SSD's and swap files

I haven't found this question yet unless it's in the stickied thread 957 pages long...

Say you have a SATA III SSD as primary o/s drive and 8gb of (1600mhz) RAM in a laptop predominantly used for gaming. I'm thinking I wouldn't need a swap file at all. Am I right, or badly misguided?

 

The hard drive technology doesn't matter, but because you have 8gb of RAM, there's little chance that you'll run out during gaming. I have 4gb and I have the page file completely disabled.

 

I left my swap file at 800 MB so I could still get BSOD crash logs, but yeah, if you have 8GB of RAM you'll definitely be fine even if you turn off the swap file.

 

if you don't use the page file, don't CARE about it. it's there like any other safeguard: normally never used, but there for you in the rare case you need it.

so you might never need it. the day you would, you would be pissed off if you don't have it (bluescreen, and no info why).

just let it be (on dynamic) and never ever care about it.

 

Personally I've disabled mine. I had planned to re-enable it, after installing my SSD, but I never got any weird errors or anything, so I figured it would be one less potential bottleneck.

Tip though: if you're disabling it, Windows will just deactivate that portion of HDD space - you don't actually get it back. Since this is the case, set your pagefile to 16MB first, restart, then disable it.

 

not true about the "deactivation of that portion of hdd space". it's just a file (Pagefile.sys on c:\ or whereever you have it). and it gets deleted on deactivation.

but again, the pagefile is just there for two (hopefully rare to never happening) situations: 1) bluescreen of death. it collects the crashdata in there, then. 2) system is out of physical memory. then, the system uses memory in the pagefile to guarantee continued application stability. else, the applications would crash with an out of memory error.

now id you have a 16mb pagefile, and your 6gb (in case of serephucus) of memory would be used, the 16mb won't give you much more fallback space. that's why "system managed" is the best setting. small when not used, big when needed (like, never).


or, in short. just leave it the way the system wants it. it's how it's designed for it's function, and how the system can put it to best use.

 

on an SSD, just leave it enabled as SSD is very fast so the price to pay for the insurance is very very low, that is assuming you don't need the space.

however, disabling page file is not as scary as it sounds, BSOD is rarely(if ever) caused by OOM. and windows warn you well before OOM happens.

 

actually, those warnings pop up when it had an OOM error that got caught by allocating memory in the pagefile. else, you get an application crash with an OOM message. been there, tested that.

and yes, it's not something that happens often AT ALL. still, it's a FREE insurance while not in use.

 

Some software (incl. some games) requires pagefile to run, i.e. Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War 2, Chaos Rising and Retribution all require a pagefile of minimum 1,5GB to run.

 

NOOP. those warning pop up BEFORE OOM. I have seen it occasionally and been there, tested that too. None of my program crashs at the time of that popup. And even in cases I ignored them and latter lead to OOM, it is not BSOD. BSOD comes from kernel drivers and if there is such driver that relies on page file, it is a badly written one.

It is not FREE, but almost free on SSD. On HDD, there are cases that makes noticeable difference but we don't need to get there again, search 'gracy123' is enough.

So the conclusion is still the same, leave it on for SSD. disable it if you want on HDD.

 

i was not talking about bsod when out of memory

pagefile is there to record what happens IF YOU HAVE A BSOD. crash reports.

and the pagefile is there if you go OUT OF MEMORY, which results in app crashes.

 

Thanks for the comments everyone. Guess I'll see how much room it takes up first, and do some experimenting from there.

 

Mine is limited to a custom size: certainly large enough to be usefull but not so large as to get in the way.

Of course I have 16 GB of RAM.

 

Since you guys in here seem to know much more about how Windows 7 determines the optimal amount of SDD space to allocate for virtual memory...does anyone here know why Windows 7 would want to allocate 24gb to virtual memory when I leave it to "let windows decide?"

 

Probably because you have 16GB RAM?

Just resize the pagefile. Windows is dumb when it comes to pagefile size. I have 16GB in my system and wanted minimum 16GB pagefile up to 24GB!

I just set minimum for 256MB and max for 2GB.