Need Pagefile Advice

[Big Skelestonks]

Hey, I am wondering if it is beneficial to have 2 pagefiles, one for each of my drives, since I want to have a decently small one on my SSD (Around like 5 GB) and a larger one on my HDD (10 GB+), or that it's better to have just a small one on my SSD, or just a large one on my HDD.

The numbers are after I bumped them up, as I had my SSD pagefile at 2 GB, and my HDD one at 5 GB, but I seemed to still experience crashing in certain games. What should I do? Should I lower the current values, or have 1 in a single drive instead of 2 different ones in 2 drives?

Please, any advice on how large and if I should have only 1 pagefile would help.

[Cathulhu]

How much RAM does your PC have?
Running out of space in a pagefile shouldn't cause crashes, just FPS drops.

[Big Skelestonks]

I have 8 GB of RAM

[_I_]

set it to about half your ram, or whatever programs need if you do not have enough ram
put it on the fastest drive you have in the system (nvme > pci-e > sata/ssd > hdd)

[Daggoth]

Set the page file to "Let Windows handle it" because the RAM to Pagefile ratio voodoo is a decade or so out of date.
Do you even know if your games are crashing due to lack of pagefile - IE: is Windows logging memory exhaustion errors?

[Big Skelestonks]

Well, I was on VRchat, and it crashed which had never happened before, and I got the error VirtualAlloc Remapping Failed, and on the VRchat help page it said that it was due to having a small Windows Page File, which im guessing was Pagefile.sys.

[Set-115689]

Set it to auto and see what happens. It will likely go up to at least 8 gb for some programs or games. Leave space on your drive of course. Not sure about splitting it?

[xSOSxHawkens]

So many will argue with me. But before letting their arguments hold water just go try it. It wont hurt ya...

The less RAM you have the more pagefile will be used in a modern workload. For anything 8GB or under I *always* use 16GB of page file size. Officially, and for a *long* time, the suggested value was 1.5-2x your physical RAM (that was from MS back in the day).

With 16GB+ Ram that rule of thunmb can change, and you can use less, with 32GB+ Ram you dont need 64GB of page for example, you can get by with about 8GB (some would argue less or none, but not me).

But for 2,4, or 8GB RAM systems, a large page is a must, with it being even mroe valueable when speaking of 8GB gamers, as they often are trying to push high RAM usage situations with *just* enough ram to get by.


For your machine: SSD: 4096 max/min, HDD 12,288 max/min *OR* SSD: 8192, HDD 8192

^^THAT^^ will either put 4GB/12GB or an 8/8 split for your page.

One favors more SSD space to use at the cost of a bit less performance, one favors performance at the cost of a bit of SSD space usable. Both will work well for you, and both should keep you from hitting crashes due to lack of RAM, or running out of ram (in most cases).

[nullable]

I would just run the page file off the HDD if you don't want to it be using SSD space. And my thinking is that while SSDs are faster than HDDs, they're still much slower compared to RAM. And any time you're having to use the pagefile to make up for too little RAM you're going to have an abysmal experience regardless of if it's an SSD or HDD.

That being said I don't think splitting the pagefile up between the SSD and HDD will have any performance consequences. It's probably not going to have much in the way of performance benefits either though. Nearly any configuration will work just fine.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Brockenstein:

I would just run the page file off the HDD if you don't want to it be using SSD space. And my thinking is that while SSDs are faster than HDDs, they're still much slower compared to RAM. And any time you're having to use the pagefile to make up for too little RAM you're going to have an abysmal experience regardless of if it's an SSD or HDD.

That being said I don't think splitting the pagefile up between the SSD and HDD will have any performance consequences. It's probably not going to have much in the way of performance benefits either though. Nearly any configuration will work just fine.

You are right on the pagefile vs RAM, kinda. The page will be exceptionally slower in raw throughput, yes, but by the time something dumps to page the performance impact of the speed has already been taken and experianced by the user.

The bigger impact when bumping to page is responce time. That is where A) having an SSD page, and B) having split pages, will help.

The SSD page portion will have SSD lattency to I/O requests, which is far better than HDD obviously.

Splitting the pages can also help, as windows will page to whichever drive is not in use from said program. This can be felt very quickly if you run a dual HDD no SSD. Single page on boost HDD = slow AF. Single page on secondary drive = Nice, unless the second drive is in use, Split apge on both drives = Better performance in most cases unless the data needed is paged to the drive in use already.

Windows *tries* to priotitize page to specific drives when it can. Cant awlays make it work, but it does its best I suppose.

[nullable]

I'm not discounting that, on a technical level. I've run page files myself in several configurations and I'd be hard pressed to tell you which configuration was being used in a blind test. And so my thinking from that is the performance consequences users will experience are going to be extremely small in either direction.

Certainly there are scenarios you could run to magnify the effects to highlight the benefits. I'm not going to argue against any specific configuration, I don't have a preference because like I said any configuration ought to work well enough for most users.

But perhaps only running SSDs for the last couple of years makes the idea of trying to manage the pagefile for performance seem even more insignificant. In the past I just threw the page file on the HDD that wasn't running the OS and that usually worked well enough. It was usually going to have lower usage most of the time anyway.

[Big Skelestonks]

Opprinnelig skrevet av xSOSxHawkens:

Opprinnelig skrevet av Brockenstein:

I would just run the page file off the HDD if you don't want to it be using SSD space. And my thinking is that while SSDs are faster than HDDs, they're still much slower compared to RAM. And any time you're having to use the pagefile to make up for too little RAM you're going to have an abysmal experience regardless of if it's an SSD or HDD.

That being said I don't think splitting the pagefile up between the SSD and HDD will have any performance consequences. It's probably not going to have much in the way of performance benefits either though. Nearly any configuration will work just fine.

You are right on the pagefile vs RAM, kinda. The page will be exceptionally slower in raw throughput, yes, but by the time something dumps to page the performance impact of the speed has already been taken and experianced by the user.

The bigger impact when bumping to page is responce time. That is where A) having an SSD page, and B) having split pages, will help.

The SSD page portion will have SSD lattency to I/O requests, which is far better than HDD obviously.

Splitting the pages can also help, as windows will page to whichever drive is not in use from said program. This can be felt very quickly if you run a dual HDD no SSD. Single page on boost HDD = slow AF. Single page on secondary drive = Nice, unless the second drive is in use, Split apge on both drives = Better performance in most cases unless the data needed is paged to the drive in use already.

Windows *tries* to priotitize page to specific drives when it can. Cant awlays make it work, but it does its best I suppose.

>Reply to the last 2 paragraphs

Ah! So this may be a reason why VRchat crashed, as the Pagefile on my SSD was way smaller than the one on my HDD, and VRchat was installed on my HDD so it would have used the pagefile on my SSD which was originally 1/4th of my actual RAM size (Only around 2 GB). Alright, I may lower the pagefile on my HDD as its pretty large yet the really only main programs on my SSD is the OS, or H3VR (Those programs which would use the HDD Pagefile)

[_I_]

if you have a ssd, neve put it on a spinning drive

[xSOSxHawkens]

Opprinnelig skrevet av _I_:

if you have a ssd, neve put it on a spinning drive

meh, depends on the space of the SSD.

Say a system with only a 120gb ssd, and 8GB ram, wanting a 16GB page... Thats a case where unless I was running into a specific reason to page all to SSD I would keep the SSD page to 4GB or less and dump 3/4 of the page to the HDD.

But, like the OP issue, if thats a problem no reason you cant just page half and half, or all to the SSD, assuming space is not an issue.

And yes, ideally, *all* on the SSD. But to a 100-120GB or less SSD eating a chunk of 16GB to page can hurt...

[Big Skelestonks]

I have a 120 GB SSD, but only have the minimum amount of files on it, and a bit more, so I have a good 32 GB free. I wouldn't mind putting 8 GB on it, but any more and i'd rather not. I paged 16 to 32 GB on my HDD just as an incase as I have plenty of space on it. Right now after putting the Pagefile, my SSD only has 25 GB or so left, so adding another 8 GB to the pagefile would be a no go for me.

[_I_]

set it to a static size so it never changes and you will not need to worry about it taking up more space

if the ssd does not have alot of room, get another one, they are cheap now
1tb for $100
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#t=0&i=25,24&f=3&A=900000000000,16000000000000&sort=price&page=1

500g for $40-50
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#t=0&i=25,24&f=3&A=450000000000,16000000000000&sort=price&page=1