How To Manage Virtual Memory (Pagefile) In Windows 10

[icepick314]

I've always set to "No paging file" since Windows 7. I install either 32 or 64GB memory and use SSD.

No problem running games and office software and had maybe 1 or 2 random BSOD in past year.

I thought paging file is necessary if you do many large image, video, and music editing and not necessary for everyday and casual usage.

 

[Tolis_GR]

2 questions please.
As far as i understand, allocating the pagefile to a SSD is better than allocating to a HDD. Is this correct and to what extend?
Pagefile is supposed to be enabled when running out of physical ram, right? While gaming, and definitely my ram usage is barely hitting 60%, i always have pagefile usage. Why's that so?

 

[jimmysmitty]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

"...an optional, hidden system file on a hard disk."

"...when a lot of physical memory is installed, a page file might not be required to back the system commit charge during peak usage. The available physical memory alone might be large enough to do this."

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2860880/how-to-determine-the-appropriate-page-file-size-for-64-bit-versions-of

Was going to say. Back in the day before we had 16GB pretty standard people used to stick to 1GB. I always did 4GB and would kill the page file as I didn't need it, I had plenty of extra for the system.

However with 10 I have decided to leave it be as it does handle very differently than previous versions of Windows which is expected since it is one of the biggest changes to Windows in a while.

 

[daglesj]

For many iterations the Pagefile was relegated to just handling crashdumps and little else.

Not entirely true - While yes, it provides a means of generating a crash-dump for post-crash analysis, that was never the primary function. For the end-user, the pagefile was a physical extension of addressable memory beyond what physical RAM modules were installed. However, it's up to the OS (kernel) to handle what processes got paged out to file via it's memory management.

.

Yeah if you look up Microsoft's own white papers on the Pagefile most of them from the past 10 years have stated that the Pagefile was essentially just here for Crashdumps and little else. Sure it wasn't that way back in the days when 64MB of ram was considered amazing...but that was along time ago.

However, with Windows 10, Pagefile now has a new lease of life. Just leave it alone for best results.

 

[stdragon]

Yeah if you look up Microsoft's own white papers on the Pagefile most of them from the past 10 years have stated that the Pagefile was essentially just here for Crashdumps and little else

Well, this is the first I'm reading about this, because I've never ran across it. If you could be so kind, please provide links to these white papers. I genuinely want to read them.

I've been using MSDOS, primarily since the days v5.0 and v6.22. To my knowledge, the pagefile (swapfile) wasn't implimented until Windows NT 3.5, and subsequently adopted to the DOS version of what is known as Windows 95 for the consumer market. VMM (Virtual Memory Manager) is what's responsible for paging out what's in RAM to disk via the pagefile.sys file for these two OSes and newer. As you may recall, Windows ME was basically the last of the DOS linage, and NT continued on as 4.0, 2000, XP, Win7, Win8, and Win10.

FYI, the swapfile.sys is now a separate entity as of Windows 8 and Windows 10. But it's only relegated to their new Windows Universal/Metro based apps.

 

[taulatin]

Virtual memory is an artifact of the Stone Age!
If you have 32GB, 64GB and even 16GB you don't need it at all...

 

[daglesj]

Virtual memory is an artifact of the Stone Age!
If you have 32GB, 64GB and even 16GB you don't need it at all...

You haven't really read a word we've said have you? 😉

 

[compprob237]

Virtual memory is an artifact of the Stone Age!
If you have 32GB, 64GB and even 16GB you don't need it at all...

Except if you're alpha testing or running a simulation that uses >64GB of RAM. Then again, your average user wouldn't be doing these things.

I know of one program in Alpha that will outright crash if you have the page file disabled even if you have 128GB of RAM installed. It explicitly requests page file commits and if there is no page file at all then the program crashes.