Do you have the Page File On or Off?

I have it always Off. Never ran into any problems thanks to my rich 8 GB MB of DDR3 RAM

What do you have yours as?

 

On in default settings except in circumstances where I know I gain from it and can live with the increased risk of issues (the only case is a 32gb ssd installation, btw). otherwise, it makes zero sense. but as usual, to each it's own. the ones who want to be geeky and disable it without knowing what it does, do so anyways.

 

I've heard people advising against disabling as some ancient programs still require to see the Virtual Page to function properly. but according to my needs, I don't have any of these programs so it's perfectly fine with me

 

I have ONE game that demands a page file. It's not even an old game:
Star Wars - The Force Unleashed

in its 28GB of glory. :|

 

On, at 4Gb set by OS itself. Don't know if I should change this to 2Gb or any other number. I don't really bother.

 

I have 2 threads that describe the "before" and "after" disabling it! If you have enough RAM (which is highly individual but I would say >4GB) - disable it and you will notice how the system becomes way more responsive, especially by multitasking, while copying large files, etc.

I have mine disabled since I upgraded to 6GB long time ago and don't even think of enabling it again The difference is huge!

 

On, I just leave it alone.

 

As daveperman said, If your ssd is small, turn it off assuming you have 4 gig ram or more. I set it to a fixed custom size (1 GIG) and put it on my 2nd HDD but never notice the HDD spin up in everyday use.
This article is old but makes some good points Increasing Virtual Memory in Windows 7 SSD - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com

 

I leave it on, but 1.5 x RAM size is too much for me these days.
A fixed 1 GB setting have never failed on me.

 

Off in W7 as I run a 40gb ssd system partition, ubunutu I leave 4gb of swap as I have 200gb ssd and plenty of space. Also I virtualbox from ubunutu...

 

Ditto!!!!!!!

 

Mine is on, only for one or two apps that don't like not having it. I moved it to the second drive though and shrank it to 2GB.

 

512MB on the system disk.

 

16 GB ram, so on and as small as allowed and on the HD (not the SSD).

 

On @ 1GB or so, for the sake of some oddball software.

 

On. Some programs require it.

 

care to mention a few?
I failed to be found by any

 

No page file.

 

mostly games and I know an ancient version of photoshop which would warn(but still works).

 

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

 

Not using one. I can't think why I'd need it but I'll read through this topic and maybe learn something =p

edit: Nope.

 

BSOD crash minidump reports are initially written to the page file.
Windows does not save memory dump file after a crash

No page file means no crash reports, unless I read that link wrong.

 

^ There is one good reason for not disabling page file.

 

That doesn't really matter too much to me =p

 

ok... I don't play games (well tried Mafia II) and do use Photoshop CS4 and CS5 a lot - they only complain whenever the RAM is nearly over. Even then - it is not the end of the world that is coming - you are just invited to close some applications to free up some RAM and if you don't - after some time Windows does that for you closing an app you are not currently using.

Nothing to be afraid of. End this only happened with 6GB whenever I had like 10-15 or 20 edited pictures at the same time which certainly isn't the case for many.

So I strongly advise to at least try disabling the pagefile - all it takes is a restart. Enabling it again doesn't even cost that much and is instant. No reason not to give it a try

 

I haven't noticed a ton of difference between having it disabled and having it enabled. But I can't see how it would hurt it.

 

To have 8 GB plus a page file is overkill but this is just my opinion / needs.

I don't play any games so I will very rarely even use all of my 8 GB. That said, when the 8 GB is finished (if it ever happened) the system can always flush some memory so. This gives me better battery life too since the HDD is not rotating as much when I'm out and about

 

Early faux 3d games (age of empires or starcraft isometric view), and a handful of older xp programs that only work in compatibility mode in Win7 (photoshop for sure) like to drop data into the page file. XP programs in general like to drop into the page file when they're minimized.


Now to drop some knowledge:

A large portion of the system kernel generally gets dropped in the page file on load. Generally, system managed pagefile works best, since in most cases system managed means only the kernel and nothing else gets dropped into the page file unless you start to run out of physical memory. In XP, 2/3 of the ~180MB kernel sits in the pagefile, and rarely gets accessed. I forget what the kernel size for win7 is, but I recall there being talk bout the microkernel being under 50mb (not on my laptop at the moment, so I can't check). It is loaded into RAM as necessary, but otherwise stays out of your way.

Now, if you really want to futz around with the pagefile, there's a simple way to do it, and it's not as haphazard as some of you are going about it. First, enable the pagefile, and use your computer and open all the programs you would normally use on a "heavy usage" day. If you play games, open a couple. If you use photoshop, open some nice RAWs. And so on. Open your task manager/resource monitor and find out what you Peak Commit Charge is. That's the total available memory (RAM + pagefile) you've used since the system last booted. If the peak is significantly less than total your physical memory, go ahead and nearly kill it. If the peak is close, maybe you should have a system managed pagefile, even if it's small (1GBish), just in case. That's a judgment call. Now, if your peak is above the physical, find the difference between peak and total physical. This is the minimum pagefile size. For the max pagefile size, just double that minimum size for possible overflows.

The downside of turning off the page file is that if you ever run out of RAM (unlikely at or above 6GB, and for most people 3-4GB), you will either: i) feel the system crawl or shudder once in a while as it swaps data in and out of RAM off the storage device (hdd or ssd), or ii) see a program crash and get a "virtual memory low" errorbox. Vista/Win7 programs that are active typically sit in RAM within the SuperFetch system, if possible within physical memory. If the pagefile is disabled, a significant chunk of SuperFetch memory disappears as well because normally paged data will have to sit in RAM, so there's a limit to the snappiness gain that really depends on how much RAM you have.

One option to improve performance of the pagefile is to move it off your OS/program drive. Not the partition, but the physical drive. If you want to hear a harddrive act like it's in the throes of death, drop it onto a different partition on your boot volume and listen to the heads click clask back and forth from the data to the page file.

Also, as noted, you will not get a dump file if you crash (good thing I previewed the post before getting into this one).

 

Nah, I'll just disable it, simpler, never had problems, better performance any time of the day

But to each his own I guess

 

Specifically?

 

You've got enough RAM that it's rarely going to be an issue if you stick to newer programs. For machines at 2-3GB, there could be a noticeable difference.

 

@woofer00,

I am too lazy to give a detail response to your 'knowledge' thingy as this page file things have been beaten to death(see Gracy123's orginal posts) but your description of the page file mechanism is not what I know how it works.

 

I confirm that. It has already been discussed and the result was:

1. 95% of those who have disabled it (and had enough RAM to ensure that they will not run out of any which in most cases equals 6 or 8 GB) were absolutely convinced what a positive difference it makes and declared to plan to keep it this way
2. There were about 10 people who were willing and able to paste all kinds of information (partially true, but mostly inaccurate/false) to support the thesis how "bad" and "dangerous" it is to disable it, but don't have a minute of experience on a system with disabled pagefile and for some reason I can't explain - were too sissy to just experiment and see for themselves.

If those people only spent 1% of the time looking for articles and theory that advise not to disable it to actually disable it and take advantage of the results - the results would have been really conclusive

I'd be glad to look for those threads where I explain what initial problems I had and how disabling the pagefile significantly improved my performance, but don't make me write it all over again

If you are to be a "denier" - do that on your own time and costs. If you are interested to find out which one is better FOR YOU - there is only one way to find out - disable the pagefile and see whether you run into any trouble - and NO by "trouble" you definitely can't expect:

* Fire
* Over-flooding
* Environmental disasters
* AIDS
* etc.

All that can ever happen if you run low on RAM is a message asking you to close some programs in order to free up RAM.
So instead of "dropping some knowledge" - "drop some experience" and decide based on it!

 

8 GB of RAM plus 1.5 GB of video RAM, turned off a long time ago.

 

The bulk of the kernel doesn't get accessed on normal usage. From what I've seen, I think 3/4 allocated kernel space gets paged, while 1/4 is loaded to RAM. Part of the paged space is the memory dump (i think), although I cant recall off the top of my head how that was allocated.

How to determine the appropriate page file size for 64-bit versions of Windows

Read that, then tell me what differs from what I said. The vocabulary differs between XP and win7/vista, but the concept is the same for calculation purposes.

I'd disagree that it's been beaten to death, since the bulk of the evidence in this thread on the board has been anecdotal evidence of what worked for their own particular usage on their particular hardware. On the other hand, it's incredibly hard to find any actual thorough benchmarks regarding disabling of the pagefile, so it has to be anecdotal.

And here I thought I was just giving the MS info on what the pagefile does and the recommended size. If you think I was promoting or discouraging disabling the pagefile, I'd suggest reading my post again and not be so defensive about it. I posted about functionality and consequences, and was actually trying to stay away from throwing opinion into that post since it was relatively long.

If you have a 4GB+ Vista/7 system, or 2GB+ on XP, it would be rare to have an issue with disabling the pagefile, depending on your usage. If you're pushing the limits of physical memory with active apps, idle/inactive/minimized apps get moved to the paged area. Whether that push is efficient or not is a different question entirely. If your harddrive needs a good fscking or defrag, the pagefile is going to suck horribly. Whether the kernel that's paged or active is properly divided is also a really good question. IIRC, most people who have disable paging, at least within this thread and the others I read in the past on NBR, had 6GB+, maybe 4gb+ physical memory, so the chance of any issue was pretty rare. Even if there were, it wouldn't be a fatal error by any means, just a warning.

Personally, in my own experience, I've run both ways, and had to reenable only because of a single specialized pain in the butt engineering program that crashed on large datasets (MatLab). The system was overall snappier, but I couldn't reboot and toggle on/off for the sake of one program. MatLab isn't typical usage though.

 

Crap... I accidentally voted No but in fact I DO have it enabled.

 

Those who disable page file, would you care to provide the performance difference in numbers ( no anecdotal evidence)?

 

I don't see anything actively wrong with leaving a small page file in tact. It doesn't need to be all-or-nothing, like some here seem to think it should be.

I've had BSOD's in the past for not having a page file on my OS drive, and I've also had a couple of hardware related BSOD's. So, I choose to keep a 200-500MB pagefile on C:\. This keeps one of my games happy and I haven't had any issues either way.

 

Got it, ten foot poled.

 

And how would you suggest a benchmark like that works?

Anyways, lots of information in here. Thanks Woofer.

 

Toms hardware did a crappy version of a swapfile. Found this link in another pagefile thread on NBR, not quite sure who posted it. Credit to whomever found it.
64-Bit: Swap File : Memory Upgrade: Is It Time To Add More RAM?

That comparison was more of a "beat up my desktop" scenario. Wish it had done more than just throw 2GB renders into each pipe, but it does demonstrate both the performance pro and crashy con.

*edit*
found the link in this post:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/558685-4-gb-ram-still-enough-today-3.html#post7210760

Anything else I found was either too old or too qualitative and not quantitative.

 

Those do show that there are significant performance increases when you remove the swap-file if you are able to not crash (ie: 12GB of RAM.)

That second benchmark shows a performance increase of 500% when using 12GB of RAM.

 

I have an absolute minimum page file (256MB). Even though I have 12GB of RAM and I know I won't run out of memory, I run a lot of older games that may or may not need the page file. Plan on testing them out sometime soon, just don't have any time at hand at the moment.

 

When I run into a program/ game that absolutely requires it... that's when I'll reenable it =p

 

Unless we are talking about headless server, disable page file is the easiest way to find that out.

 

Understanding the Windows Pagefile and Why You Shouldn't Disable It

 

Yet another 'authoritative' title when it is just a preference. Beside, there is no evidence which links the 'shown' error dialogs that is related to page file being disabled.

For 99% of the case, disable or enable makes no noticeable difference(neither good or bad).

 

I'm surprised Superfetch hasn't come up given its rammy nature (mine is disabled).

PF is off on this laptop (4gb) and I even use a 1gb ram disk occasionally.

What older games are we talking? I haven't had issues as far as I can remember..


....To prevent thread crapping, in response, to below: YES

 

You have superfetch disabled?

 

That would only make sense if clone63 has an SSD. Otherwise, perhaps he cares more about boot time than program launch time?