Please dont mess with your systems PageFile

[A Regular Italian Plumber]

Ive seen countless posts by computer illiterate people telling others to mess with their systems PageFile.

This is INCREDIBLY bad advice and you should never touch your PageFile unless you intend on placing it on a different HDD so it does not affect OS/Program/Game HDD access on your main/storage HDD.

Now Ill try to explain what pagefile is and why messing with it or [as some have suggested] removing it, is a horrible idea.

What pagefile is, is a sort of virtual RAM file placed on the HDD your computer uses for several different purposes. A few being...

Saving OS specific values that do not need to be read or written quickly. No need to use up RAM space for something that doesnt need RAM speeds. This frees up RAM for more speed intensive purposes like programs or games.

Saving values that do not need to or cannot be rewritten over and over and over. RAM is whats known as "volatile" memory, meaning it needs to be powered and constantly refreshed to hold information. (this will generally be where your errors from removing a pagefile come from)

Giving your system some "Virtual RAM" for when you run out of actual physical DRAM [RAM]. This is the one most people know about but they also tend to think this is it's only use. This is why you get people saying crap like "As long as you have [X amount] of RAM you dont need a pagefile!"


Now that ive explained what a PageFile is and gave a quick overview of what it does Ill explain why you shouldn't touch the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing.

You have four options when you go into the PageFile edit window.

You can allow windows to completely manage the pagefile with a checkbox on the top, this will allow your OS to tell the pagefile which drive to go to an what size it will be (this is fine for 99% of users).

You can set a custom size. This is 100% useless, the only thing you will get from checking this box and increasing the default size is less HDD space to store things. Windows is not so stupid that it will by default make the pagefile too small and increasing its size has ZERO benefit to any and all users.

You can allow windows to manage the size while you pick the drive. This is useful if have one drive with everything on it and a storage or empty drive just sitting in the PC. What this will do is make the pagefile's read and write requests take place on a different drive and slightly speed the drive up in times of heavy use. This is the best option by far if you have two or more drives. Your HDD is like any other component and has a usage limit, the pagefile uses a small % of this, so moving that load to a HDD that isint being used can be beneficial.

The third option is disabling the PageFile. This is something nobody under any circumstance should ever do. It will dump the pagefiles workload onto your ram. Now information that doesnt need to be accessed quickly and stuff that simply becomes unstable when rewritten over and over is being rewritten a few thousand times per second on your DRAM. This can cause OS instability, crashes, or even BSODs.
Just dont ever use this for any reason, anybody who tells you to do this knows NOTHING about the windows PageFile system.



I hope this clears a few things up tho im sure it wont stop the flood of people telling others to mess around with crucial windows settings for no tangible benefit.

[A Regular Italian Plumber]

Bump for visibility. Too many people messing with settings they dont understand that will end up messing their PCs up.

[R3sistance]

In summary, don't mess around with system settings if you don't understand them, doing so can cause stability issues or even complete system failure. Pagefile/Virtual Memory is one of those settings that can result in both stability issues and complete system failure.

You went way over detail for most people, as most people aren't techies then they won't care to read all that information (AKA TL;DR). These days, most OSs aren't as dependent on virtual memory as they use to but as you said, still not a great idea to disable it because some processes may still refer directly to virtual memory rather than RAM and of course it risks OOMing.

[Morbid Gamer]

Page file free for over 3 years. No problems.

[Erebus]

Originally posted by Morbid Gamer:

Page file free for over 3 years. No problems.

+1

Only enable it when I specifically need log files for troubleshooting something.

[R3sistance]

Originally posted by Morbid Gamer:

Page file free for over 3 years. No problems.

Great... and that has done what for your system... it really supplies no real worthwhile benefits.

[A Regular Italian Plumber]

Originally posted by R3sistance:

Originally posted by Morbid Gamer:

Page file free for over 3 years. No problems.

Great... and that has done what for your system... it really supplies no real worthwhile benefits.

Let em run an unstable computer. Anybody with a computer period who claims to never have issues is flat out lying. In this case we just know what the cause probably is for their random freezes and lockups.

I swear the level of computer illiteracy in PC gamers is stunning.

[Morbid Gamer]

Originally posted by R3sistance:

Great... and that has done what for your system... it really supplies no real worthwhile benefits.

For one it prolongs the life of SSD's and 2, RAM has much faster read/wright and access times then even PCIE SSD's.

A game like GTA that streams from your storage device... It helps to take the load away from it and put it on RAM.

[darkenergymatter]

Well, the OP's info is only relevant for PC noobs and really does not apply for experienced PC enthusiast who's been building and tweaking their PC's performance since the XT days.

Furthermore, some page file info are outdated.

Page file configuration are not that critical in home PC but more for enterprise stability where you need to enable the page file for crash dump analysis in case of an OS crash.

I have personally disabled my page file for 'performance reasons' for years as I have more than sufficient RAM and has been trouble free...

[A Regular Italian Plumber]

Originally posted by Morbid Gamer:

Originally posted by R3sistance:

Great... and that has done what for your system... it really supplies no real worthwhile benefits.

For one it prolongs the life of SSD's and 2, RAM has much faster read/wright and access times then even PCIE SSD's.

A game like GTA that streams from your storage device... It helps to take the load away from it and put it on RAM.

Translation: I dont understand how hardware or software works.

Textures are not loaded from the pagefile... They are loaded directly from the game folder on the HDD/SDD. Any benefit you think you are getting is purely in your own head.

The placebo effect is a hell of a thing.

[A Regular Italian Plumber]

I forgot how powerful a force ignorance is. I stated the facts and explained why messing with the pagefile is a bad idea.

If after reading this you still want to mess with your systems stability, be my guest and mess with or disable your pagefile. Im done trying to point out the lies and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

[Morbid Gamer]

Originally posted by Day Eahta PuPu:

Translation: I dont understand how hardware or software works.

Textures are not loaded from the pagefile... They are loaded directly from the game folder on the HDD/SDD. Any benefit you think you are getting is purely in your own head.

The placebo effect is a hell of a thing.

Well, as we here can see your a total noob on this. I installed games on RAM DISK... I know you don't even know what that is... But you should look it up.

Textures are streamed from storage to RAM/VRAM. This game is 65 GB and there is no way your going to store 65 GB in a page file or 8 or even 16 GB of RAM.

But hey, noobs believe what they wanna believe. Like I said, 3+ years... No page file and I have had zero issues.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Originally posted by Day Eahta PuPu:

You can set a custom size. This is 100% useless, the only thing you will get from checking this box and increasing the default size is less HDD space to store things. Windows is not so stupid that it will by default make the pagefile too small and increasing its size has ZERO benefit to any and all users.

While I commend you on having a well writen and *mostly* factual post, this part deserves to be brought out as false (some times).

Windows auto-managing of the page file is a great option for many, especialy all of the non-gamer PC users. But windows will NOT manage the PageFile correctly for a system with greater than around 4GB, as it makes the PageFile too small by default.

For gamers, and those that are heavy on their ram usage, the officialy Microsoft Recomendation for PageFile size has always been a 1:1 ratio with ram. However, though that is the official written advice from MS, it is NOT how the system will auto-alocate. For 4GB and above users it will generaly only make a PageFile fo about half the amount of ram.

This can have very REAL performance impacts on Gamers, especialy those in the sub-8GB ram range.

Take me for example, I have 6GB ram (2x2, 2x1). My system had an auto-managed page file of 4GB for about a year after installing the OS. One weekend I downloaded the free weekebd of CoD - Advanced Warfare, which is an INSANE memory hog (far more than any GTA).

With the game on minimum settings @ 720P it used 4.8GB of ram, and litteraly forced windows to push all my OS data into the Pagefile. When I tried to load into any matches though, it would crash to desktop without an error listed.

I manualy upped my Page File by 2GB to bring it to a 1:1 of 6GB ram and 6GB page file, now when I ran the game the pagefile was filled up even more, and the game used about 5.4gb of ram and loaded the missions.

The Auto-Managed Page file was not enough to dump the memory, and the game needed more. Only by manualy controlling the PageFile and setting it to the recomended MS value of 1:1 was I able to attain stability in my game.

Just like in the example above, there are MANY times when increasing your pagefile over the default is better than not, especialy when dealing with data intesive apps.

[Erebus]

One huge added bonus of no page file is it is also easier to ascertain when there is a memory leak. Plus who the ♥♥♥♥ wants their performance going out the window due to a technique that more or less only exists in the first place due to ram limitations of the past.

[Wampum Biskit]

Originally posted by Morbid Gamer:

Page file free for over 3 years. No problems.

same here , on 3 different systems , with all over 32gigs of ram , never had an issue or system instability because of the no pagefile..

[R3sistance]

Originally posted by xSOSxHawkens:

...

Windows not updating it's settings to reflect hardware changes is one of the times where manually changing the pagefile/virtual memory settings is correct. Mostly when increasing the amount of RAM your system has.

Originally posted by Erebus:

One huge added bonus of no page file is it is also easier to ascertain when there is a memory leak. Plus who the ♥♥♥♥ wants their performance going out the window due to a technique that more or less only exists in the first place due to ram limitations of the past.

Of course for the added benefit of not having to use perfmon to detect that memory leak... you are more vulnerable to an OOM from said memory leak, just saying. Virtual Memory doesn't lead to decreased performance if it isn't doing anything, it only leads to decreased performance if you are heavily paging which only occurs because you are low on free memory and would OOM else wise anyways... with modern RAM. To avoid this problem you just tossed lots of RAM at the machine in the hope you never use it all.