Page file causing high amount of TBW on SSD when gaming

[Guest]

I got a Crucial MX500 500 GB Sata ssd in december to substitute my Kingston a400 120 gb (used for 16 months, 12 tbw)

After only 4 months of usage i have noticed with HwInfo64 and Crystaldisk Info that it already lost 2% of life span and got almost 5 terabytes of writes.     

I started to monitor the disk and nothing too write-intensive seems to happen as long as i only do web browsing and other light tasks, but after i play any game for very little time i see a huge increase in writes.    

This seems to be caused by the paging file that for some reason starts to write 100 mb/s of data in spikes every few seconds of playing games, even when my ram usage is like 10 gigs out of 16 (as shown by task manager and resource monitor).    

I reach almost 1 Gb of writes per minute of playing, amounting to almost 1 tb for every 24 hours of gaming, when doing anything else i get 1 gb per hour. 

This doesen't happen if i play with chrome and any other program closed, so that my ram usage is under 9/10 gigs. 

Any suggestions? 

 

Things i tried:   

-Disabling page file (causes some games to not load at all and makes system crash when ram is full)

-Adjusting page file to min. 16 Mb max. 2 gb (doesen't improve anything)

[Kilrah]

Likely nothing to do with page file, but probably things like shadowplay/auto highlight recordings, check game settings and AMD software to disable that if you don't care about it.

 

8 minutes ago, Van28 said:

After only 4 months of usage i have noticed with HwInfo64 and Crystaldisk Info that it already lost 2% of life span

Note that 2% in 4 months still means 10+ years, so you likely don't even need to bother.

[Pixel5]

this does not seem like its the pagefile as this is really only used when you run out of RAM which you are not in this case.

 

You can disable the page file completely and see if you still get the same result.

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Likely nothing to do with page file, but probably things like shadowplay/auto highlight recordings, check game settings and geforce experience to disable that if you don't care about it.

 

Note that 2% in 4 months still means 10+ years, so you likely don't even need to bother.

I'm checking with resource monitor and i'ts only page file. (you can check at the bottom left of the second screenshot)

I have radeon relive set to buffer in RAM instead of disk.    
I know it means 10+ years, but it's still an abnormal usage   
in 4 months i have the tbw that some people make in 2 years of intensive usage

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

this does not seem like its the pagefile as this is really only used when you run out of RAM which you are not in this case.

 

You can disable the page file completely and see if you still get the same result.

Without paging this doesen't happen.    

[Mark Kaine]

Fwiw I have a mx500 ,always have shadow play on ,page file is set to default and i don't see this behavior at all. Going to double check when I'm back home though. 

 

But to me this seems rather mysterious and definitely not normal. 

Eh, my Samsung Evo (os) is used for shadow play temp folder,  it's 2 years old and still at 100% according to Crystal disk (not according to hwinfo64 though,  pretty sure crystal disk isn't all that accurate, because the evo *can't* be at 100% after all this time and writes)

 

Idk either something is off with your mx500 or some settings aren't how they should be. 

 

25 minutes ago, Van28 said:

Without paging this doesen't happen.    

Ah, you can try ISLC (wagnardsoft) i use that,  no negative impact as far I can tell, but it eliminates weird stutters and keeps your memory clean (because there's some weird standby list bug in some configurations)

 

https://www.wagnardsoft.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1256

 

 

Read the thread how to set it up properly though. 

 

 

33 minutes ago, Van28 said:

have radeon relive set to buffer in RAM instead of disk.    

Ok, but does this still happen with relive off?

Because it sounds a bit like that could cause some "swapping" perhaps... I'd still recommend to try ISLC regardless, but this does seems a bit like it could be causing this  (relive)

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, Grand Admiral Thrawn said:

Change the size of the page file to 1.5x your RAM and 2x your RAM in minimum and maximum size field respectively and see if something changes.

No difference

[Guest]

41 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Ok, but does this still happen with relive off?

Because it sounds a bit like that could cause some "swapping" perhaps... I'd still recommend to try ISLC regardless, but this does seems a bit like it could be causing this  (relive)

Yes, it happens with relive off, relive has nothing to do with this.    

After purging the standby list with ISLC the problem seems to be gone.     

How do i know what's causing it to happen in the first place? 

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, Van28 said:

After purging the standby list with ISLC the problem seems to be gone. 

That's good!  I'd put it on automatic start... for me it really fixed any of these issues... no more "random" framedrops etc...

 

2 hours ago, Van28 said:

How do i know what's causing it to happen in the first place? 

It's a windows bug... not sure,  but probably hardware related, as they say "certain configurations" are affected. 

 

And it's intel and amd systems so that's not the main cause apparently. 

[Guest]

I finally found a real solution to the problem (that doesen't require using Intelligent Standby List Cleaner).    

I had prefetch disabled, like everybody raccomends.    

Apparently in Windows 10 this also disables "Memory compression", which instead of moving stuff to disk paging when the memory is full, compresses that stuff directly into ram, to save space and use some very low amount of cpu power to decompress it when needed.    

After re-enabling prefetch, my page file usage, even when using 12/13 Gbs of ram out of 16, stays below 1/2%, it never uses the disk (unless i were to fully utilize those 16 gigs to the point where memory compression is not an option anymore, and even then, it wouldn't be so drastic to write 500Mb of data to page file every few seconds.   

So this disk wear problem was caused by guides telling me to disable prefetch to reduce disk writes, when it does the complete opposite (at least in my case).   

If you found this thread by searching this on google, and you had disabled prefetch, Just re-enable prefetch, even if performance doesen't change (or even gets worse in some cases), it's only a few kbs every time you open a program.    

to re-enable memory compression after you re-enable prefetch, just type this in PowerShell launched as admin: Enable-MMAgent -MemoryCompression