Pagefile usage during gaming

[Guest]

Hi,

Short question about pagefile usage,
namely: Is there a figure that's considered appropriated?

As of the last days i started with including the pagefile usage on my monitoring app and it revealed almost 16 GB's usage when playing BattleTech and 10 GB's of usage when playing Aven Colony.

Are these numbers exactly like they should? The zise of the pagefile is as is normal… set is the right term if i'm not mistaken. Would i gain from enlarging the size, are those numbers i just named ridicilous etc...

System

Xeon x5650
18 Gb's of ram 3x4 and 3x2
500 gb ssd and a 750gb hdd

Already much obliged for granting this question your attention 

Chris   

[Electronics Wizardy]

Is the game performance fine?  If it is don't worry, using a page file is fine.

 

WIndows will do things like copy the ram to the page file so pages can be swapped out faster and hibernation is faster, no reason to worry.

[Guest]

23 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Is the game performance fine?  If it is don't worry, using a page file is fine.

Oke…. There's always this thought lingering in the backside of my head ; " This works oke but what would happen if it could work in a better way? Would my gaming experience improve.. would i ravel about the unimaginairy heights the creaturs must roam " etc etc etc 

Yes it works more then fine! 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I've seen a monitoring app claim some value for the "Page file", but in actuality it was how much virtual memory was in use.  If you go to Task Manager to the Memory usage section, it's the "Committed" value.

 

There's some confusion that "virtual memory" means the page file, but it generally means physical memory + page file allocation.

[straight_stewie]

3 hours ago, Christiaan21-03 said:

Are these numbers exactly like they should? The zise of the pagefile is as is normal… set is the right term if i'm not mistaken. Would i gain from enlarging the size, are those numbers i just named ridicilous etc...

We need a little history lesson here.

Back in the day, only one application could be loaded up at a time. When you opened a new application, the OS would transfer complete control of the machine to the application, including all memory space and I/O control. When you closed the application, if it was properly functioning, it would transfer control back to the OS. There was no form of "multi-tasking" of any type.

Sometime around 1985-1987, while Microsoft and Apple were squarely in the middle of their OS war, one of the companies thought that it would be nice if the computer could run multiple applications at once. Unfortunately, to truly do that requires hardware support, something which wasn't available at the time. So what they came up with is called "virtual-memory".

The idea behind virtual memory is that every application thinks that it has the entire machine to itself. As far as an application is concerned, every address in the address range belongs solely to it. But clearly, if we have two applications that want to write to address 0, then we have a problem because they will corrupt each other. So what these early OSes did was assign each process an ID (you can see this easily in task manager, that ID is called PID for Process ID). Then, the OS stored whatever offset to apply to the address the application was trying to access in a table which can be referenced by Process ID. That way, when an application tries to access an address, it just thinks it's addressing address "x" when really it's asking the OS to access virtual address "x" for process PID. When this happens, the OS looks up the offset in the table, applies it to the address and then tells the machine what real address to use. Eventually, engineers realized that doing this all in software was very, very slow, and integrated circuits had become sufficiently advanced that this functionality was largely offloaded onto the physical memory controllers in the processor.

Then, sometime later as applications started getting bigger and bigger, and requiring more and more memory, OS writers decided that each application should think that it has control over the entire address space AND that each application should think that it has unlimited memory. But clearly, memory is very limited, so what they did was start offloading pages of memory into a "page file". A page file is just memory that the application thinks is in RAM, but in reality is in the hard drive. Modern OSes and the processors they run on use advanced pattern recognition and prediction algorithms to decide what memory will need to be used and attempt to handle this transition between page file in the hard drive and memory in RAM as quickly and efficiently as possible, often without the user ever noticing that it's going on.

Normally, you won't notice a performance hit from using a page file unless either or both of the following conditions are met: 1) You are using a very slow hard drive relative to the speed of the rest of the computer, 2) You are using the maximum amount of RAM available and that still isn't enough.

If your RAM usage is not absolutely maxed out, the page file size doesn't really correlate to game performance or memory usage patterns in any meaningful way, it's just Windows doin' what it do.
 

[LogicalDrm]

With 16gigs or more RAM, you shouldn't need more than 16gigs of pagefile. Usually you need 8gigs, and sometimes just 4gigs or less. It depends on software you are using. They use different amounts, and some can work without pagefile being enabled. I would however recommend keeping it enabled, and maybe testing on how much is enough that you can still use all software as intended without any lacks in performance.

[Guest]

13 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I've seen a monitoring app claim some value for the "Page file", but in actuality it was how much virtual memory was in use.  If you go to Task Manager to the Memory usage section, it's the "Committed" value.

I was using Afterburner's tool …. btw made a slight error.. it was 12 gb's in BT

12 from the pagefile almost 3 from the card and 7 from the ram ….. 

[LogicalDrm]

57 minutes ago, Christiaan21-03 said:

I was using Afterburner's tool …. btw made a slight error.. it was 12 gb's in BT

12 from the pagefile almost 3 from the card and 7 from the ram …..

By looking at my own numbers, thats not pagefile. My pagefile is set to be 9-17gb, task manager shows I have 6gb of RAM and 8.7Gb total in use. Thats 2.7gb for pagefile. Afterburner shows pagefile to be 9gb, RAM at 6.3. So pagefile in Afterburner is total RAM in use, you get actual pagefile amount by reducing RAM from total. In your case its 5gb of pagefile. Or something along those lines.

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, Christiaan21-03 said:

I was using Afterburner's tool …. btw made a slight error.. it was 12 gb's in BT

12 from the pagefile almost 3 from the card and 7 from the ram …..

Afterburner reports memory committed (physical RAM in use + page file) as "Page File" for some reason.

 

Unless the scale is dynamic, it also looks like you don't have a page file anyway because the top of that graph is the same value as the physical RAM graph.

[Guest]

Yea well the task manager reports 9 gb's of shared memory use ( gpu section )
The memory section reports 21 Gb's committed
According to my pagefile settings its only 3,2 gbs which indeed would be total ram + pagefile 

The last time i had it set on 10 gb's btw... random thought …. 

12 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Unless the scale is dynamic, it also looks like you don't have a page file anyway because the top of that graph is the same value as the physical RAM graph

which is weird because that should 18 on the physical ram... hmmmmm 

 

1 hour ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

So pagefile in Afterburner is total RAM in use, you get actual pagefile amount by reducing RAM from total. In your case its 5gb of pagefile. Or something along those lines.

yea well 3,2 but it might be variable.. should look those other numbers up in game again to see if it changes

 

[Guest]

i forgot to look up the numbers in the taskmanager but nvm you know  
Changes.. btw with the last picture... system in a minor oc card in a minor oc pagefile enlarged to 10 gbs .. first conclusion : system is more expensive in use!

[Mira Yurizaki]

It would be really helpful if you can show the Memory page of Task Manager to verify what MSI Afterburner is reporting

[Guest]

2 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

It would be really helpful if you can show the Memory page of Task Manager to verify what MSI Afterburner is reporting

Yea will do.... I'm just about to continue with the campaign again… Last night i failed in completing the first mission you have to do for the princess, after her so called death… Managed to get my main character shot... Now how about that… It seems the last update really sharpend up the adversary rule set, maybe even made some changes.. if i fail again i'm starting over.... anyway at a certain point i will be alt tabbing and make pictures of the stuff i see 

[Guest]

3 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Memory page of Task Manager to verify

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

11 minutes ago, Christiaan21-03 said:

 

Yeah, MSI Afterburner reports the "Committed" field as "Pagefile usage" when it shouldn't. The page file's actual size is likely around 10GB

 

Though having almost half the committed memory usage be in the page file seems weird to me.

[Guest]

57 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Yeah, MSI Afterburner reports the "Committed" field as "Pagefile usage" when it shouldn't. The page file's actual size is likely around 10GB

The pagefile is a part of the complete memory ofcourse… Maybe thats where its going wrong or right to be more precise 

If you detract ram usage its around 5 gb's of pagefile use

[Guest]

Just for fun ^^ … it actually took a while before i figured out that i was playing on the power conserving plan.. hence the speed of the cpu.. which in turn results in way lower temperatures 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I'm still curious why nearly half your virtual memory usage is in the page file. For me it's rarely above 15%

[ShoshinUK]

On 12/19/2018 at 1:14 PM, LoGiCalDrm said:

By looking at my own numbers, thats not pagefile. My pagefile is set to be 9-17gb, task manager shows I have 6gb of RAM and 8.7Gb total in use. Thats 2.7gb for pagefile. Afterburner shows pagefile to be 9gb, RAM at 6.3. So pagefile in Afterburner is total RAM in use, you get actual pagefile amount by reducing RAM from total. In your case its 5gb of pagefile. Or something along those lines.

Thanks for that info - I have been unsure about this for so long!

I run 32GB RAM, yet in some games I was using say 15GB RAM and (according to MSI Afterburner) say another 18GB on page file. Now I know it means only (in this example) 3GB pagefile, which makes so much more sense.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, ShoshinUK said:

Thanks for that info - I have been unsure about this for so long!

your quite right there with a thank you… i totally missed that @LoGiCalDrm provided the answer in a meaningfull way... Maybe i was to dense at the moment of reading... 

On a sidenote Nier Automata is terrible …… even on 1377 x 789 i'm not able on my p.c. to let it draw this perfect gameworld. System is barely in use and still it starts with drawing everything off ( with that i mean trees that take on different shapes… buildings just plopping in sight etc etc ) even without the use of shadow and antialias and texture filtering the gameworld is at best 'unstable' 
If there weren't so many other complaints i would have blamed my 'old' system... The arrogant ^&%@#$^ don't even want to provide us with the same level of goodies that the PS and Xbox.. But how could someone in his right mind expect fame for this sort of product release... I'm scared of hackers so i'm stay away from mods … Maybe the new gamerelease will be accompanied with a major free update to the excisting game! 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I'm still curious why nearly half your virtual memory usage is in the page file. For me it's rarely above 15%

Xeon ? 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, Christiaan21-03 said:

Xeon ? 

Processor type shouldn't matter.

[Guest]

37 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Processor type shouldn't matter.

older system then yours?

[Mira Yurizaki]

36 minutes ago, Christiaan21-03 said:

older system then yours?

Hardware configuration in general should not affect memory usage.

[Guest]

28 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Hardware configuration in general should not affect memory usage.

i'm not so sure about that statement. all those multicores are almost a treat to society in there self adapting ways. Another trick of my machine is that when i auto memory speed it usually goes for the lowest herz with the 6-6-6-18 rating.. I'm not even sure from where it picked up that trick.. it just was on some day… or how google sends me a roadmap on my phone while i'm on the p.c. figuring out the route for some buddy i have on the phone .. weird life.. I'm just saying that a cpu designed for office loads is bound to try other solutions… that's why i also tried to incorporate the age of the machine … maybe in a same way as Total War offers to its players a way to use the system to enforce the gpu in its task.. maybe my cpu learned the trick from that game...Its also a common tip to enlarge your pagefile size on a older machine because it on its turn can affect gameplay in a certain way furthermore there is one more contribitor in this discussion that even admits having larger amounts of pagefile use so i'm not sure… I am very curious about the system your running at this point in time .. Maybe even accompanied with a gaming pic and your pagefile results