Why my page file usage is always higher than my RAM usage?

[Eric A.]

Does anyone know if this is "normal"? I have disabled page file on windows settings I also have tried to use lower values like 1GB to 2 GB or even let windows to manage it, but page usage is always higher than RAM usage 

Sometimes some games crash due to pagefile usage ... I'm having trouble to run my RAM on a Ryzen CPU but I would like to dismiss this as the main cause

 

 

[vanished]

Looking at my own system, it appears what afterburner is calling "pagefile" as confusingly not actually the pagefile, but rather the total "committed" memory, which includes everything in RAM as well as in the pagefile.  If your pagefile is turned off (which is something I do not recommend), these numbers (RAM used and "pagefile" in afterburner) should be the same, but regardless, it will show as equal or more for this reason.

[Tabs]

I'm pretty sure Afterburner does not report pagefile usage properly. On my machine it's listing pagefle usage as 5.6GB, but I only have a 4GB pagefile allocated.

 

Utilising a pagefile does not make programs more likely to crash; the point of it is that any unneeded (dormant) memory entries are paged to disk so that more actual RAM is available for running programs. If you make your pagefile too small, that can start causing crashes snice there's nowhere for Windows to allocate pages to when your physical memory runs out.

 

I think you might be looking in the wrong place if you're having problems with your running programs. 

[Eric A.]

24 minutes ago, Tabs said:

I'm pretty sure Afterburner does not report pagefile usage properly. On my machine it's listing pagefle usage as 5.6GB, but I only have a 4GB pagefile allocated.

 

Utilising a pagefile does not make programs more likely to crash; the point of it is that any unneeded (dormant) memory entries are paged to disk so that more actual RAM is available for running programs. If you make your pagefile too small, that can start causing crashes snice there's nowhere for Windows to allocate pages to when your physical memory runs out.

 

I think you might be looking in the wrong place if you're having problems with your running programs. 

It have happen few times but when I looked afterburner's charts I noticed page file chart was reaching its max then the program crashed... I'll look into RAM settings on BIOS.