I have 32GB of ram, why is 9gb of pagefile space used?

[Rorgash]

So i was playing around in MSI afterburner messing with my overclock and looking all the nice graphs, well down that list i ran across pagefile usage, and since i just saw that my ram usage was about 6gb im wondering why.

 

So my question is, I have 32Gb of DDR4, why is my PC using pagefile space while gaming?

 

 

GPU is GTX 1080

[Jack Dvorak]

Well if your gaming it uses RAM. And windows 10 use a lot also.

[Rorgash]

but with 32 gigs, and im looking at my stats, 22508MB available

[Jack Dvorak]

12 minutes ago, Rorgash said:

but with 32 gigs, and im looking at my stats, 22508MB available

When you are booting it says you have 32gbs right? If not it might be a bad RAM stick

[Thony]

Windows alone uses 10% of ram or something like that, Its not a fixed amount.

[Rorgash]

1 minute ago, Jack Dvorak said:

When you are booting it says you have 32gbs right? If not it might be a bad RAM stick

yea, everywhere i look i see the 32gb of ram, i mean its not really slowing down my games i think, but i just find it strange that a freshly rebooted computer after starting a game has 9gb of pagefile filled when there are tons of ram left  dont really want my computer to write constantly to my SSD

[GangstaRas]

Well since you have 32GB of RAM, I'm assuming your lifestyle may be to have a lot of inactive windows in the background as you play your games. That's gonna put RAM content into the pagefile so that running programs have more RAM to work with. You can always just decrease the pagefile size to say 1GB instead of 9GB. You should see your RAM usage go up a lot easier but everything running the background will at least be snappy to reopen. You can't disable the pagefile though, some programs still use it for whatever reasons so disabling it usually causes a lot of program crashes

[Jack Dvorak]

12 minutes ago, Rorgash said:

yea, everywhere i look i see the 32gb of ram, i mean its not really slowing down my games i think, but i just find it strange that a freshly rebooted computer after starting a game has 9gb of pagefile filled when there are tons of ram left  dont really want my computer to write constantly to my SSD

That is really weird though. I wonder if anyone else has experienced this...

[Rorgash]

1 minute ago, GangstaRas said:

Well since you have 32GB of RAM, I'm assuming your lifestyle may be to have a lot of inactive windows in the background as you play your games. That's gonna put RAM content into the pagefile so that running programs have more RAM to work with. You can always just decrease the pagefile size to say 1GB instead of 9GB. You should see your RAM usage go up a lot easier but everything running the background will at least be snappy to reopen. You can't disable the pagefile though, some programs still use it for whatever reasons so disabling it usually causes a lot of program crashes

normally yes, got a 4 monitor setup, including a 4k monitor, will be setting pagefile to 1gb, but i still found it strange and wanted to see if anyone maybe knew why its happening

[mariushm]

@Rorgash Please let me summarize things for you.

 

Windows looks at how much memory you have and from that number, it automatically determines a particular amount of page file size to start with. By default, the page file is dynamic meaning it can increase or decrease automatically depending on the needs of the operating system BUT if there is plenty of disk space free on the drive where your page file is, Windows is in no rush to shrink the page file down to a smaller size.

 

Your page file is 9 GB but not all those 9 GB are actually used up with information, it's just that the old no longer necessary information is still there taking up disk space. In order to shrink the file down to the minimum needed, information spread all over those 9 GB that are still needed would have to be moved towards the beginning of the file and that causes disk operations (reads and writes) and it makes no sense to do this if you have lots of disk space, from the operating system's point of view such a big file doesn't bother anyone. 

 

You can instruct the operating system to stop using a dynamic page file, by instructing it to use a fixed page file (set the minimum and maximum size to the same value, I recommend a value under 4096 MB, for your system with 32 GB of memory I recommend going with 1024 or 2048 MB , which is exactly 1GB or 2GB. It appears you have disk space, so just leave it to a sensible value.

I have 16 GB of memory installed and I keep my pagefile at 2048 MB and all's good.

 

You shouldn't disable the page file completely, there are some core functions of the operating system which still need the page file in case of some extreme situations and as the pagefile is a sort of safety net, some behaviors of the operating system change if there's no page file or if it's under a specific size (i think at least 64 MB). Think of it like the operating system choosing to use safer slower algorithms instead of faster ones for some very particular sections of the operating system.

 

For people with less than 4 GB of memory, the page file should be at least 2 GB in size, because that's the maximum amount of memory a 32 bit application can (normally) request from the operating system. So for example, if by accident an application that runs in background  on your system freezes or crashes and starts requesting memory, it will keep asking for data up to 2 GB and the operating system will constantly move this memory to page file to keep the RAM free for the application or game you're using in foreground. Once 2 GB is reached, the application will be killed (or the operating system will ask you what to do).

 

= this only applies if the drive with pagefile is old style mechanical drive, not ssd =

A dynamic page file is usually created in the middle of a partition, because statistically that's where most of the free space is, and if the pagefile ever needs to be enlarged, there's a higher chance to enlarge the file as a continuous block of data in that area, preventing file fragmentation this way (having a pagefile split in lots of small chunks all over an area of a disk is bad).

 

A fixed size page file is created once after the operating system is rebooted, disk space is allocated then and for the rest of its life the page file remains in that location so it's basically one nice continuous clean block of disk space. This has the benefit of giving you the ability to move the page file towards the beginning of a drive, where it takes less time for disk heads to locate and read data, which makes applications more responsive if they use the page file more often.  So after a fixed pagefile is created, it's often a smart idea to use a good drive defragmented (I used to use O&O Defrag) to move the pagefile and most executables and dll files towards the beginning of the disk drive (or partition).

With SSDs, this is no longer relevant, because access times are constant no matter where data is put on a SSD. It's actually a bad thing to defragment a SSD because the controller inside the SSD actually intentionally (by design) spreads data around in various Flash memory cells. Defragmenting doesn't do anything for SSD drives.

 

Of course, if you have 32 GB of memory all this is irrelevant, because 99.99% of the time, the operating system won't even touch the page file, regardless of how big or small it is. I'm just saying it for others