What should I set my paging file size to be?

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leh18621

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Specs in sig. I recently upgraded my pc and one of the upgrades was 16gb of RAM. Keep in mind this is mostly a gaming pc (mostly). I usually let my paging file be managed by Windows, but with 16gb of RAM and only running a 128gb SSD I am thinking of manually setting the Paging file.

I was thinking a min of 500mb and a max of 4gb, 6gb, 8gb????

Your input would be greatly appreciated.
 
SSDs are perfect for paging (low latency/seek times). IMO the best compromise on an SSD/HDD setup is a small one on your SSD (I think I used 2GB) and a windows-managed one on a secondary HDD.
 
You want about 400mb on the windows drive. This is for compatibility reasons with certain applications that expect it to be on the root drive.

If you have a secondary drive you can expand your paging file to that if needed.
 
Shadohh said:
You want about 400mb on the windows drive. This is for compatibility reasons with certain applications that expect it to be on the root drive.

If you have a secondary drive you can expand your paging file to that if needed.
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I only have the SSD. So I will go with 500mb for the min, but what about the max?
 
Set 500gb min and max with 16gb ram you will almost never use it. For me I just disabled the swap file entirely and never looked back. There a few programs that do need a swap file but the only one I can think of off the top of my head is photoshop and only while editing larg files
 
System Managed Size.

These threads are funny due to all the people who end up recommending simply disabling the page-file, etc. Gives me flashbacks to the Windows95 era.
 
0 if dont intend to use more than 16GB of ram, is useless, 0 compatibility issues on 7 and 8. xp needs a minimum of 2mb (two megs) to work properly.
 
Since disk space is an issue, dont disable it, make it 2GB min/max fixed size, 4GB min/max if you do heavy gaming.
 
OldMX said:
Since disk space is an issue, dont disable it, make it 2GB min/max fixed size, 4GB min/max if you do heavy gaming.
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for gaming it'll have the same use of an empty 4GB .rar file stuffed on the drive.. but yeah if you feel like it..
 
512MB min and 16GB max. This will take up the least space while leaving you with all the leeway you may need just in case.
 
rive22 said:
512MB min and 16GB max. This will take up the least space while leaving you with all the leeway you may need just in case.
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just in case when? just in case never if he dont use photoshop or CAD applications.. it'll be just that big dumb useless dump on the drive, and worse, because its there windows will use it and its like what? 1000x slower than RAM? thats smart... ooh, i get it, "windows default" eh? cool bro.
 
System managed size. The only reason you may want to play with the swap file is if you are running some type of massive database that need to be access all the time. Other than that, if you are running 16GB of memory, the only time you should ever need a swap file is for Photoshop or a typoe of legacy app that needs Windows XP or below. Most stuff that is 64 bit and came out over the last few year...rarely, if ever uses a swap file on the main OS (Windows 7/8)
 
If you really MUST set a swap file size, set the swap file to the amount of ram that you have on your system. 16GB of physical memory = 16GB SWAP file.
 
The Cobra said:
If you really MUST set a swap file size, set the swap file to the amount of ram that you have on your system. 16GB of physical memory = 16GB SWAP file.
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yeah sure.. you can actually put more if you feel like it..
 
D4rkn3ss said:
just in case when? just in case never if he dont use photoshop or CAD applications.. it'll be just that big dumb useless dump on the drive, and worse, because its there windows will use it and its like what? 1000x slower than RAM? thats smart... ooh, i get it, "windows default" eh? cool bro.
Click to expand...

lol... I used to be one of those guys that always disabled the page file. For a long time I thought it was the best thing. And back in the day sure, it was definitely useful with slow systems and HDDs. Nowadays if you are a heavy worker it only always caused more problems. In some scenarios it can be better to leave it off, but for a multipurpose desktop rig, it's better to just leave it at default. Because YES, just in case, you don't know what he does with his rig or ever plans to do down the road.

Go do something useful with yourself and take the attitude elsewhere, or I will rip you a new one.
 
rive22 said:
Go do something useful with yourself and take the attitude elsewhere, or I will rip you a new one.
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pff lol, yeah right, another one of those internet warriors, whatever bro, leave everything default for all i care, im gonna take a shower, shave my beard and go out for a drink, thats good enough for you? sure it is, lol.
 
GotNoRice said:
System Managed Size.These threads are funny due to all the people who end up recommending simply disabling the page-file, etc. Gives me flashbacks to the Windows95 era.
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But wont that make it dynamic and have it keep changing, constantly using up the limited lifetime read/write cycles of the ssd?
 
nightfly said:
But wont that make it dynamic and have it keep changing, constantly using up the limited lifetime read/write cycles of the ssd?
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In the event that it actually gets used, yes. Will that happen with 16GB of RAM? Probably not.

Don't worry about it. It isn't even worth thinking about changing the default setting, let alone changing it.
 
If you want your system able to do page dumps the minimum size you can make it is 800MB, generally I set it initially to 800MB min/max then reboot to force the size down, then after set it to 800MB min/recomdended size max (for 16GB RAM recomended max is 24GB). Apparently during the last few months at some point I had enough open that it felt the need to increase it from 800MB to a little over 5GB (it seems leaving lots of web pages open for weeks on end, some of which being video sites, can cause considerable RAM usage).

If you're putting the page file on a SSD definitely do NOT leave it on default, esp if you have tons of RAM, the default page file for 16GB RAM is almost 16GB of page file and that's a bit unecessary. You can't really go wrong with the 800/800 to force it down to a minimum size then 800/rec max "just in case".
 
The default page size for a system with 16GB of RAM is 16GB? I find that doubtful. On my 8GB machine, the current size is 1648MB.
 
Since I have 16GBs of ram, and have never seen the system go over about 3GBs used, I leave mine disabled. The ram only cost $85, so I don't consider it a waste. Some apps may require a page file, but I don't use any that do. Considering the cheapness of ram, I think it's becoming typical for many people to have much more ram than they need, so they'd probably be better off disabling it. It may seem that if you don't fill up your ram, the OS won't page anything, in which case it's just a safety net, but in my testing I've seen pagefile use and associated slow downs when the memory was no where near full in win 7, don't know about win 8 because I switched to SSD and had it disabled at all times in win 8 (and MS did some fairly major memory system changes in win 8 that may affect this.) My opinion is also that if you leave a ton of things open like one guy said with web pages for weeks with videos, I'd rather just get an out of memory warning/error and close things than end up using the hdd as ram. Back when typical system ram was 128MBs, paging may have made more sense, at this point with the cheapness of ram, I think it's just better to get more ram in most cases.
 
Here we go again with the disabling the page file advice.

Anyone here even taken a basic programming class? RAM is used for more than just active usage, it's also needed for memory allocation and a lot more.

Microsoft themselves and pretty much every pro I.T. publication says to leave it alone as-is. Microsoft knows how to write operating systems, and they know how to optimize performance.

There's no pro to disabling it besides saving the space. Cons include some possible/rare reduced performance, possible crashes from apps that expect it or need it, and probably a couple more things I'm forgetting.

The *only* reason to restrict the size is if you are in need of the space on a laptop or the like (or here where you have a desktop with only the SSD...weird..one of the best parts about still having a desktop is having a bunch of drive bays).
 
You can believe what you like, of course, but I have seen performance hits from simply running with a page file, verified by running resource monitor and nothing that the page file was being read/written when I hadn't come close to filling up memory. If that happens, and you can probably verify it yourself, well you probably get more free ram that you don't need (if you have enough memory), but background reads/writes increase latency and you generally don't want that. It's up to you, but I prefer to have the ram be used since it's there, than have the system lag up. Have you done testing with and without the page file? It does make things a little more laggy. I've yet to see anything crash, or a performance decrease from not running it. If it did that, I would almost certainly enable it, it's not like I get money from not running the page file. I think MS and most IT say leave it alone, so people with 512MBs of ram, who don't know what they're doing, don't disable it. As a few users with some unnecessary lag are better than a lot of users with out of memory errors, or else they just repeat what others say who think this.
 
devil22 said:
You can believe what you like, of course, but I have seen performance hits from simply running with a page file, verified by running resource monitor and nothing that the page file was being read/written when I hadn't come close to filling up memory. If that happens, and you can probably verify it yourself, well you probably get more free ram that you don't need (if you have enough memory), but background reads/writes increase latency and you generally don't want that. It's up to you, but I prefer to have the ram be used since it's there, than have the system lag up. Have you done testing with and without the page file? It does make things a little more laggy. I've yet to see anything crash, or a performance decrease from not running it. If it did that, I would almost certainly enable it, it's not like I get money from not running the page file. I think MS and most IT say leave it alone, so people with 512MBs of ram, who don't know what they're doing, don't disable it. As a few users with some unnecessary lag are better than a lot of users with out of memory errors, or else they just repeat what others say who think this.
Click to expand...

It's like saying "disable the L3 cache on your CPU, it's the slowest cache".

A pagefile is an available resource, and it's managed smartly by the O.S.

Last I knew, benchmarking and testing have been unable to prove any benefit in removing the pagefile. MS and I.T. pros recommend against it.

I can't lecture on MS system architecture, (I spent my years as an OpenVMS sysadmin, not a Windows one), but all the professionals say to run the leave it enabled, including MS themselves, and none of the naysayers have been able to conclusively benchmark or prove a positive benefit for performance.

It's got all possible negatives, with no positive except saving a little HDD/SDD space. That's the only scenario that it makes sense to disable it.
 
GreenMonkey said:
It's like saying "disable the L3 cache on your CPU, it's the slowest cache".
Click to expand...

Well, if you want that analogy, it's like disabling your L3 cache, because your entire work set fits in your L2, and the system uses the L3 for no reason.


A pagefile is an available resource, and it's managed smartly by the O.S.

Last I knew, benchmarking and testing have been unable to prove any benefit in removing the pagefile. MS and I.T. pros recommend against it.

I can't lecture on MS system architecture, (I spent my years as an OpenVMS sysadmin, not a Windows one), but all the professionals say to run the leave it enabled, including MS themselves, and none of the naysayers have been able to conclusively benchmark or prove a positive benefit for performance.

It's got all possible negatives, with no positive except saving a little HDD/SDD space. That's the only scenario that it makes sense to disable it.
Click to expand...

It's not easy to prove, as its' page file accesses are not deterministic. It will randomly read and write from the page file for no reason, but there is at least one easy way, just run a latency benchmark after using your system for a while, after you see the system hitting the page file in resource monitor. I guess you're expecting some kind of constant decreased FPS in a game or 3d app, but like I said it was totally random in my experience, and any unnecessary read/write to an HDD is going to lag things a bit. I mean it's not easy to nail this down, but it's also not impossible, and then the effect is slight so maybe most people couldn't care less any way. Just from pure logic, if your page file has anything in it and you have not filled up most of your memory, the system has been slowed down at least a little bit for no reason. Like I said, the page file was good idea when systems had less than 2GBs, or for users who fill up their ram with data that needs to be operated on (not background web videos, for example), but if you are not filling up your ram, you're just hitting up the hdd and causing latency for no reason.
 
devil22 said:
You can believe what you like, of course, but I have seen performance hits from simply running with a page file, verified by running resource monitor and nothing that the page file was being read/written when I hadn't come close to filling up memory.
Click to expand...
The OS can perform I/O asynchronously. Just because the page is being written to doesn't mean performance is being negatively impacted.

I find your claim that page writes are non-deterministic to be incredibly dubious as well. There may be no reliable method to predict its behavior due to limited access to the internals of its operation, but that does not make it non-deterministic.
 
wonderfield said:
The OS can perform I/O asynchronously. Just because the page is being written to doesn't mean performance is being negatively impacted.
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It will still lag the system, and slow down access to that HDD. page file accesses are at 'critical' I/o priority, above even 'high' priority. And I have seen it lag the system while using DPC Latency Checker and Latency Monitor. It's very slight though, and you probably wouldn't notice it in normal use, though I have in the past seen it grind my system to halt just to do unnecessary reads/writes from the page file in Win 7 when my memory was not near full, which is why I disabled it in the first place. But I have a different work set, I think win 7's memory system just really does not handle large files well (I had a bunch that I worked on.)


I find your claim that page writes are non-deterministic to be incredibly dubious as well. There may be no reliable method to predict its behavior due to limited access to the internals of its operation, but that does not make it non-deterministic.
Click to expand...

It's non-deterministic as far as my ability to predict it is concerned. I thought that was obvious, I mean of course it's code and can thus be predicted with unrealistic (for me) resources.
 
GreenMonkey said:
Microsoft knows how to write operating systems, and they know how to optimize performance.
Click to expand...
See, it's this 'Microsoft knows best' concept that simply doesn't wash, and whenever I read something to that effect, all it makes me think is that you've been drinking the Microsoft Kool aid. What Microsoft knows best how to do, is make their operating system slowly deteriorate until you think you need a new computer, so they get to sell you another copy of their software. I'd say that 99% of computers sold with windows aren't set to optimize performance; they're set to make all the bells and whistles ring to get the best OOBE for someone who just purchased the computer. Then when the thing starts to get sluggish, it's up to me and the thousands of other guys who are their friends and relatives computer reference person to get the thing working right again. And of course, Microsoft and the vendors do everything they can to avoid us doing that, starting with the deletion of supplying the OS installation disks, so we can't easily reformat and install the operating system and programs without all the junk that microsoft tells us is so essential.
So forgive me for not believing that Microsoft has the customer's best interests at heart; they don't. That's been demonstrated over and over again, all you have to do is examine their marketing behavior. Could they write a great OS from scratch that runs fast on much less memory and slower processors? Sure they could. But they won't. The invention of the registry, making it virtually impossible for the average user to figure out how to make simple changes like stopping programs from running at startup is a simple example. All kinds of junk installs itself that way, and microsoft makes it even more difficult, by allowing the program to hide itself from the user so they don't know what's happening.
 
I've always just left it alone until I built my new machine with 12GB of ram (was 16 till one stick died prematurely). There's no reason for a page file when you have that much ram unless you actually find yourself using a big chunk of it and could go higher. Especially with a SSD where you want to reduce processes that do lot of unneeded I/O.
 
Microsoft said:
Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
Click to expand...

Support and Q&A for Solid State Drives

This was Microsoft's stance on pagefiles and SSDs in 2009, in preparation for Windows 7. SSDs are considerably more mature in durability now, so is there any reason to change this stance?
 
Short answer:

With 16GB and your intended usage it doesn't matter what you set the Page file to.


Long answer:

Back in the good old days when memory was expensive, we had "swap files" that would move an entire processes out of physical memory and into virtual memory to make room for new processes. I recall making entire partitions for swap files back in those days... it really sucked.. a lot. It was slow, but memory was expensive, so we lived with it.

Later the memory management process was refined and instead of swap files that moved memory in huge chunks, we got "page files" that would break a processes contiguous block into "frames" or "pages" of memory. Pages of a running process could be in physical memory or virtual memory or both... less often used pages got moved to virtual memory. Cool thing was the process could still be running while it existed in both physical and virtual memory. Unlike a swap file where the process had to be completely idle before it went to the swap file.

But these days, on a modern system. There isn't a whole lot of need for virtual memory. Most systems these days have plenty of physical memory.

Just set a 1GB of virtual memory to avoid any incompatibility issues with a select few programs and don't give it any more thought. With 16GB and your intended usage the page file/virtual memory is a non issue.
 
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