Question Can I disable the pagefile on Windows?

[rscheetah30]

I have 16GB of ram, can I disable it?

 

[Lafong]

I believe you can, and I believe most here would tell you it's either a bad idea or unnecessary or pointless.

Page file ideas have been discussed for decades and few minds have changed.

 

[punkncat]

Yeah, this is one of those things best left alone. Nothing to gain aside from problems.

 

[kanewolf]

I have 16GB of ram, can I disable it?

Probably, but WHY? You gain nothing.

 

[Morisatos]

Probably, but WHY? You gain nothing.

Think in earlier OS's back in the day you gained performance. I think after W10 it becomes moot? Either way it is still needed by certain applications.

 

[Bob.B]

I have 16GB of ram, can I disable it?

Can you?....yes.
Will it cause problems?......depends on what you do with the pc.
Try it see what the results are.
I don't use a page file the pc works fine but I can't say I see any big change either on or off.

 

[USAFRet]

I have 16GB of ram, can I disable it?

Can you? Yes.
Should yo? Probably not.

What, specifically, do you hope to gain by disabling i?

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Windows requires that at least a minimal paging file exist. It's always been this way.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Outside of some apps complaining about it not existing, here's why you shouldn't turn off the page file.

When an app asks for memory from the OS, the OS will reserve more than it asked for. The reasoning is chances are the application will likely ask for memory again and allocating a chunk of memory for it can be expensive in terms of overhead. So when the application asks for more memory, the OS can immediately give it to the application.

The problem comes when the system starts running out of physical memory. The OS can't reassign reserved memory for another application. It'd be like if you reserved a table at a restaurant for some number of chairs, but your friends are late, so the restaurant reassigns those chairs to other guests because they see you're not using them at the moment. So what does the OS do? Punt the unused reserved memory bits into the page file. It's essentially a free action, because there's nothing to copy.

In any case, the entire memory space Windows has for applications is a combination of how much physical memory there is plus the size of the page file. The amount of memory Windows marked for applications (whether they use it or not) is called a commit charge. The entire commit charge must fit within the memory space.

As I'm writing this, my entire commit charge is about 14.6GB, but only 11.2GB is in use. If I had 16GB of memory with no page file, the moment 1.4GB is reserved, this is effectively considered no more memory is available. Applications will start throwing "out of memory" errors even though I still have a few gigabytes of RAM not in use.

tl;dr, if you turn off the page file, you effectively lessen the amount of RAM your system can use.