be, i know going too small will cause problems/slowdowns, and going too big will waste disk space, so is there an ideal size, or if you have ample ram will the pagefile not really get a lot of use?

Craig321 · 22 Jan 2011 at 13:19

Leave it alone.

gillywibble · 22 Jan 2011 at 13:30

Have a look at this thread.

m4rkw7 · 23 Jan 2011 at 17:12

Page file is normally 1.5x the amount of RAM that you have installed. Windows standards.

ecksmen · 23 Jan 2011 at 23:06

in a command prompt, type the following to see your current page file usage - see the peak usage, double and set it to min / max of this size to prevent fragmentation of the file. Run this command once in a while to make sure your page file is set accurrately.

Code:

C:\Users\userrname>wmic
wmic:root\cli>pagefile
AllocatedBaseSize  Caption          CurrentUsage  Description      InstallDate                Name             PeakUsage  Status  TempPageFile
4028               C:\pagefile.sys  148           C:\pagefile.sys  20100922083759.097213+060  C:\pagefile.sys  181                FALSE

Edit - if you want a crash dump file to analyse in the event of a bsod, you'll need to set it to your RAM (IIRC plus a few MB)

TheVoice · 23 Jan 2011 at 23:18

m4rkw7 said:
Page file is normally 1.5x the amount of RAM that you have installed. Windows standards.

That makes no sense.

As above, just leave it be, Windows knows what to do.

vertica · 23 Jan 2011 at 23:54

TheVoice said:
That makes no sense.

As above, just leave it be, Windows knows what to do.

Neither does your post.

It completely depends on how much physical RAM you have and what your usage is. If you read the linked thread you will see that is the case.

Windows certainly doesn't know what to do, in my case I have a machine with 48GB of RAM and another with 24GB of RAM and Windows tries to allocate 60-80GB and 20-30Gb of page file respectively. Far more than is required and it just takes up SSD space.

Mattus · 24 Jan 2011 at 00:00

vertica said:
Windows certainly doesn't know what to do, in my case I have a machine with 48GB of RAM and another with 24GB of RAM and Windows tries to allocate 60-80GB and 20-30Gb of page file respectively. Far more than is required and it just takes up SSD space.

That's really a bit of an unusual case, though, since you're combining enormous amounts of RAM with an SSD.

For the average user who has 2-6GB of RAM and ample disk space, there's really not a lot of point messing around with it - the default settings will serve you fine.

TheVoice · 24 Jan 2011 at 00:03

vertica said:
Neither does your post.

It completely depends on how much physical RAM you have and what your usage is. If you read the linked thread you will see that is the case.

Eh? How does 1.5x your physical RAM benefit the user if, say, they only have 512MB of RAM in the first place? They're going to need a bigger pagefile than 768MB.

ShakenNstirred · 24 Jan 2011 at 08:19

i let win 7 sort it all out
it does it well enough

NathanE · 24 Jan 2011 at 09:44

TheVoice said:
Eh? How does 1.5x your physical RAM benefit the user if, say, they only have 512MB of RAM in the first place? They're going to need a bigger pagefile than 768MB.

No they won't. The page file is intended to be a slightly dirty mirror image of physical RAM. Therefore having a disproportionately larger page file than the amount of physical RAM is not going to do many favours for you. It just means the system will be able to die a slow paging death for longer before any "out of memory" errors start appearing.

BunnyKillBot · 24 Jan 2011 at 12:01

vertica said:
Neither does your post.

It completely depends on how much physical RAM you have and what your usage is. If you read the linked thread you will see that is the case.

Windows certainly doesn't know what to do, in my case I have a machine with 48GB of RAM and another with 24GB of RAM and Windows tries to allocate 60-80GB and 20-30Gb of page file respectively. Far more than is required and it just takes up SSD space.

He was right, you were wrong, your post does not make any sense.

Who in the hells runs 24-48GB of RAM? You can't bring out an extreme test case and claim 'see! Windows sucks!'. I don't know anybody who runs that much memory, and if you did somehow manage to fill up 48GB of ram its logical to suggest you could easily fill 48GB more.

NathanE · 24 Jan 2011 at 12:22

Windows's "system managed" setting uses a simple 1.0x or 1.5x multiplier. If you've got 1GB RAM of less it uses 1.5x. If you've got more than that, it uses 1.0x.

The "system managed" setting is nothing spectacular really. It is not a silver bullet that is for sure.

Technically Windows was doing the "correct" thing by allocating a ~24GB page file for a machine with 24GB RAM. It was playing it safe by ensuring there is at least a 1:1 ratio between RAM and page file. This may or may not be overkill in this particular situation. It really depends upon what that machine is doing. It's sort of outside the scope of this thread really.

m4rkw7 · 7 Feb 2011 at 18:25

1.5x is just the Windows standard. You can use ReadyBoost for Windows 7 anyway

Broken Hope · 7 Feb 2011 at 21:30

I have 6GB of RAM with my pagefile set to 2GB min 4GB max, since my workload is never going to touch 8GB or over there's no need to have a bigger pagefile and I'm likely allocating too much to it to be fair.