Should you use pagefile

[tommi_6o]

Hi, Is there a noticeable difference in performance if you turn pagefile off and have enough ram to do so? Will it effect bencmark scores?

[Levent]

turning it off causes shit ton of issues on my PC, I would have a pagefile.sys no matter what.

[QueenDemetria]

Hi, Is there a noticeable difference in performance if you turn pagefile off and have enough ram to do so? Will it effect bencmark scores?

No, but its always nice to have. So if your RAM gets full and you don't have a page file, then your system literally comes to a stop, lol(it will eventually fix itself after it force closes tasks, but that's not good). Even putting your system to sleep adds stuff to the pagefile(even though it doesn't 'need' to), so even if it doesn't have a purpose with performance, it does serve a purpose with how the OS works and adds redundancy.

[Castdeath97]

No, but its always nice to have. So if your RAM gets full and you don't have a page file, then your system literally comes to a stop, lol(it will eventually fix itself after it force closes tasks, but that's not good). Even putting your system to sleep adds stuff to the pagefile(even though it doesn't 'need' to), so even if it doesn't have a purpose with performance, it does serve a purpose with how the OS works and adds redundancy.

Even if the RAM is plenty the OS will go nuts without the page file. I just tried reducing it to 2GB and ran into constant low memory errors.

[Valkyrie Lenneth]

pagefile minimum should be 1.5x your ram size and maximum 3x ur ram size for optimal performance

[TheProfosist]

If you have enough ram no turn it off as even if you have more than enough ram windows still uses it.

Turning it off significantly improves responsiveness of the system.

[TheProfosist]

No, but its always nice to have. So if your RAM gets full and you don't have a page file, then your system literally comes to a stop, lol(it will eventually fix itself after it force closes tasks, but that's not good). Even putting your system to sleep adds stuff to the pagefile(even though it doesn't 'need' to), so even if it doesn't have a purpose with performance, it does serve a purpose with how the OS works and adds redundancy.

It's fine for the most part it just gets unhappy with you till you close whatever is soaking up that ram. Putting you pc to sleep goes to the hibernate file if anything.

pagefile minimum should be 1.5x your ram size and maximum 3x ur ram size for optimal performance

Its 1.5x to 2x but can be even less. If you goona use it run 2x but then watch it fill up your SSD.

[LogicalDrm]

You should have something in there. If you are worrying over the space it takes on SSD, move it to HDD. I have small 256mb pagefile on SSD in case windows has troubles recognizing my HDD on startup (has happened) and rest 8gb of it on HDD.

[RH00D]

You should keep it on regardless of how much RAM you have because there are cases where it needs to get used and disabling it can cause problems. Its ok to lower it to just 2 or 3 GB but I wouldn't disable it completely.

For example when an app crashes it may dump error information to the page file that Windows will then use to try to troubleshoot issues.

Check this article out: http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

[TheProfosist]

You should keep it on regardless of how much RAM you have because there are cases where it needs to get used and disabling it can cause problems. Its ok to lower it to just 2 or 3 GB but I wouldn't disable it completely.

For example when an app crashes it may dump error information to the page file that Windows will then use to try to troubleshoot issues.

Check this article out: http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

Ill disagree with that whole article. Been running no page file since 64bit and Vista since I've had 8GB or more of ram, was even running on 6GB but ran into issues with DX10 games and well I'd run out. On netbooks with only 2GB of ram you nearly always disabled it because the SSD just didn't have enough room and what you were doing on a netbooks would get close to using the 2GB of ram.

That article also says only if you not using a program. This is I heavily multitasking and sit at a minimum of 8GB used much of that would get thrown to the HDD and it in the background. Windows 8 and probably 10 have made strides for improvement but until nothing goes into page file unless you are getting close room running out of ram I won't be using it.

Also until you run out of ram you won't encounter any issues so just buy enough ram for that not to happen. It relatively cheap. For a normal user it's min 8GB for a heavy user min 16GB and a power user/enthusiast/producer should probably be at 32GB so you don't have to keep tabs. I get close to 16GB at times on my secondary rig Chibi PC.