Question 96GB page file

[maomaobear]

Have been trouble shooting some Diablo 4 crashes and system instability overnight and found out my page file is 96GB (3x my RAM).

I found this out because I saw some low virtual memory warnings in the event viewer while playing Diablo. I'm not so much concerned about the game but that my computer if left on overnight will show errors and require a hard restart in the morning (if I don't restart my PC after playing Diablo 4).

I'm also not strapped for disk space but as far as I understand this is not a normal page file size. Any ideas why it would be this big?

System:
Ryzen 5600X
32GB RAM
Windows 10 Pro 22H2 (19045.3086)
Samsung 970 Evo Plus where page file is (309GB / 930GB free)
Additional Samsung SSDs: 850 Evo and 860 Evo
Sapphire Radeon Pulse 5700 XT
MSI MAG B550M Mortar WiFi Motherboard

HWinfo doing some browsing/spotifying:

So far I've tried: SFC/DISM stuff, testing in Prime95, disabling fast startup. Also disabled the page file to 0, restarted, turned it on, and restarted again: still a 96B file.

 

[Ralston18]

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

Disk drive(s): make, model, capacity, how full?

Have you made or used some tool to manage virtual memory?

What happens if Windows is allowed to manage page size?

 

[maomaobear]

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

Disk drive(s): make, model, capacity, how full?

Have you made or used some tool to manage virtual memory?

What happens if Windows is allowed to manage page size?

Whoops! Updated post to include this info:

Ryzen 5600X
32GB RAM
Windows 10 Pro 22H2 (19045.3086)
Samsung 970 Evo Plus where page file is (309GB / 930GB free)
Additional Samsung SSDs: 850 Evo and 860 Evo
Sapphire Radeon Pulse 5700 XT
MSI MAG B550M Mortar WiFi Motherboard

I haven't intentionally installed anything to manage virtual memory. This is in fact the automatic virtual memory assigned by Windows (updated screenshot to reflect).

Thanks for the reply!

 

[Ralston18]

Three SSD's - C:, D:, and E: - correct?

Open Disk Management and expand the window so all be seen.

Take a screenshot and post the screenshot here via imgur (www.imgur.com).

The problem may be some disk related issue.

Moving thread from Memory to Storage.

 

[Misgar]

Back in the days of Windows XP I occasionally configured the swap file size manually and placed it on a different hard disk to improve performance (no SSDs in the system)

You could remove the check mark from 'Automatically manage paging file size ...' and manually set the size to 4982MB as recommended on the C: (nothing on D : or E: drives), then reboot.

This might fix the problem.

 

[maomaobear]

Woke up just now and my computer fans were spun up. Took a look at HWinfo and the commit was huge (100GB+)

Suspiciously, when I opened up task manager and clicked "Details" to see what was making such a large commit the memory commit immediately went back down to 13GB:

@Ralston18 here's a screen of disk management:

Why do you think this is storage related? Just so I can wrap my head around the problem.

 

[maomaobear]

Back in the days of Windows XP I occasionally configured the swap file size manually and placed it on a different hard disk to improve performance (no SSDs in the system)

You could remove the check mark from 'Automatically manage paging file size ...' and manually set the size to 4982MB as recommended on the C: (nothing on D : or E: drives), then reboot.

This might fix the problem.

Thanks for the recommendation. Setting it manually certainly reduces the size of the page file.

However, I am not so much concerned for saving the space here as I am trying to figure out the root cause. Just seems like something is off.

 

[Ralston18]

My interest is/was simply that the virtual memory host drive has sufficient space to do so.

Where did you get Diablo 4?

Download Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) and look for any unexpected or any unknown processes that may be running. And claiming virtual memory.....

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

There may be another way to delve into things but I am not sure that the means to do so are applicable. TBD.

Just for the record, have you tried any utilities, registry edits, etc. as an attempt to fix the problem?

Are you able to disconnect all drives except C: and let C: host virtual memory?

 

[maomaobear]

Got Diablo 4 off Battle.net!

Took a look around in process explorer but nothing stood out. No viruses from submitted hashes.

Re: utilities, I did run CCleaner recently including the registry cleanup as an attempt. Did not help.

Currently the C: drive is the only one hosting virtual memory.

Any idea why the page file would even be this big? Especially after restart?

 

[Ralston18]

Disconnect the D: and E: drives.

Then with only the C: drive connected run sfc /scannow and dism again.

Objective being to narrow things down and determine if Windows has gotten corrupted in some manner.

And "believes" that the page file is 96 GB as a result.

There may be another way to look at virtual memory. However, I need to check on that possibility.

 

[maomaobear]

OK. Work week has begun again so may be a bit until I get to this. Thanks for suggestion.

Woke up once again to see a large memory commit in HWinfo. Opening up process explorer this time the commit instantly went back down again and could not find the culprit.

 

[maomaobear]

Found a virus on the PC called "UnpackChecker"

Caught a 98% memory load and opened up process explorer. Before the commit went down I saw "UnpackChecker" at the top. Did a search for this and turns out its a coin miner virus.

Good news is I've deleted it and its corresponding task scheduler and windows defender exclusion... Unfortunately my page file is still going to 96GB so I have set it manually temporarily until I do a clean install. Think a clean install is warranted at this point.

Thanks for all the help everyone.