16GB RAM - disable paging file?

I find it more amusing that you think those two statements are contradictory. In fact it IS great to have most RAM in use and it IS great that Win8 itself needs less of that RAM. This allows more RAM to be used for caching other things besides the OS. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Gary

 

Yes, it's one thing for an OS to *require* a lot of RAM, it's another thing for it to make efficient use of it. If they are able to reduce the RAM footprint of Win8, all the better.

 

I've even disabled pagefile back when I had my laptop with 3GB RAM. Seriously, many maybe won't notice any diffrence, but I doo. Forever since, I have kept my Pagefile disabled, that said, you have 16GB RAM, go ahead. In worst case, if you manage to run out of RAM, you'll get a warning message saying that Windows is low on memory Oh, you may get a crash after that, however, maxout that 16GB, then make another therad asking for what to do

 

I disabled page file even for my 4GB ram desktop two years ago, everything is fine until now, never comes unstable problem.

 

You are wrong. Not NEVER but not that much and in general not an issue.

 

Alright I now have my laptop (currently with 8GB ram). The paging file is automatically set to max. 8GB.. now guess what.. since the first start of windows 7 , the paging file is exactly 8GB. The minimum could be 16MB.. but it's always 8GB.

So eventhough the paging file was never really needed (i don't even use 20% of my total RAM) it is 8GB big. Which means 8GB were written on my SSD and are getting read.

So I have an 8GB file altough it's not even needed. The SSD is reading/writing 8GB at some point which will cause a loss in performance?

 

Windows is managing the paging file.

My first logical thinking of this whole paging file is: If 16GB of RAM are more than enough (and I'm sure even with 2 virtual boxes I won't run out of RAM) then why would I want some pagingfile that causes read/write/access on my SSD if it is simply not needed? Yes there could be compatibility problems.. but then I could still go back and enable the paging file.

 

lol, I think it's something to do with horses and water.

 

Noop. Windows 7 default is make page file the same size as your RAM(was 1.5 in NT/XP). But not 8GB is written to it, size is allocated but not written too.

It would occasionally write a small amount to it, no matter if all your RAM is used or not(and why I said dave is wrong). But it is not going to make anyone lose sleep as it is rare and tiny. And being SSD, it doesn't even have any noticeable impact to performance(it made a difference if it is a HDD @ 5400rpm).

This whole page file things keep on repeating itself again and again and I think the moderator should just post a sticky stating the facts and nothing else.

 

4GB of those 8GB are actually "used" according to everest / hwinfo... my current RAM usage is at 2,6GB of 8GB. So 3GB's are getting written/read to the SSD altough its completely not necessary ?

 

No idea what everest/hwinfo is measuring but my Intel tools which monitor actual write to the SSD didn't support this observation.

 

Or maybe Donkeys?

zakazak do what you want...because the horse is already dead and it's still being beat to death.

 

Okay I got ma 2x 4GB RAM today and now have a total of 16GB RAM. Altough I disabled the pagingfile (and its not on C:/ anymore), Rainmeter & Everest Home show me SWAP with 16GB (with the paging file enabled it was 32GB). What's that?

 

Most operating systems of today operate on a paging system, that is your physical memory is mapped to virtual addresses by what is called paging.

Typically in windows that usually involves 4k blocks being assigned from physical memory to virtual addresses. This has great advantages for many applications as they just see a contiguous address range even though the physical mapping is all over the place.

Different processes can use the same virtual address range as they map to different physical pages or share physical memory with other applications just by pointing those physical pages to their virtual address.

In other words your RAM is seen as paging, when you run without a pagefile your paging pool consists of RAM, when you run with a pagefile then your paging pool consist of RAM and the pagefile.

Those programs that show it all as "SWAP" though is probably misleading.

 

So, for the disablers - systems running any better over a long period of time?

cheers ...

 

So as I disabled the paging file, my SWAP should have the same usage as my RAM ? As my SWAP consists only of my RAM ?

@qhn: hard to say as I'm overall amazed by the speed of my new laptop.. and it's my 2nd day with the paging file disabled. I believe that booting my 2 virtualboxes was faster and working with them + programs on my real system was fast as well. But who knows Placebo <3

 

I don't know if 18 months counts as a long time, but I've gone that long (may 2010 with zero paging file) on my Sager NP8662 (specs in sig) and the only time I've had a crash is when I do something bone-headed like put in a beta driver and it BSoD's. Otherwise, that sager's been solid as a rock. So I did the same with my NP8130 (also in sig). I think the Paging File works best at this stage of RAM expandability (IMHO) when you have very little onboard RAM (like my mom's laptop, which has 3GB RAM) and for some reason you're masochistic and want to run photoshop or something RAM-intensive.

Jason

 

More or less that, well a little bit less but let's not get into that. Technically a SWAP file is located on disk so those softwares are IMO not really being correct. If you want to see what is happening with your pagefile on W7 then you can get an idea with perfmon.exe and resource monitor which are part of the OS.

 

Hmm strange thing is:
According to rainmeter my RAM usage is @4.3GB and my SWAP at 4.5GB altough the paging file is diabled.

 

First in your case it's not SWAP it's pagefile and pagefile is not pagefile.sys but pagefile.sys can be a part of pagefile.

One reason is that RAM can be reserved by a program and use up some pagefile but until that RAM is actually used the amount of RAM in use doesn't increase.

Here's a quick and dirty example of reserving RAM you can try. As a standard 32-bit program it tries to allocate as much as it can, that can be up to 4GB on 64-bit systems.

RAM usage should not change much but there will be a big hit with the paging pool. Note that without a SWAP file such as pagefile.sys you can run out of pagefile before all RAM is used and when the paging pool is empty you will likely not be able to use any more RAM.

Warning, allocating a lot of resource may cause system instability on some systems.

 

Thanks for that explanation. And where is this "pagefile" located ? Since I disabled the paging in win7 I don't have the pagefile.sys anyway.

Thanks

 

Pagefile isn't as it's name would suggest, a file. Maybe easier to think of it as the amount of addresses that can be assigned to virtual addresses.

 

Pagefile exists as a file called pagefile.sys and it resides in the root or C:/
you can see it if you don't have the system files hidden by default.

 

Pagefile can usually mean pagefile.sys but in the OP's example pagefile is meant as the combination of RAM + pagefile.sys.

It might have been easier if MS called pagefile.sys SWAP and named the file swap.sys to make things clearer, but they didn't.

 

That would confusing considering that a swap partition is different from a pagefile.

 

And what would a swap partition have to do with windows? Other operating systems may use a partition for swap area but windows uses files.

FYI it used to be called 386spart.par or win386.swp for the older windows operating systems.

Not the best example but Swap file

 

swap partition, page file are the same thing, even linux nowadays can use a file as 'swap'.

A matter of implementation detail.

 

I'm on XP and I dont have page file. I did not even have one when I was only with 2GB RAM total in the system ... hehehe.

now with 4GB (and using only 3 of those) I haven't had a single memory issue for the time being (~4 years).

 

Maybe the Op can give us some feedback. I only had problems with lack of pagefile when i went above the RAM.

 

thanks guys i was wary whether or not to disable it but now im certain I could, restarting...

 

No problem so far with the disabled pagingfile

 

Thanks zakazak

 

No problem.

Also did a lot of multitasking during the last few days (as I got my root server and had to do a lot of configuration/installing/etc).

On two screens:
Firefox with 174 tabs
Foobar playing some nice music
2x putty ssh connection
filezilla with 5 ftp-connections
notepad++ with like 20 tabs opened
skype
msn
teamviewer
comodo internet security
malwarebytes anti-malware
thunderbird
keepass
mirc
normal notepad.exe
calc.exe
pdf-viewer
.......
And then I needed a break and decided to play (on top of all that) a few rounds Counter Strike:Source ;D


Paging file disabled and no problems at all. Everything runs really smooth. I think firefox never worked as smooth as now (the max. tabs I had before were 91 tabs.. now 174 tabs and everything is much faster). Well.. my system had a nice upgrade too ;D

 

I don't know why this is such a debated topic. If you have any doubts, just set a range from 256MB to 2048MB and let it be. There really is no downsides to this. And if you think there is, well just turn it off then. Not hard.

 

You should disable pagefile. This have been discussed so many times on NBR I even don't know where to start...

From my own experience, I've never used up 8GB of RAM. If you're an average user, I'm pretty sure you won't either. (in your case, 6GB) I still have one of my laptops with 2GB RAM, and it is working great without pagefile for my main tasks.

Outlook, Skype, Winamp, Kasperksy Pure and surfing with IE9. With Outlook closed, I can even use Photoshop!

 

^ Some of us are late to the party I see.

 

With a pagefile, which in REAL tests has been shown to not slow down a user by any MEASUREABLE amount, you would not have to bother to close Outlook just so you could run Photoshop. Thanks for making the perfect case for why it is nuts to second guess the folks who wrote the operating system.

Gary

 

WOW! My post wasnt spose to be here? What the hell?

Gary, since you started it, it was to a SSD drive thread as you can see from the title, why not save, in this case 6GB of place on the SSD drive and use it to something else?


I'll have to contact a mod and ask why my post got here..

 

I see nothing of the sort. The only title I see here is "16GB RAM - disable paging file?". If your response is in the narrow context of a machine with only an SSD drive, I see your point. But your post didn't say anything at all about that context, it seemed to be a blanket answer. Thus my reply.

Gary

 

Gary, if you take a look at the tittle of this post:

I have no idea why my post got here...

 

Just purchased 16GB of RAM, 65$, prices are so low I was too tempted

Going to put 512 or 1GB of pagefile. My system got 3 SSD only, so I suppose anything related to slowing access because of small pagefile and reading directly from the source doesn't apply with me.