zircle :
I see you found a solution, but I personally doubt that the main reason why your game was lagging is because of a lack of virtual ram... 8gbs is quite alot already.
Remember the swap file is for ALL programs that are currently running. Even if they are not activly doing anything, their resources still need to be mapped to the swap file, which can result in it getting very large. I've seen mine reach upwards of 12GB or so...[I have 8GB Physical RAM installed]
Just to go back to basics:
Win32: A single application can use up to 2GB of its Address Space [lower 2GB of Virtual Address is reserved]; System RAM limit is 4GB.
Win32 + 3GB Switch + Large Address Aware: A single application can use up to 3GB of its Virtaul Address Space [lower 1GB of Virtual Address is reserved]; System RAM limit is 4GB.
Win32 + PAE + Large Address Aware Application: A single application can use its entire 4GB Virtual Address Space; system RAM limit is 64GB.
Win64 + 32-bit EXE w/o Large Address Aware: A single application can use up to 2GB of its Virtual Address Space; System RAM limit is 192GB [limited by OS]
Win64 + 32-bit EXE + Large Address Aware Application: A single application can use its entire 4GB Virtual Address Space; System RAM limit is 192GB [limited by OS]
Win64 + 64-bit EXE: A single application can use up its entire 64-bit Virtual Address Space; System RAM limit is 192GB [limited by OS]
Most apps are 32-bit, so depending on the setting of the Large Address Aware flag, even on Win64, 32-bit applications are limited to either 2GB [Not LAA] or 4GB [LAA], regardless of installed RAM.
Without a pagefile, all Virtual Addresses must be mapped to a single Physical Address. So if you have 8GB installed, all your applications combined can never use more then this amount at any one time, or the application that next asks for more space allocated will crash [due to an unhandled error when malloc fails...].
With a pagefile, Virtual Address will be mapped to RAM only when the data stored in those address needs to be read/written to. As a result, teh amount of RAM in use at any one time is actually very, very small [Avaliable RAM], even though the majority of RAM has been used at one point or another [Free RAM]. In other words: Avaliable RAM is RAM that is able to be used, Free RAM is RAM that have never been used by any application.
For example, if I created a 1GB buffer, and I don't use it, with a pagefile, none of that 1GB gets mapped into active memory. The Virtual Addresses are reserved, but not mapped into physical addresses. Without a pagefile, each of those 1GB of Virtual Address MUST be mapped to a PHysical Address, costing you 1GB of RAM even though you haven't populated a single bit in the buffer.
Point being, sicne you are going to go through the Windows Virtual Memory subsystem no matter what you do with the pagefile, you may as well leave it on. And the majority of the time, "System Managed" is good enough, since the pagefile will grow as needed. [I usually set the maximum size to 16GB, which is a "sane" limit for running no more then one heavy app at a time].
Edited to clean up some statements and remove general confusion
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