Turning off the page file with 8GB

I'm thinking of bumping up to 8GB's of ram with my main reasoning to disable the page file. Running Vista x64 is there any downsides to this idea? (The expense is not a concern.)

 

Hi.

I only have 3gb in Vista32 and i always turn the page file off and delete the file, and i have not had any problems, and i did the same on my desktop with vista64 and 4gb, and i have no problems there either.

Regards

John.

 

Why disable the pagefile ?
Is there any up-side to it....?

I wouldn't disable the pagefile, unless you're real anal about HDD space or cannot defrag it at all.

 

It won't be a problem as long as you don't ever use 8GB of memory. If you hit that limit, you'll get a low memory error and the program that overflowed the memory will crash.

 

Actually, and i say this only because i suppose it's like that, it might be possible that windows expects there be a page and without it the ram will never offload some of it's unused data. This is true of linux, you CAN turn off the page but there are consequences. With 8gig of ram, i'd create a small ramdisk and mount the pagefile on that, just to fool windows. I think you can overflow your memory, but you can't overflow your pagefile, it'll dump it.

 

You do NOT want to turn off the pagefile. It is only used when a program specifically asks for the pagefile, or if you run out of memory.

With 8GB of memory you won't use the pagefile much, but not having it means your computer may just crash the moment that a program needs it.

 

I have never had a problem with the pagefile turned off (+ deleted the pagefile). So i don't see the worry about it really.

 

turning off the page file is a bad idea, as some programs and services explicitly depend on it. you'll also notice, that without a page file, your RAM usage actually increases.

furthermore, there is no real-world performance gain achieved by disabling it. hard disk space is plentiful, and the relative space taken by the page file has dramatically decreased as disk density has increased. what are you really saving by turning it off?

 

I never had page file since I upped to 1GB ram on my older notebook, lol.

the current one did not have page file, but it came with 2 GB ram. Now I have 3GB (4 but XP 32bit sees 3) and still don't have page file, lol.

note that not having page file will increase performance

thought I'm using XP and Vista requires a little more RAM

 

have you measured the alleged performance increase? how did you measure it? were the results repeatable? were the tests synthetic or were they produced using real-world applications? what about with lesser RAM? more RAM? what about a different system?

no offense, but it's hardly scientific to make such a blanket statement as that.

 

If you have 4gb ram on an x32 OS you can use superspeed's ramdisk to make a ram disk in the unmanaged upper ram area and put the page file there (this is what i'm doing on my desktop, I'm actually kinda investigating stuff to possibly use a ramdisk in conjunction with an SSD, currently my browser cache and a 512mb page file reside on the ram disk.

 

That's what I'm setting up right now!

 

I have 4gb ram and SSD, using Vista x64 and 200mb pagefile. If you disable the pagefile it gives you a warning that it will not be able to save any error logs. It works fine, I have also tried completely removing the page file and it works fine.

 

I have no idea why people insist on disabling the pagefile.

Why invite possible issues down the line for no actual gain?

 

Well you do gain 2-8 GB of space, and it puts all the user files that are typically located after it that much closer to the outermost tracks of the disk which are the fastest. While certainly it doesn't magically stop your computer from swapping to disk if you already had enough ram, it can improve the performance of the file system on the disk to at least a marginal degree. I've run both ways over the years and never noticed any real difference one way or the other.

 

do you really want me to write you a whole guide with tests and stuff to show you obvious results from common sence that when your OS accesses/uses your hard drive as RAM rather than just RAM things get slower ?

no offense, but think a little.

 

firstly, what you define to be "common sense" is not a repeatable measurement, in any environment regardless of past result or momentum. to what system does the advice apply? what if the system doesn't behave identically next to another system? what if the two systems differ?

this is known as a blanket statement because it implies the advice applies to all systems. what if the system has 256MB of RAM, the OS requires 128MB and you have three programs each competing for 128MB when that's all that remains? what if an application manages memory on its own (including paging) and fails to find a page file?

an interesting fact to note is that disabling the page file is guaranteed to increase RAM usage.

secondly, this is offensive.

 

There are very, very, very few programs that actually use the HDD for cache, even if there is physical memory available.

And as said before majority of the programs won't use the pagefile unless the system actually runs out of physical memory.

Its best to keep the pagefile enabled. It was made and is enabled for a purpose, and the nerds at MS know better than us, as to what will be best for performance+stability.

 

As was said, saying no offense doesn't make it not offensive. As for a whole guide, I'd challenge you to find REAL PROOF in benchmarks or similar measurable metrics that prove that disabling the page file really does substantially improve performance as your common sence(sic) tells you it does. While I've run without a page file without issues, and there are some benefits in certain situations, I've never found any substantial performance boost to justify the risks particularly to someone who isn't a power user, there are some things that really don't work well if there's no page file at all.

 

None of the statement makes sense, sorry. The unmanaged upper RAM is NEVER accessible when the computer is running a 32bit OS. Period.

 

http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php

RamDisk Plus 9 has a most unique feature. Our patent pending technology can access memory beyond the limitation imposed by a Windows 32-bit operating system! In other words, RamDisk Plus 9 can use "unmanaged" Windows' memory e.g. above 4GB. It can also use the stubbornly inaccessable memory between 3.2GB and 4GB.

See the product's help file for detailed explanation of what "unmanaged" memory is and how to access and use it with RamDisk Plus 9.

The computer I'm writing this from has it installed, it works.

 

Well, unless they managed to figure out a way to force the processor into 64bit mode while running that program, or configure the chipset for 64bit memory access in a way that the processor and rest of the system does not get confused...

It might claim it works, how to do you actually KNOW?

I've taken a fair amount of courses in microprocessor interfacing. Interesting program, I'll have to look at it but something tells me you're getting your leg pulled.

 

Superspeed is not the only RAMDisk that can do it either. Gavotte's RAMDisk can also do it and best of all it's free. How do you know it's working? Just examine current memory usage with any memory management tool. This has been validated by a great number of people. Google it.

I experience the same results.

 

Yeah I have 3406248 K of physical memory in taskman and a 650 meg ram drive, I haven't tried sizing the ram drive all the way up because it doesn't seem to tell me what the upper address limit is that I can use, and I've heard the last few hundred K aren't usable anyways as other stuff sneaks things in there like BIOS shadow etc. I'm not going to pretend to know anything about this stuff really, but I'd imagine they may be taking advantage of the 36bit addressable space provided by physical address extension, that's why mapping the memory on your video cards doesn't further erode your maximum ram limit, with the 1gb and growing video card memories you'd start losing even the 3gb you currently get.

 

lol..what sort of system was that which addressed only 2GB with a 32-bit OS..

And how come this thing isn't popular ? It still shows Chinese links and stuff like that.

 

The before was before he made the unmanaged space available so the ram drive was being carved out of the normal 3gb of managed address space.

 

Okay....I'm slow! He manually made the 1GB unmanaged, to assign that gig to the ram disk.

 

this is not true. I wish it was, but it's not. I have planty of RAM and yet with page file windows still uses it. And that's why I disabled it.

 

you are going in different direction as of how much RAM is enough, which would depend on what you do with the computer. If I had a computer with 256MB ram and I used only Notepad, it will still be fine. If you would like a discussion about that, OK.

by common sence I meant that RAM is faster than any HDD and almost any SSD (last one excludes RAMSSDs since those are made from real RAM modules). This has been fact since forever.

and I stand by my statement, which was: not having a page file increases systems performance.

p.s. what benchmark programs would you like me to use to prove it ?

and for real, sorry if you feel offended.

 

Ok, ok its popular....Still a 64-bit OS rules..

The paging process is going to continue in the background, and its not like its gonna stall the OS when paging.

Disabling the pagefile is gonna give you a performance boost in the order of µs imo....
I've never seen any rock-solid nos. showing that disabling the pagefile actually improves performance, but only statements "It makes the OS faster"; "It seems faster, snappier"; "It felt much quicker", etc etc.

It is an unproven tweak, and there is a great risk of an application crashing. (Memory Leak ?)
What if a BSOD occurs, where is the complete memory dump file gonna be saved ?

Why don't you actually do a small write-up on it. You must know the programs you can use to actually show the difference in performance on a system with the pagefile enabled and disabled.

 

This is a pretty good article regarding the Windows page file and how it works.

 

PCMark 05 or Vantage or some other semi real world benchmark would probably be the best if you want to test the theory, you need a whole system benchmark rather than something that is focused on just graphics or just cpu or just hard disk.

 

Hrm, so the answer is "no". lol Good reading, good posts guys.

 

I've also turned it off all the time and currently use 4GB ram on Win 32bit.
It does not slow down or crashes your PC, except you need more than the 4GB Ram, then the OS crashes.
But hell, when do you need that much ram. Even when you do a lot of things simultaneously it will get difficult to reach that limit. At least I had to open a lot of heavy programs and load very large files to test it out, if the OS really crashes, and it did.

But because this worst case scenario is very rare and will almost never happen you're on the save side to turn it off.

My experience is, that the system gets faster and HDD activity gets reduced after disabling the swap file.
Why? Because not the program but windows manages the RAM and even if you have enough free RAM Windows will always also use the Swapfile, and not only when the RAM is full.
That means that you force windows to use only the RAM and not also the slow HDD by disabling the Swapfile.
And because windows has absolutely no problem to run without a swap file it's a win win situation.

You only should activate it if you use programs which need more than 4GB RAM, but I don't think that you use such programs.

And to all those "Ahh, it will damage your system, windows is not able to run properly without a swap file" people: Where have you read such garbage. Have you ever tried to disable the swap file. What does not work then. What got worse. Have you ever tried it yourself.
I don't experience any slowdown after disabling the swap file. My subjective experience is only, that it seems to get faster.

And if all of you mean the paging feature of windows, well, a reboot every few days solves this issue better.

So keep the swap file turned on if you keep your PC for several days or use heavy programs.

edit:
An alternative to turning off the page file is to change following registry key to force windows to keep some things in ram:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/regentry/29931.mspx?mfr=true
But I don't know if it impoves anything.