Should I use a page file with 6gb memory and an SSD?

[JasonM]

Ok egg on face moment.

I was wrong, I was not using 6GB of page files. I already knew the Peak Commit Charge was the important value, however I forgot for some reason.

Anyhow I repeated my test of loading photoshop etc, I got my 8GB ram down to around 0.5 gig, however watching the Peak Commit, it only went to just under 9GB. So just under 1GB of page file in use. This confirms what people are saying that on high memory systems, they are never seeing more then 2GB ever used. Also my 8GB of dedicated page file is totally overkill, and i've reduced it down to 4GB.

Also in light of my existing problems with my JMicron SSD, i've moved the page file back to HDD only. I thought the OP had a SSD with a write issue, and never realised it was one of the more advanced ones.

So looks like if you have lots of memory, a newer SSD (no write issues), then 2GB dedicated page file on the SSD is likey correct.

 

[John24]

There seems to be a common perception in which a page file is simply used as an overflow of physical memory whereby once physical memory has been used up, the page file is then used, which isn't correct.

I never said that was the case.

Having a paging file mean pages which may not have been accessed for a while can be written to the paging file and thus making that memory available for much more useful purposes such as caching.

Exactly, and why have them paged out when you have enough RAM to keep them in memory.

Storing everything into physical memory, including things which aren't being accessed, isn't going to improve system performance, it just means memory is wasted.

When you access said pages from the pagefile it will be slower than if they were already in RAM, reading from RAM is faster than reading from a file on the hard drive.

If you disable the paging file without any regard to the amount of committed virtual memory for your workload which happens to sum up to be more than the amount of physical memory you have installed in your system, you will run into problems which I demonstrated in my post here. It's worth taking into account that whilst you will usually receive "Your system is low on memory" message when your applications are unable to allocate the virtual memory they want, on a couple of occasions while I was testing this, my system came to a complete halt which forced me to restart.

I have never got that message, maybe it's a feature of Vista/W7. I have been left with an unresponsive system due to using more RAM than was available though (I only had 512MB at the time), which is why I say you need to make sure you have enough physical RAM for your needs or of course when you run out you will get lockups.

Also, Windows will be unable to generate crash dumps without a correctly sized paging file.

You have a point there, I will remember to warn people about that when i recommend disableing the pagefile in future.

 

[IAmATeaf]

Don't have an SSD but my home PC has 8gb of RAM and I've set a fixed page file size of around 6gb for my rig else Photoshop/Corel Paint can sometimes complain if you have too many pics open at once.