Setting pagefile usage

[EoinG21]

MSI Afterburner was showing a high amount of pagefile usage while playing arma 3 so I decided to set min/max to 15000mb. After doing so I noticed less CPU usage while playing and smoother gameplay. But I was wondering is setting it to 15000 doing any possible damage to my system etc ? Thanks.

 

[ahnilated]

How much ram do you have? It sounds like your system doesn't have enough ram and is being forced to drive swap a lot.

 

[EoinG21]

How much ram do you have? It sounds like your system doesn't have enough ram and is being forced to drive swap a lot.

I have 8GB of DDR3.

 

[Solandri]

When you set the minimum pagefile size to a large number, you're telling the computer to pre-allocate the pagefile (or at least as much of it as you're likely to use). This usually results in the pagefile being sequential on the HDD, speeding up access. If you use a small minimum pagefile size and the computer needs to make it bigger, it will grab whatever free disk space is available, possibly resulting in the pagefile being fragmented, slowing down access.

It won't damage your system (other than leaving less free space on the HDD). But consistent large pagefile use is a sign that you need more RAM. You can either add more RAM, or you can look in Task manager (ctrl-alt-del) to see what programs are using all your RAM and see if any of them can be removed from auto-starting. Stupid stuff like an app to check for Adobe Acrobat updates, printer driver updates, etc. can be removed from the startup list (one of the tabs on Task manager, though in older versions of Windows you needed to use msconfig) to save memory.

 

[ahnilated]

How much ram do you have? It sounds like your system doesn't have enough ram and is being forced to drive swap a lot.

I have 8GB of DDR3.

Check task manger and see how much of your ram and swap file are being used. You might need to look at getting 8G more ram to be safe.

 

[EoinG21]

Only 4GB being used while playing Arma and over 8000mb pagefile usage on MSI Afterburner.

 

[EoinG21]

MERGED QUESTION
Question from EoinG21 : "Pagefile Usage issues - ARMA 3"

My pagefile usage is reaching over 8000MB and I believe it's causing stuttering and rendering issues in game. I have 8GB DDR3 memory, do I need to upgrade ? I'll leave a link to a graph below.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8D3HsVovbkTNnpLX05hNzBCdTA

 

[EoinG21]

When you set the minimum pagefile size to a large number, you're telling the computer to pre-allocate the pagefile (or at least as much of it as you're likely to use). This usually results in the pagefile being sequential on the HDD, speeding up access. If you use a small minimum pagefile size and the computer needs to make it bigger, it will grab whatever free disk space is available, possibly resulting in the pagefile being fragmented, slowing down access.

It won't damage your system (other than leaving less free space on the HDD). But consistent large pagefile use is a sign that you need more RAM. You can either add more RAM, or you can look in Task manager (ctrl-alt-del) to see what programs are using all your RAM and see if any of them can be removed from auto-starting. Stupid stuff like an app to check for Adobe Acrobat updates, printer driver updates, etc. can be removed from the startup list (one of the tabs on Task manager, though in older versions of Windows you needed to use msconfig) to save memory.

Pagefile usage is still at over 8000MB in MSI Afterburner but I switched it to min/max 15000MB ? Yeah unless I can get the pagefile to take up the slack it's looking like a 16GB kit of RAM is going to be purchased soon.

 

[Gillerer]

"Pagefile usage" as reported by MSI Afterburner is actually "Current Commit Charge". It includes use of both RAM and pagefile - some of it overlapping. (In addition, hardware drivers have some RAM assigned to them that is not part of Commit Charge.)