Question Page file size is 5.6 GB.I have 8gb ram .How to reduce it ?

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hrishi654

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My page file size is 5.6 GB . I have 8gb ram . It says that the recommended size is 1914 MB in settings but it is taking 5.6 GB. It is set to automatic manage only.
 

seanwebster

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Unless your OS drive is really crammed on free space, there's no need to disable it. Although you can if you like, you just won't get any BSOD crash logs with it disabled. Personally, I've been without a page file on and off for the past 10 years and never noticed any performance difference either way.
 

seanwebster

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Is that realistic with only 8GB of ram?
Depends on the tasks you perform and if they need the page file or not. Everything I've done, I've not had an app crash on me yet with it disabled in systems with 8GB of RAM. My main system has had 16GB of RAM for a while now tho. Like the past 5-years. Before that was 6-8GB. I run VMs, do video and photo editing from time to time, play some games, and a bunch of other random things that only a storage nut like myself would do. lol

Like I said though, if you're not absolutely cramped for space, no need to disable it. I don't actually recommend disabling it, but Windows isn't going to kill him or corrupt anything by not having it.

Edit: I forgot to mention, a disclaimer to my statement sorry. "In my experience," I have yet to see Windows crash due to the PF disabled. Corruption may happen, but is not always the case. Just things will start crashing on you when RAM is full. Not worth risking corruption tho. You can manually set the page file to just 1GB if you wanna save some space.
 
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1st - it is not advisable to turn off page file. Virtual memory subsystem needs it. Depending on software used, you'll get memory management errors, if you disable it.
2nd - page file too large hurts performance. It is really noticeable on mechanical HDDs (on SSDs not so much).

My page file size is 5.6 GB . I have 8gb ram . It says that the recommended size is 1914 MB in settings but it is taking 5.6 GB. It is set to automatic manage only.
Set it to custom, 1GB initial , 8GB max. Then monitor page file growth. If it ever grows to 2GB, then set initial to 2GB.
 
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I vote leaving the setting to system managed and just upgrade the physical memory to address the underlying issue/cause. Doing this will alleviate the need for an excessive page file. As an IT Consultant for 11 years, i've rarely ever had to adjust the page file size. This only had to be done with physical memory hardware limitations of the motherboard, that this member clearly doesn't have.
 
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.....but Windows isn't going to kill him or corrupt anything by not having it.
Untrue. You've just been extremely fortunate not to have hit the wall. When there is no more RAM or swap space available to fulfill a memory request, Windows is prone to crash with sometimes catastrophic results. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to clean up the mess when users thought themselves smarter than the Windows engineers when it came to managing memory.
 

seanwebster

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Untrue. You've just been extremely fortunate not to have hit the wall. When there is no more RAM or swap space available to fulfill a memory request, Windows is prone to crash with sometimes catastrophic results. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to clean up the mess when users thought themselves smarter than the Windows engineers when it came to managing memory.
I forgot to mention, a disclaimer to my statement sorry. "In my experience," I have yet to see Windows crash due to the PF disabled. Actually, I think i'm going to try to get it to today lol.
 
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seanwebster

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It won't necessarily crash because of no pagefile.
But when it does crash for other reasons, it won't give you a dumpfile to diagnose.
Exactly. I did happen to test things out with the PF disabled on my main system. I maxed out a ram disk and then filled up the remaining free RAM space with apps. Windows starts getting unstable when there's only a few hundred MB free, the browser would crash, etc. But, it didn't fully crash the system. It still worked. Unmounted the ram disk, re-enabled PF, did a SFC /scannow and Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth and got no corruption.
 
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