Cities Skylines Doesn't Use Full Pagefile

[dascronch1]

So I have a Lenovo Legion Y520 and I have a pagefile of 32 GB 4x my actual ram. In loading screen, the loading screen mod shows that C:S uses the rest of my physical ram but it only uses 12 GB of pagefile ram, or 1/3 even though i still have 30 gb of pagefile available to use in system information. How do I get C:S to use all of the pagefile?

[gameblogger]

Why do you want it to use the whole pagefile?

[CO_Avanya]

That's completely expected and how things should be. RAM is much faster than using the pagefile and needed for certain things. The pagefile is "makeshift RAM" and used to "park" some things that are lower priority. The ideal situation is to have enough RAM to not really need the pagefile.

[dascronch1]

Oh. OK then, I'll just make do with what I have. TY

[db48x]

You could subscribe to 20GB of additional assets. Then CS would use 20GB more ram, and it would all end up in the page file. But the game would also be slower, as it would need to retrieve data from the page file more often.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

You do not want a full pagefile as you will be on the verge of an Out Of Memory error, not to mention the pagefile is slower than RAM. Having plenty to spare is good.

[MaxFX]

Originally posted by CO_Avanya:

That's completely expected and how things should be. RAM is much faster than using the pagefile and needed for certain things. The pagefile is "makeshift RAM" and used to "park" some things that are lower priority. The ideal situation is to have enough RAM to not really need the pagefile.

I've recently upgraded my RAM to 64GB's. When playing I use about 21GB of RAM, but the page file is still being used for about 12GB's. Any chance to change that, so everything goes trough my RAM instead of partially?

[db48x]

The game does not decide to put things into virtual memory (aka “the pagefile”); this is done transparently by the operating system. The operating system may have put other programs into virtual memory to make room for the game, or it might have put things into virtual memory before you even started the game. Just knowing the total usage doesn’t really tell you very much.

[MessengerOfRage]

Originally posted by MaxFX:

Originally posted by CO_Avanya:

That's completely expected and how things should be. RAM is much faster than using the pagefile and needed for certain things. The pagefile is "makeshift RAM" and used to "park" some things that are lower priority. The ideal situation is to have enough RAM to not really need the pagefile.

I've recently upgraded my RAM to 64GB's. When playing I use about 21GB of RAM, but the page file is still being used for about 12GB's. Any chance to change that, so everything goes trough my RAM instead of partially?

deactivate or set your pagefile to min and max =0

[TobbySkylines]

There is a good guide to the topic:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2114415052&searchtext=pagefile

[Kalil]

Game clearly has some problem requiring pagefile capacity it never uses once you add even simple mods.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Originally posted by Kalil:

Game clearly has some problem requiring pagefile capacity it never uses once you add even simple mods.

Windows has a tendency to dump stuff to pagefile when there is more than enough RAM available, memory management is OS level.

[Mytwo Centsworth]

Pagefile typically is on a hard disk drive. Having a solid-state hard drive is supposed to provide faster read and write times in general. So here's my question: Would having a solid-state drive bring pagefile speed up to something closer to actual RAM?

[MaxFX]

@Mytwo Centsworth: I had CS installed on my HDD till recently. Uninstalled, and then reinstalled on my SSD drive. That really improved the loading speed of the game.

As for the page file: It's best to have the page file on the same drive as your operating system (Windows). Don't know about loading speed differences though.

[gameblogger]

Originally posted by Mytwo Centsworth:

Pagefile typically is on a hard disk drive. Having a solid-state hard drive is supposed to provide faster read and write times in general. So here's my question: Would having a solid-state drive bring pagefile speed up to something closer to actual RAM?

It can be a lot quicker but still not as fast as RAM.

[db48x]

It takes around 1-10 nanoseconds (one billionth of a second) to access data stored in the CPU cache, about 100 nanoseconds to access data stored in main memory, around 10,000 nanoseconds (10 microseconds) to access data stored on a really good NVME SSD, on a decent SATA SSD it will take around a one hundred thousand nanoseconds (one tenth of a millisecond), and on a hard drive it will take around ten million nanoseconds (10 whole entire milliseconds).

So you can see that while going from a hard drive to an SSD is very nice 100× improvement, that SSD is still 1,000× slower than main memory. There is a lot that your computer can do to hide this latency (out–of–order execution, multiple threads, multiple cores), but virtual memory is _slow_. You want to avoid it at all costs.

I personally have used a very, very good NVME SSD (an Intel Optane 900P) with access times going as low as 3,000–6,000 nanoseconds as a swap device. It was amazing. I had a workload that required several hundred gigabytes of ram, but my machine only had 64GB, so it was dog slow. Worse, it needed to access the swap so frequently that it starved out all other programs on the machine; I couldn’t even move the mouse cursor until the program finished (seriously). After getting the Optane drive it was like night and day. My machine was perfectly usable, even though it was swapping several gigabytes of memory in and out every second. My program would still have been faster if I had 256GB of ram, but it didn’t take all day to run any more.

On the other hand, the Optane drive cost nearly as much as 256GB of ram plus a new motherboard and cpu to go with it. And it’s overkill for Cities: Skylines, which merely needs 10 or 20 GB of ram at a time.