Is more RAM warranted? Question about pagefile useage.

[Dudis]

Hey,

 

I havn't really thought about this ever before, but I just noticed that my laptop has a pretty massive pagefile useage. While in normal day-to-day useage with 15-20 chrome tabs open and discord on but not much else running in the background, my ram sits at 6-7 gb used  and while gaming, it hits 12-13 gb used (out of 16).

 

What worries me though, is that MSI Afterburner is telling me my pagefile is nearly 20 gb (!!!). I'm kind of thinking that number is inaccurate though, but have a look yourself and let me know what you think. Pagefile size is currently automatically set by windows.

 

Screenshot below is while playing Battlefield 5 (sorry about the task manager being in swedish, you should be able to figure it out though:)

 

Is it time I went and bought another 16 gb for my laptop and/or should I fiddle around with my pagefile? Or am i simply missunderstadning the numbers? Again, I'm new to this, so thank you in advance!

 

Full specs.

 

- MSI GT72VR 6RE Laptop

- Intel 6700HQ (undervolt -177 mV)

- 16 GB ram (2400 mhz CL17)

- GTX 1060 6gb (+162/+366 mhz)

- 970 EVO 500 gb nvme SSD + 1 TB HDD

 

Spoiler

 

 

[Jurrunio]

manually drop the psgefile size then

[Mira Yurizaki]

I'd like to see what the memory page in Task Manager says.

 

The only thing that stands out to me though is your commit charge is really high. Which means your virtual memory usage (physical + page file) is really high. I'd rather see what's eating that much memory than go buy more RAM, especially since you have 16GB.

[iRileyx]

16GB ram should be more than enough, and you can manually set your pagefile size, odd that its at 20GB though.

 

I'd have a guess that because the pagefile is at 20GB for whatever reason, that's why its actually using it, because it sees that the space is there, rather than clearing the memory it just dumps it into the pagefile.

[corrado33]

13 minutes ago, iRileyx said:

16GB ram should be more than enough, and you can manually set your pagefile size, odd that its at 20GB though.

 

I'd have a guess that because the pagefile is at 20GB for whatever reason, that's why its actually using it, because it sees that the space is there, rather than clearing the memory it just dumps it into the pagefile.

I recently did a fresh install of windows 7 with a small SSD for the OS, and a HDD for the data. After installing the basics (chrome, adobe reader, antivirus, etc) I moved the pagefile from the NVME SSD to the HDD. It had already grown to 15 GB. Literally hours after a fresh install. Computer has 16 GB of ram as well. No idea WHY it was so large. The hibernation file was also massive. So I disabled hibernation. No need to put stress on the SSD with a pagefile on it. 

[Dudis]

Thats a good point, moving the pagefile from the SSD.

 

Screenshots of the task manager (again sorry about it being in swedish). I also have no clue why GPU says 0-3%, BF5 was runnin on the other screen.

 

In-game

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After i closed the game:

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[Mira Yurizaki]

5 minutes ago, Dudis said:

Thats a good point, moving the pagefile from the SSD.

 

Screenshots of the task manager (again sorry about it being in swedish). I also have no clue why GPU says 0-3%, BF5 was runnin on the other screen.

To start with, your "Icke vaxlingsbar pool" is abnormally high. I also notice you have a Killer NIC (by the screen shot in your OP). Killer NICs are notorious for leaking memory. Usually it goes away with a driver update. Also considering that in-game, the "Dedickerat virtuellt minne" is almost full, this correlates to the "Page File" value in MSI Afterburner. And ~19003 MB is actually 18.5GB, if we used binary prefix style of scale (or basically 19003 / 1024). And that lines up close enough to the usage in the in-game screenshot you took.

 

In any case, let's attack the low hanging fruit first: update your network driver.

[Dudis]

Thanks, I appreciate your help a lot!

 

Instaling the latest Killer drivers seem to have helped a bit, maybe I have more leaky stuff... I've basically just let windows figure out the drivers for everything but my videocard.

 

Physical memory down by 500+ mb

Pagefile down by 3-4 gb

Commit charge down by 10%

 

Then again, I rebooted after the install and had a total of 15 fewer processes running, but I had the same chrome session etc going to make as good a match as i could.

 

I have also tried moving my pagefile to my HDD and capped it at 4000 MB, but Windows dont seem to care, everything looks pretty much the exact same.

 

 

New snapshot with BF5 running (with pagefile still on SSD and windows-controlled)

Spoiler

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, Dudis said:

-Snip-

"Icke vaxlingsbar pool" (Non-paged pool)  is still abnormally high. This is mine and I'm playing an MMO at the moment:

 

 

Is it always that high or only after doing things on Chrome/BFV?

[Dudis]

That seems odd indeed. Non-paged pool is allways the same. Just after a restart with nothing special running, it sits at about 1.7 gb.

 

So it doesnt slowly increase to nearly 2gb, 1.7 or so seems to be the starting point and then i get the normal couple of hundred mb on top of that.

 

I looked up how to cap the Non-paged pool in the registry, but that doesnt seem to have done anything either.

 

It doesnt seem like a continious leak that gets larger and larger, but rather something that just there.

 

I've downloaded Windows Driver Kit to get access to PoolMon to try and investigate further, and as you can see, the top one "EtwB" seems be be eating those 1.7 gigs.

 

EtwB seem to be the Event tracing buffer.

 

This is all way above my knowledgelevel, but do you think im going down the right path here? Any ideas?

 

I'll keep looking around...

 

 

Screenshot of poolmon:

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Poolmon download link and how to get to this view

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1. Download + install the WDK for Windows 10, version 1809 from here
   https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/download-the-wdk

2. Assuming you install it to the default location, in File Explorer go to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Tools\x64 - (a file named poolmon.exe should be there)

3. In that folder, click File > Open Windows PowerShell > Open Windows PowerShell as administrator

4. Type cmd then  poolmon /p /b

5. Use the  P key until you see only "Nonp" in the left column, then B to sort by bytes

 

 

 

 

[Turtle Rig]

20 hours ago, Dudis said:

Hey,

 

I havn't really thought about this ever before, but I just noticed that my laptop has a pretty massive pagefile useage. While in normal day-to-day useage with 15-20 chrome tabs open and discord on but not much else running in the background, my ram sits at 6-7 gb used  and while gaming, it hits 12-13 gb used (out of 16).

 

What worries me though, is that MSI Afterburner is telling me my pagefile is nearly 20 gb (!!!). I'm kind of thinking that number is inaccurate though, but have a look yourself and let me know what you think. Pagefile size is currently automatically set by windows.

 

Screenshot below is while playing Battlefield 5 (sorry about the task manager being in swedish, you should be able to figure it out though:)

 

Is it time I went and bought another 16 gb for my laptop and/or should I fiddle around with my pagefile? Or am i simply missunderstadning the numbers? Again, I'm new to this, so thank you in advance!

 

Full specs.

 

- MSI GT72VR 6RE Laptop

- Intel 6700HQ (undervolt -177 mV)

- 16 GB ram (2400 mhz CL17)

- GTX 1060 6gb (+162/+366 mhz)

- 970 EVO 500 gb nvme SSD + 1 TB HDD

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

If you have 16GB of RAM or more then you can disable the page file.  It will never come in use and will only take up precious disk space.  good luck.

[Dudis]

Turns out the Non-paged pool leak was my damn Killer network drivers afterall.

 

I've tried downloading the drivers from their website multiple times, even slightly older versions but that didnt help, so i just went through ALL of my devices in the device manager where I found and updated these (pic) in its own category apparently. Now it's all good again 

 

Thanks again M.Yurizaki, for making me look in the right direction!

 

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