Turning off your page file

trentlad

trentlad

trentlad

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With so many systems having an abundant amount of RAM, has anyone tried switching off their page file? To force the OS to use the RAM as active memory?

I bought 8GB of RAM for my system and tried taking out the 4GBtw after using it for oneyear. I didnt see the slightest bit of difference. So I'm looking for away to use it, it's really good quality pricey RAM too so Im not going to sell it.
 
Regardless of how much ram you have experience tells me that Windows still needs a pagefile.

If you didnt see any difference when you went from 4gb to 8gb its because you didnt need the extra ram not because Windows wont use it.

In just Windows day to day stuff and gaming 4gb RAM still has loads of capacity & 8gb should only really be needed when you are running RAM heavy apps such as Adobe CS5 regularly.

Just leave it alone and let the OS manage it.
 
Mancubus, I couldn't have put it any better.

OP, if you are desperate to use it the extra RAM, then maybe setup a ramdisk. Point your temp files and (if it will let you) most of your pagefile there for some extra performance. It's even been known for people to run games directly from them to extract every last ounce.
Otherwise, I expect you've got more CPU cores than you know what to do with too, so how about setting up a virtual PC and donating it to science (SETI,folding)? :D
 
Vista & 7 use the extra RAM for SuperFetch (the best feature added to Windows for consumers possibly ever).

Unless you're horribly low on disk space (in which case that's your fault for a lack of forward thinking when you bought that SSD :p) then removing the page file is almost never a good idea on NT.
 
Just search for this topic on these forums as it has come up a number of times - and they include some great technical details from Mark Russinovich.

Since I am far too lazy to link the shortened version is:

The Pagefile is not an overflow. Meaning even if you are only using half your 12GB RAM, stuff may still be written to the pagefile. If there is no pagefile, your computer falls over.
 
vsmora said:
Mancubus, I couldn't have put it any better.

OP, if you are desperate to use it the extra RAM, then maybe setup a ramdisk. Point your temp files and (if it will let you) most of your pagefile there for some extra performance. It's even been known for people to run games directly from them to extract every last ounce.
Otherwise, I expect you've got more CPU cores than you know what to do with too, so how about setting up a virtual PC and donating it to science (SETI,folding)? :D
Click to expand...

Lads, thank you all for the great input. Honestly really appreciate it. I understand that the RAM can be utilized by particular applications but I just don't use any like that so it leaves the excess RAM redundant.

Vsmora - that's one hell of a bloody good idea. I think I'll look into this RAM disk capability and definitely give it a blast. Yep you're right I have more power in this Rig than I can fully utilize, but that's why I built an upper mid-spec Rig because I wanted something that moves faster than I do and something that will last me. Saying that I am a gamer so that's about as intense as it gets for my Rig, but even though I don't use intense apps I'm definitely above an 'average user'.
 
I've read good things about the free "Dataram", but don't take this as a recommendation. I haven't played with any general purpose ramdisks for some years now.
 
No point turning it off, some programs actually require it and will refuse to run, Company of Heroes if I recall is one.

I have 8gb ram, I run with a reduced page file (only 2 or 4gb I think), but wouldn't turn it off completely.
 
Ah see now you're talking. So I can actually reduce it's size and hence have a page file but still make use of the RAM.

How did you do that?
 
A ramdisk is unrelated to the partitioning and formating of your HDD, so Linux is no help unless you want to use the ramdisk in Linux. It is just a bit of sw that you install from inside Win like any other app, so if you don't have the sw running, the ramdisk won't exist. People wanting to hide things sometimes use them precisely because they only exist in RAM, which gets erased as soon as you turn off the power. The better versions can be set to autostart on bootup, allow dynamic resizing (so you can grow/shrink them without rebooting) and can auto save/restore the contents to HDD when you shutdown/bootup (e.g. if you want the speed of RAM but the continuity of a HDD between sessions).
 
trentlad said:
Ah see now you're talking. So I can actually reduce it's size and hence have a page file but still make use of the RAM.

How did you do that?
Click to expand...

Simply manually assign the pagefile size to as small as you want from the normal System->Performance->Advanced... etc page. I don't think you will get any benefit from doing this though and may even slow things down. Ultimately if you still haven't got any of the demanding apps previously mentioned, then it won't really alter how much you usefully use. Making full use of the RAM might sound good in theory, but in a multi-tasking OS, not always.

Fictional example to illustrate: Start iTunes 10 and maybe it asks the OS for 2GB, Firefox 5 asks for 3GB, Acrobat 12 asks for 2Gb, which Win decides is all OK to give out. You now have 7GB of physical RAM occupied and only 1GB free. You start a game which asks for 4GB, so the OS asks the other apps if they will give up some RAM but they only care about themselves and end up freeing just 1GB more RAM. Your game is now shoehorned into the remaining 2GB physical RAM with none free. If the swapfile was the normal size, Win could see that the first 3 apps are unnecessarily greedy and only actively using 1GB between them, and the other 6GB was mapped by them but not being accessed, so could be paged to disk without them noticing or impacting performance at all. With 6GB free your game now asks for 4GB and gets the full allocation which it will really use. Plus there's still 2GB free for running the OS and performing caching/superfetch. (Note before someone posts to poke holes: yes I know it doesn't work exactly like this, but it is an acceptable simplification for using in an example).

With a modern version of Win, the only good reasons for tweaking pagefile are:
1) To fix the size so it stays unfragmented and on the fastest part of your HDD.
2) To set which drive you want it on, so you can pick the most suitable one e.g. if you have an SSD and don't want to use your HDD.
3) If you have a specific app that you know for a fact (i.e. the maker tells you) it needs specific swapfile settings.

I only suggested the ramdisk because it gives you some use of the extra RAM, without slowing performance for the apps you use.
 
Do NOT put your page file on a RAM disk.

This is actually WORSE than turning the page file off altogether. And not many things get worse than even that.
 
I have previously tried turning it off on a system with 4gb ram, so as to preserve the integrity of my (non-TRIM) SSD. The primary goal was achieved, but obviously when you hit the limit, instead of starting to swap, the system simply throws out of memory errors. To be fair, though - this only ever happened when doing massive photomerges in photoshop (for example) - in these days of SSD trim and stupid cheap HDD space, I can't really think of a good reason to turn paging off.
 
thepeganator said:
No point turning it off, some programs actually require it and will refuse to run, Company of Heroes if I recall is one.

I have 8gb ram, I run with a reduced page file (only 2 or 4gb I think), but wouldn't turn it off completely.
Click to expand...

All programs require it. The fact that "Company of Heroes" apparently requires it is merely a coincidence with the fact that it must be a particularly demanding game on the kernel's memory manager.

No programs will start up and do some bizarre "is the page file enabled" check with the OS. They don't care. All they care about is whether their memory allocation request for say 500MB is successful or not.

Given that such a request (500MB) is far far easier for the kernel's memory manager to fulfil instantaneously if it has a large page file to work with versus not having one, there is a much higher probability that the program will succeed in its memory allocation request rather than fail.

The page file is just one part of how a virtual memory operating system goes about its business. The page file is something that is constantly in use. Merely minimising an application to the task bar can cause Windows to update that application's representation in the page file. So that if some other application comes along and wants to allocate a chunk of memory then it can quickly and easily "page out" that minimised application. There are a whole raft of optimisations like this in Windows. To turn off the page file is only going to criple the OS and make the job of the kernel's memory manager MUCH more difficult. It will inevitably at some point have to start rejecting memory allocation requests. And that's when applications start crashing and things start failing to load.

People get into their minds that the page file is some sort of "overflow carpark". Where it is only used when RAM gets tight. This is not the case. The page file is actually more akin to that science fiction concept of a "parallel universe" except where there might be a guy in the far distance that shouts compliments at you all day long. The page file is intended to be a sort of "dirty and disorganised" mirror image of what is in RAM.
 
We need a Pagefile sticky because this keeps coming up in new threads every other month and always ends the same way!
 
We just need a banner across the top of the forum:

THE PAGE FILE IS FINE AS IT IS. NO, YOU DON'T NEED TO SPLIT YOUR DRIVE INTO 18 PARTITIONS. YES, INSTALL WINDOWS AND APPLICATIONS TO YOUR SSD. OH GOD PLEASE DON'T USE REGISTRY BOOSTING/TWEAKING SOFTWARE AND FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY STOP USING XP!

:D
 
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