Confused about page file???

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DudeItsMe

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
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Well I read up on the sticky about the page file, did some gaming (Quake 4 and NFS:MW), and went ahead to check my status...

And now I'm just confused.

From my understanding, my peak value of 1,117,536 puts me at a little over 1.1 GB of memory used. Seeing how I have 2 GB of RAM, this should mean I'm using no virtual memory, right?

Well, my Page File Usage is showing that I'm using quite a bit. In fact it shows that I'm using the exact same amount as my commit charge (amount of RAM being used). But if I'm not using full RAM, I shouldn't be using page file, right?

My guess is that either 1) I'm totally misunderstanding this and I'm not actually using the displayed amount of the page file (it's displaying RAM usage, not Page File?), or 2) Everything in my RAM is being copied to the page file?

Just want to make sure everything is running as smoothly as possible, so if there's anything wrong with what I've described, please let me know.

And screenshots FTW!

http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=get&tp=379422&poll_id=0&warned=y
 
well, windows is really bad with page file usage, most of the time it uses more then it needs to.
 
Windows isn't smart enough to know that everything in the page file can fit in ram. I honestly don't know why, but I suspect it's down to either 1) inefficient coding or 2) coding that's left over from days long ago when people had at most 64mb ram and the operating system as a result just stuffs a lot of junk into the page file and stores only the most accessed stuff in ram
 
Well what I was kinda getting at is that the size of the page file and the Commit Charge (supposedly memory being used) were exactly the same. Why?
 
The commit charge limit is the total of your page file and system ram combined. The peak shows your maximum ram usage. The total is the amount you are currently using. The whole problem arises from the fact that windows sees them as one and the same. But we all know that after 2 gigs its using the page file. Another thing you should know is that paging and swapping are not the same thing, although you will see them referred to interchageably everywhere you look .You can stop windows from paging, but not from swapping. Its impossible to make windows use ram efficiently in my opinion.
 
if you want to know pagefile usage, you need to go to control panel, administrative tools, open 'performance'
click the "+" icon over the grap, goto "paging file" in the performance object list select %Usage and click add.


Paging vs. Swapping is not a debate that has right answer, both have their merits in different circumstances. Windows NT uses paging, and there's not much you can do to change that.
 
FreiDOg said:
if you want to know pagefile usage, you need to go to control panel, administrative tools, open 'performance'
click the "+" icon over the grap, goto "paging file" in the performance object list select %Usage and click add.


Paging vs. Swapping is not a debate that has right answer, both have their merits in different circumstances. Windows NT uses paging, and there's not much you can do to change that.
Click to expand...
I did that, and it showed average of 5.2, max of 5.3. I'll take that to mean 5.3 MB.

Basically I wanted to know if my system was or was not paging when it shouldn't be. The Task Manager doesn't really show that. But I think I got it now, it's using very little of the page file, since I have excess RAM. In other words, performance can't be increased any.
 
DudeItsMe said:
I did that, and it showed average of 5.2, max of 5.3. I'll take that to mean 5.3 MB.

Basically I wanted to know if my system was or was not paging when it shouldn't be. The Task Manager doesn't really show that. But I think I got it now, it's using very little of the page file, since I have excess RAM. In other words, performance can't be increased any.
Click to expand...

that's 5.2 percent. Out of a 2GiB pagefile, that's a bit over 100MiB paged. You screen shot from task manager shows 88500KiB of that is kernel memory being paged, so at the time you've got about 20MiB of application data paged. Bear in mind the performance monitor doesn't keep all time or session high / lows, that max 5.3 is just over the last group of samples (100 samples).
 
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