Pagefile?

[Tranquill]

I had this question concerning the pagefile... so, I have always had the system automatically handle that (specs) and I always play games like ARMA 3, but is it even worth to have it on or the pagefile at 16gb for my kind of system? It currently allocates 16gb of ram to it, automatically.

[tp95112]

Pagefile uses your hard drive as a substitute for RAM.Which is significantly slower then ram. You have 16GB of ram so it shouldnt even be something to consider

[Tranquill]

Just now, tp95112 said:

Pagefile uses your hard drive as a substitute for RAM.Which is significantly slower then ram. You have 16GB of ram so it shouldnt even be something to consider

 

Screenshot

 

Should I just completely disable it, then?

[VVoltor]

Disabling the pagefile can lead to problems, it's usually best to let windows handle it.

What you can try is to reduce the size, reboot and then set it back to automatic, to let windows 'reconsider' the best setting for your system.

[tp95112]

1 minute ago, Tranquill said:

 

Screenshot

 

Should I just completely disable it, then?

 

Nothing happens when disabling it. But if you ever for some reason use 16GB it might crash or cause system instabilities, id keep it automatic. It wont cause any problems

[Tranquill]

Just now, VVoltor said:

Disabling the pagefile can lead to problems, it's usually best to let windows handle it.

What you can try is to reduce the size, reboot and then set it back to automatic, to let windows 'reconsider' the best setting for your system.

 

 

Just now, tp95112 said:

Nothing happens when disabling it. But if you ever for some reason use 16GB it might crash or cause system instabilities, id keep it automatic. It wont cause any problems

 

Alright, should I just keep the pagefile on my HDD, or do it on my SSD, etc..?

[VVoltor]

3 minutes ago, Tranquill said:

 

Screenshot

 

Should I just completely disable it, then?

According to your screenshot only 1gb is allocated, not 16?

[tp95112]

Just now, Tranquill said:

 

 

Alright, should I just keep the pagefile on my HDD, or do it on my SSD, etc..?

 

I dont expect it to right Tb worth of data so ssd should be fine

[Tranquill]

Just now, tp95112 said:

I dont expect it to right Tb worth of data so ssd should be fine

Even though my OS is on my HDD? SSD is 256GB aswell.

 

1 minute ago, VVoltor said:

According to your screenshot only 1gb is allocated, not 16?

Yeah, because I was fiddling around with the min/max before, It used to be allocated with 16gb.

[tp95112]

Just now, Tranquill said:

Even though my OS is on my HDD? SSD is 256GB aswell.

 

Yeah, because I was fiddling around with the min/max before, It used to be allocated with 16gb.

 

Oh... you might want to get your os on your ssd. You will enjoy the boost in speed. But just have it on the ssd

[Tranquill]

Just now, tp95112 said:

Oh... you might want to get your os on your ssd. You will enjoy the boost in speed. But just have it on the ssd

How would I go about moving my OS to my SSD? Because, my HDD is 1tb and my SSD is 256gb, and my HDD has a lot of stuff on it.

[tp95112]

2 minutes ago, Tranquill said:

How would I go about moving my OS to my SSD? Because, my HDD is 1tb and my SSD is 256gb, and my HDD has a lot of stuff on it.

If you have a Samsung one they have there magician software that will migrate it or you can do a fresh install call microsoft to reactivate it or if you have your microsoft account connected your key. As for the hard drive you can keep your data and redirect your doc music etc to your hard drive

[Tranquill]

1 minute ago, tp95112 said:

If you have a Samsung one they have there magician software that will migrate it or you can do a fresh install call microsoft to reactivate it or if you have your microsoft account connected your key. As for the hard drive you can keep your data and redirect your doc music etc to your hard drive

 

 

Oh, yeah I do have a Samsung SSD and their software for it. I thought you had to move a ton of stuff when moving it from HDD to SSD, and space was a concern here. I'll have to look into it. I thought you had to clone your HDD to your SSD, which wouldn't work for me.

[tp95112]

2 minutes ago, Tranquill said:

Oh, yeah I do have a Samsung SSD and their software for it. I thought you had to move a ton of stuff when moving it from HDD to SSD, and space was a concern here. I'll have to look into it. I thought you had to clone your HDD to your SSD, which wouldn't work for me.

 

I havent done it before. But im assuming it clones the os only. Someone who used it will give better advice on that

[mariushm]

the page file is used only when an application wants ram but all the ram is already used by other programs. In this case, Windows looks at programs running in backround or minimized and moves whatever they hold in ram into that page file to give some ram space to the application that asked for ram.

 

With 16 GB of memory, the page file will be used very rarely, my advice would be to set it on your 1 TB drive and make it a fixed size of maybe 4 GB. No need for any bigger file.

 

[Tranquill]

7 hours ago, mariushm said:

the page file is used only when an application wants ram but all the ram is already used by other programs. In this case, Windows looks at programs running in backround or minimized and moves whatever they hold in ram into that page file to give some ram space to the application that asked for ram.

 

With 16 GB of memory, the page file will be used very rarely, my advice would be to set it on your 1 TB drive and make it a fixed size of maybe 4 GB. No need for any bigger file.

 

 

 

So, if I move my OS to my SSD, should I do the pagefile for 4 GB on the SSD instead of my 1 TB hard drive?

[mariushm]

In theory, a pagefile would benefit from the faster access times, but because in practice it's going to be used so rarely, there's no point blocking space on your SSD drive with it.

 

Think of it like this... you have Firefox or Chrome running with lots of tabs and eating 3 GB of memory, and you launch a game that needs 12-14 GB of ram (however unlikely it is).  Windows notices Firefox is in the background, unused (the game is the main application), so it will start moving the Firefox data from memory to the page file, making room for the game.  When you're done playing, Windows will read back the data from the page file and put it back in memory.

If your page file is on SSD, from the moment you exit the game and you click on the Firefox tab in the task bar to the moment you can actually use Firefox, it will take maybe 2-5 seconds, because Windows would copy those 3 GB that Firefox used from the SSD very fast.

If your page file is on a HDD, from the moment you exit the game and you can actually use Firefox, it will take maybe 10-15 seconds, because the hard drive is much slower at transferring data.

But you have to think about it... are those few seconds every few hours or so (when you exit that memory hungry game) really going to be noticeable? Would you care? Probably wouldn't even notice it.

Again, the page file will be accessed very rarely in the first place (maybe once in a few hours or days of use) because it's unlikely you're going to start so many applications and games that in total would use more than 16 GB of memory

 

You could even disable it completely, but then Windows will alter some of its internal algorithms to take this into account, and will be ever so slightly slower in some situations. The page file is like a "parachute", if there is one, some internal code can go on alternative paths which could be faster in some situations but may require more memory... knowing there is a page file to fall back to if needed makes those paths possible to be used.

 

Also, unless I'm wrong or things changed from previous versions of Windows, if there is a page file Windows likes to copy in it every time it starts the registry, some fonts, some DLL files, file icon packs, a few megabytes ... the idea is that if the hard drive is very fragmented, the OS would feel sluggish waiting for the hard drive to move its heads in various parts of the drive to read a font file, or a portion of the registry (which could be 30-50 MB in size). So it does it once at boot, copying all the critical files into one place, ready to be loaded in memory if needed. If you have enough ram, these files eventually end up cached in RAM so the page file will not be accessed later on from the page file, but as far as I know, every time you start your Windows, it will write some stuff to the page file, potentially never to be read again... so if you put the page file on SSD, it will just suffer unnecessary writes.   It's just a few MB every time you start your Windows, so it's not that big of a deal when your SSD has a guaranteed lifetime writes of 100+ TB of data, but nevertheless

 

That's just a couple of the reasons why it's not a good idea to disable a page file completely, even though it's possible.

 

Why I recommend something like 4 GB ... basically, a 32 bit application can use at most 3 GB of memory on your computer, usually 2. If you have a 32 bit application in background while you're playing a game that uses a lot of memory, and that 32 bit application crashes somehow or keeps asking for more memory, Windows will keep moving its memory to page file so that the game will have memory in RAM. When the 32bit application reaches 3 GB, it will crash, because 32 bit applications can't use more.  At that point, Windows will simply mark those 2-3 GB in the page file as "can be overwritten by other data" and move on with its life, and you didn't even notice anything because your game wasn't affected.

64bit applications can use as much memory as they want, so this doesn't work with them.

 

 

[Tranquill]

13 hours ago, mariushm said:

In theory, a pagefile would benefit from the faster access times, but because in practice it's going to be used so rarely, there's no point blocking space on your SSD drive with it.

 

Think of it like this... you have Firefox or Chrome running with lots of tabs and eating 3 GB of memory, and you launch a game that needs 12-14 GB of ram (however unlikely it is).  Windows notices Firefox is in the background, unused (the game is the main application), so it will start moving the Firefox data from memory to the page file, making room for the game.  When you're done playing, Windows will read back the data from the page file and put it back in memory.

If your page file is on SSD, from the moment you exit the game and you click on the Firefox tab in the task bar to the moment you can actually use Firefox, it will take maybe 2-5 seconds, because Windows would copy those 3 GB that Firefox used from the SSD very fast.

If your page file is on a HDD, from the moment you exit the game and you can actually use Firefox, it will take maybe 10-15 seconds, because the hard drive is much slower at transferring data.

But you have to think about it... are those few seconds every few hours or so (when you exit that memory hungry game) really going to be noticeable? Would you care? Probably wouldn't even notice it.

Again, the page file will be accessed very rarely in the first place (maybe once in a few hours or days of use) because it's unlikely you're going to start so many applications and games that in total would use more than 16 GB of memory

 

You could even disable it completely, but then Windows will alter some of its internal algorithms to take this into account, and will be ever so slightly slower in some situations. The page file is like a "parachute", if there is one, some internal code can go on alternative paths which could be faster in some situations but may require more memory... knowing there is a page file to fall back to if needed makes those paths possible to be used.

 

Also, unless I'm wrong or things changed from previous versions of Windows, if there is a page file Windows likes to copy in it every time it starts the registry, some fonts, some DLL files, file icon packs, a few megabytes ... the idea is that if the hard drive is very fragmented, the OS would feel sluggish waiting for the hard drive to move its heads in various parts of the drive to read a font file, or a portion of the registry (which could be 30-50 MB in size). So it does it once at boot, copying all the critical files into one place, ready to be loaded in memory if needed. If you have enough ram, these files eventually end up cached in RAM so the page file will not be accessed later on from the page file, but as far as I know, every time you start your Windows, it will write some stuff to the page file, potentially never to be read again... so if you put the page file on SSD, it will just suffer unnecessary writes.   It's just a few MB every time you start your Windows, so it's not that big of a deal when your SSD has a guaranteed lifetime writes of 100+ TB of data, but nevertheless

 

That's just a couple of the reasons why it's not a good idea to disable a page file completely, even though it's possible.

 

Why I recommend something like 4 GB ... basically, a 32 bit application can use at most 3 GB of memory on your computer, usually 2. If you have a 32 bit application in background while you're playing a game that uses a lot of memory, and that 32 bit application crashes somehow or keeps asking for more memory, Windows will keep moving its memory to page file so that the game will have memory in RAM. When the 32bit application reaches 3 GB, it will crash, because 32 bit applications can't use more.  At that point, Windows will simply mark those 2-3 GB in the page file as "can be overwritten by other data" and move on with its life, and you didn't even notice anything because your game wasn't affected.

64bit applications can use as much memory as they want, so this doesn't work with them.

 

 

 

Alright, so i'll just keep a 4gb pagefile on my SSD since, it holds my OS now.