Question about virtual memory page-file on Win10 SSD

[sjefrawww]

I have a Kingston V300 SSD (C: ) as my boot. I have the games on a HDD (D: ).

Windows Resource Exhaustion Detector kicked me out of ARK, so I took a look at virtual memory settings.

In properties/performance/virtual memory, it is set to automatically manage paging file for all drives. Unticking to check over it seems that its only using the SSD (C: ) to write page file, for all drives, but I know nothing about this stuff.

Is this unhealthy for my SSD?

Should I have a own auto pagefile on (D: ) so maybe it will use that for gamepage drive instead?

And another question, can it be normal for a game to write 28gb worth of page, when I have 16gb RAM?

 

[Solandri]

Theoretically, it would be better to have the pagefile on the HDD, since if you run out of RAM and the computer starts to use the pagefile as memory, you could add a lot of write cycles to the SSD.

Practically, it is better to have the pagefile on the SSD. Windows seems to touch the pagefile every 10 sec or so even if you have lots of free RAM, and it seems to consider this a critical operation. If it has to wait for the HDD (e.g. HDD is spun down from non-use), everything will freeze, even the mouse pointer, until the HDD is ready again and Windows can do whatever it does with the pagefile. In non-extreme situations, this leads to small hiccups and pauses for a fraction of a second as Windows waits for pagefile data off the HDD.

So it is easier just to put the pagefile on the SSD and not have to deal with Windows' quirkiness.

And no, a 28GB pagefile is not normal. It means the program(s) you're running has a memory leak somewhere. Every time a program requests memory, it's supposed to release it back to the OS when it's finished using that memory. Sometimes a lazy developer forgets to release the memory, so the program keeps using more and more memory as time goes on. That is a memory leak. Either bug the developer to fix it, switch to a different program, or quit and restart the program at regular intervals before the pagefile becomes that large. In the case of a memory leak, the data written to the pagefile is mostly static (doesn't change), so you're only adding a single write cycle to the SSD. So it's annoying, but not particularly damaging. Not like if you've got 8GB of RAM and Windows is trying to juggle 16GB of programs in memory - in that case it would constantly be swapping new data in and out of the pagefile, causing a lot of excess write cycles.