Page File

I recently just did a clean install of my OS, like I do every six months. Recently within those six months I added an extra 8 gigs of ram to my system in addition original 8 gigs for a total of 16 gigs. When I re-installed I saw that I was very low on space on my 64 gig SSD. It turns out that my page file is 16 gigs, equal to the physical ram as usual. I was wondering, do I really need a 16 gig page file? Should I reduce it to a lower size? I don't want to completely disable it just in-case I need it. But should I reduce it to like 4-6 gigs. Thanks in advance.

You must have a lot of money for you to keep doing clean installs of your OS every six months.. Unless... :D

Unless, nothing. You can keep using the same activation key on the same computer.

Your page file doesn't need to be that big, though storage shouldn't be an issue since I assume you're using the ssd mainly for the os and hdd's for storage anyways

Keep page file to minimum, on my pc its slightly over 1gig
and if you are using ssd for os check hibernation file as well, you can disable that one to. So you get more storage.

you can add a 3TB HDD (around 150$)
to your pc for files that dont have to be on your SSD
so you can place them on the HDD to save room on the SSD

Page filing is intended for a variety of purposes to make reading data faster. In particular, magnetic hard disks (HDDs) use paging to reduce the time reading from the disk from the moving parts (there's a physical arm that moves around scanning the disk).

With SSDs you don't have moving parts to retrieve data, so you should be fine with having a smaller page file. I don't know why Windows would use such a large page file.

Page files are primarily used as a hard storage backup for memory when you require more than your system hardware has available. Once you're close to exceeding the limits of the physical memory you have available, Windows begins to store pages of it into the page file. Disabling it can lead to instability if you ever do exceed physical memory limits, namely application crashes and in some cases system failures.

Your page file should be your peak commit size at minimum and double it at maximum. You'd have to run some tests to see how much that would be, but honestly I don't really think it will matter if you're running 16 GB. I would set it to 2 GB or 1 GB.

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory

The above link leads to a very in-depth article which explains the formula behind setting your page file based on peak commit size.



Having a page file at the very least equal to the amount of RAM on your computer or double its size was the standard for quite a few years, doesn't seem like Microsoft has bothered to change the default page file size, likely due to some of the intense processing tasks workstations and servers are given. It would make a hell of a lot more sense to make it completely dynamically increase in size based on what's required, but god knows any kind of functional improvement that makes sense will take MS years to get to.

Brrr.... Bzzzt... Wrong. Virtual memory has nothing to do with making hard drives faster, and more to do with being able to suspend and restart processes in a multiprogrammed environment.

Pyre is onto the right thing.

We talking about the same thing?

It's been awhile since school, but from what I remember; before we read onto the disk a common approach to read faster was to implement paging. We'd have multiple levels of caches that we search for the data we want and if it wasn't there we'd either go down another level or to the disk. If it wasn't in cache we'd go to the disk, retrieve that data, then file the data onto one of the upper level caches while reading it.

Please keep the reply under 20 lines.

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Paging is the process of handling the storage of data into page frames within physical memory, along with handling overflow and page faults. The primary functions of paging decide what data is more likely to be accessed within a short period of time and empty a page frame of less important data in physical memory, store it in virtual memory, and then add the high-importance data back into the empty page frame. A page file is a set disk location for virtual memory that Windows uses to store the excess and uncommonly used pages.

As for virtual memory itself, there are quite a few uses for it like suspending and restarting processes as Flaser outlined. Notably it's also used for memory dumps, as far as I'm aware, this is one of the main reasons why it's standard in Windows to have it at least the size of your physical memory. I can't honestly say I've never diagnosed a memory dump and the vast majority of users don't even know how, so it really doesn't make sense to have the standard so high anymore.

Segmenting and paging is only used for virtual memory, cache usually usually uses an n-path associative structure, where the basic unit is called a block, not page or segment.

Paging still doesn't reduce the reading time from HDDs, the process is just as painfully slow (compared to DRAM or SRAM) as ever, however sometimes it's all you've got on hand.

A while back I set the page file to zero because I had 8GB of RAM. Turned out to be a bad idea as I noticed instability of the system and things started to act funny. Set it to 2GB and never had a problem since. I think some programs look to make sure you have page file available and bug out when it notices you don't have any.