Funny issue regarding page file ... all-powerful crashed because pagefile tried to blow up to 12.5gb

Is this normal? This happened 3-4 weeks ago but I forgot to tell people/report it, and I was looking through my log files for something and remembered the incident:

I was doing my usual, running a virtual XP environment and firefox outside of it. Wasn't doing anything in the XP environment but loading up IE6 to test a website for our client.

Moments later the machine started lagging, and then after 30 mins I couldn't work out what was wrong. Eventually I gave up and forced a shudown/restart. CPU usage was low too, but gradually nothing responded

I then looked in the logs and found out that Windows (Vista, 64bit) was trying to request more page file size, up to around 12.5gb.

You might be wondering how I worked that out, well in the logs it gave me a figure what it was trying to request, in bytes. Initially I thought it just wanted 1gb more, but then I noticed the values doesn't seem to be correct.

So I dumped it into a byte calculator (about 13421772800 bytes) and it turned out 12.5gb

I laughed and was surprised, as it has never happened me before. Is this just a freak one off issue? I was wondering if anyone encountered this.

I can dig up the exact screenshot/value/log entry when I get home from work, but it was just something I clearly remembered in my head and I decided to post it here while at work

 

You obviously have a memory leak. When running your daily apps either use perfmon or task manager to see what which is the offending app.

 

Ya I couldn't probably load it up to see, but in my experiences memory leaks are never this huge hehe, the worst culprit before was firefox going up to 500mb or so before I realised it.

 

If your running virtual machines that would be the first place I would investigate.

I have an app at work that is so poorly written I can easily reproduce a memory leak that's GBs in size.