Virtual memory setting in Win 7 with large amount of RAM

Parja

Parja

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I just put together a new system with a 60GB SSD, a 2TB Caviar Black data drive, and 16GB of memory.

I got Win 7 x64 installed last night and noticed right away that I was down to about 30GB free on my SSD. Checking the pagefile.sys file size, I see it's set at 16GB. That seems pretty excessive! So I dropped it down to 2GB. Not sure if that's a good number or not, though.

So for your folks with a smaller boot SSD and a large amount of memory, what's your rule of thumb for setting the virtual memory settings on your machines? I can't imagine with 16GB of physical memory, it's going to need to hit the virtual a whole lot.
 
basically with 16gb of memory you could turn off pagefile but it wont net you any performance gain. im in same boat and i just decided to set my pagefile to 600mb and be done with it
 
I personally like my pagefile off entirely - it completely avoids Windows touching the drive for RAM paging. With 16GB you ought to be safe to do that, unless you are into very demanding programs. If you start to get any messages about being low on RAM, you could set a very small pagefile instead (as RM_Bulldog suggested).

If you find that with your specific uses you are in need of a larger pagefile, consider getting a bigger SSD and relegating this 60GB one to only pagefile use. Alternatively, you could move the pagefile over to your data drive... though it will perform much more slowly there when needed.
 
Parja said:
I just put together a new system with a 60GB SSD, a 2TB Caviar Black data drive, and 16GB of memory.

I got Win 7 x64 installed last night and noticed right away that I was down to about 30GB free on my SSD. Checking the pagefile.sys file size, I see it's set at 16GB. That seems pretty excessive! So I dropped it down to 2GB. Not sure if that's a good number or not, though.

So for your folks with a smaller boot SSD and a large amount of memory, what's your rule of thumb for setting the virtual memory settings on your machines? I can't imagine with 16GB of physical memory, it's going to need to hit the virtual a whole lot.
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Hi, Parja,

Check the "Operating System" forum and do a search on "page file" for a number of discussions on this topic. Joe Average has some good advice that you may want to follow.

Hope this helps.

Chuklr
 
On my 60gb SSD I run a 2GB pagefile on the SSD, and a windows-managed one on my HDD.

Absolutely do not turn off the pagefile - to keep it short and sweet, Microsoft and many other reputable sources all tell you it is not a good idea, and practical benchmarks have showm it does not improve performance.
 
GreenMonkey said:
On my 60gb SSD I run a 2GB pagefile on the SSD, and a windows-managed one on my HDD.

Absolutely do not turn off the pagefile - to keep it short and sweet, Microsoft and many other reputable sources all tell you it is not a good idea, and practical benchmarks have showm it does not improve performance.
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Agreed. I remember reading on another forum awhile back about weird behavior and incompatibility with some apps and programs which expect to 'see' a pagefile even if it's not needed at the time. Chances are with that amount of RAM you won't need it so there's no harm done in moving it to the bigger drive. I'd just set it to one size to avoid system resizing so it doesn't access the drive needlessly.
 
Agree don't shut it off but do reduce the size some software needs a pagefile even with lots of ram. I'd say 2-4Gb max for pagefile size with 16Gb you can go less but some software might not like it.

The default PF size is far to big and simply wastes HDD space.
 
Mr Spocko said:
Agree don't shut it off but do reduce the size some software needs a pagefile even with lots of ram. I'd say 2-4Gb max for pagefile size with 16Gb you can go less but some software might not like it.

The default PF size is far to big and simply wastes HDD space.
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This is definitely the best way to do it and currently how I have mine set (ie: 2-4GB).
 
I suggest moving the page file to one of your other drives. Then, let Windows manage the size. WIN7 is pretty good at it and I have yet to see anyone offer any proof that tweaking the memory management makes ANY real difference with WIN7. Back in the XP days when people had 1GB or so of RAM? Yeah, you could do some good. But in this case, all you need to worry about is getting the page file off that SSD.
 
Set pagefile to 512-4096 and stick it on another hard drive entirely. I do this at home and work and have yet to see the pagefile ever grow beyond 530MB and it doesn't seem to have any effect at all on performance to have it sitting on a conventional drive.

I run 8GB of RAM at home and at work. Both systems with SSDs.
 
the page file is there so that when you run out of RAM, the program using the memory has a graceful fallback to use. without that fallback (the page file) either the program would just crash, or windows itself would bluescreen.

with large amounts of RAM, you wont often be running out and having to use the page file, but you should still have it there for the off chance that you do run out some time. i have 6 gigs of ram and a 100g SSD, i set a 256 (initial) to 512mb (max) page file. if i had 12 or 24 gigs of ram, i might decrease it even more to around 100mb just to save some extra SSD space.
 
ghost6303 said:
the page file is there so that when you run out of RAM, the program using the memory has a graceful fallback to use. without that fallback (the page file) either the program would just crash, or windows itself would bluescreen.

with large amounts of RAM, you wont often be running out and having to use the page file, but you should still have it there for the off chance that you do run out some time. i have 6 gigs of ram and a 100g SSD, i set a 256 (initial) to 512mb (max) page file. if i had 12 or 24 gigs of ram, i might decrease it even more to around 100mb just to save some extra SSD space.
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Additionally, there is some software that requires that a page file be present. No page file? Software won't work.
 
Mike Clements said:
Additionally, there is some software that requires that a page file be present. No page file? Software won't work.
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I'm curious - what software have you run into with this requirement? I've run without a page file on all of my systems for several years now, and had no such issues... but then I don't do a ton on the more creative side of things (Adobe creative suite apps and the like).
 
WilliamMGeorge said:
I'm curious - what software have you run into with this requirement? I've run without a page file on all of my systems for several years now, and had no such issues... but then I don't do a ton on the more creative side of things (Adobe creative suite apps and the like).
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I have not personally used any either. But, I have seen quite a few posts over the years where users disabled their page file and had issues. I'm not saying it's overly common.
 
WilliamMGeorge said:
I'm curious - what software have you run into with this requirement? I've run without a page file on all of my systems for several years now, and had no such issues... but then I don't do a ton on the more creative side of things (Adobe creative suite apps and the like).
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The thing is, disabling the page file doesn't improve performance. Period. It's been debunked by plenty of benchmarks.

It's like disabling your L2 cache because it's "slower" than your L1 cache or something like that. It doesn't make sense to disable it.

If you have disk space issues, I can understand reducing it in size a little. But disabling it doesn't help and can only hinder. Period.
 
GreenMonkey said:
The thing is, disabling the page file doesn't improve performance. Period. It's been debunked by plenty of benchmarks.
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That may be true today, and I really haven't had a page file since... 2004 maybe? So perhaps I'm not giving it a fair shake. But I can say definitely, from my own experience, that having one in Windows XP ended up slowing things down even if you had enough RAM that whatever task(s) you were running didn't come close to filling up the physical memory.

I'd love to do some real-world testing on this, and may in fact: look at workloads which do not exceed the physical RAM, and then see if Windows *ever* pages data. It shouldn't - there is no need to until you get at least very low on memory, but if it does then I'd still leave it turned off. It isn't that a specific application or game would be slower with the page file, it was that there was an added delay when moving to programs that had been inactive for a while. Lag of a sort, if you will.

Now it is further possible that even if Windows still pages unnecessarily, having the paging file on a SSD may alleviate any lag to the point where you don't notice it... but I guess without needing to have a page file (read: having enough RAM that I never get low memory warnings without one) I don't have a good reason to turn it back on. Hence my question about programs requiring it to run properly, as that *would* be an adequate reason to re-enable it.
 
WilliamMGeorge said:
That may be true today, and I really haven't had a page file since... 2004 maybe? So perhaps I'm not giving it a fair shake. But I can say definitely, from my own experience, that having one in Windows XP ended up slowing things down even if you had enough RAM that whatever task(s) you were running didn't come close to filling up the physical memory.

I'd love to do some real-world testing on this, and may in fact: look at workloads which do not exceed the physical RAM, and then see if Windows *ever* pages data. It shouldn't - there is no need to until you get at least very low on memory, but if it does then I'd still leave it turned off. It isn't that a specific application or game would be slower with the page file, it was that there was an added delay when moving to programs that had been inactive for a while. Lag of a sort, if you will.

Now it is further possible that even if Windows still pages unnecessarily, having the paging file on a SSD may alleviate any lag to the point where you don't notice it... but I guess without needing to have a page file (read: having enough RAM that I never get low memory warnings without one) I don't have a good reason to turn it back on. Hence my question about programs requiring it to run properly, as that *would* be an adequate reason to re-enable it.
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You're wrong. See the link posted a couple above. This comes up all of the time. Seriously. You think Windows programmers don't understand when to and when not to use paging? Plus, it has a lot to do with memory allocation (if you've had some programming, you should understand all about pre-allocating variables). I can't speak on this too much (I'm a VMS sysadmin, not Windows)...but...

Benchmarking has been done. See one of the other Hardforum threads. You can find it in a few places. This imperceptible lag you claim doesn't exist. It's probably placebo effect. Even on a hard drive, the page file only improves performance. IT DOES NOT HURT PERFORMANCE AND CAN ONLY HINDER. PERIOD. You won't be able to find any benchmark set that backs up an improvement by removing the pagefile. I challenge you to find them. This is seriously like people insisting better speaker cables make a difference - double blind studies show the opposite

This comes up about once a month here from people that don't understand programming, or operating systems, or whatever. The benchmarks and links showing why not to do it are in the other threads.

Microsoft themselves says do not turn it off, it only hurts. So does any other reputable source. About the only thing you can find is random people on forums insisting they don't need it and their system runs better without it. They're wrong.
 
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WilliamMGeorge said:
I'd love to do some real-world testing on this, and may in fact: look at workloads which do not exceed the physical RAM, and then see if Windows *ever* pages data. It shouldn't - there is no need to until you get at least very low on memory, but if it does then I'd still leave it turned off.
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I'm no programmer. I could not code my way out of a wet paper .bat file. But, I see what appears to be an error in your thinking already. Some applications are going to want certain data sitting somewhere other than in RAM because the RAM is volatile storage. If you should lose power or have any sort of error that flushes the cache and RAM, your data is gone. So, I don't think you can simply make the blanket statement that . It shouldn't - there is no need to until you get at least very low on memory,

If it works for you running without one, that's great. But, I am certain that there are other user profiles in the world that would not be served by your setup including those we've listed above in the post about programs that require a page file to be present.

As far as performance, as noted, I have yet to EVER see any proof that running without a page file improves performance. And, a lot of people have tried. On modern OSs, it's simply not beneficial to mess with the memory management.
 
Mike Clements said:
Some applications are going to want certain data sitting somewhere other than in RAM because the RAM is volatile storage. If you should lose power or have any sort of error that flushes the cache and RAM, your data is gone. So, I don't think you can simply make the blanket statement that. It shouldn't - there is no need to until you get at least very low on memory.
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The pagefile is treated just like RAM - completely volatile. If you want to store persistent data, store in in your own file on the HDD, not in the pagefile. Oh wait, that's how every program does it!

Mike Clements said:
As far as performance, as noted, I have yet to EVER see any proof that running without a page file improves performance. And, a lot of people have tried. On modern OSs, it's simply not beneficial to mess with the memory management.
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Yup, removing the pagefile is not recommended. Programs might actually depend on it, and it might be a performance improvement to keep it to a small size (1-2GB) instead of removing it (certainly don't leave it at default size, it's 1.5-2 times your memory usually).

The kernel might swap memory blocks not accessed in a reeeeeeaaally long time in favor of using the RAM for cache, or programs may swap the memory themselves to have RAM for stuff that's being worked on, so that is probably why there will still be some usage on it.
The point is to avoid having the pagefile hammered by insufficient memory, which likely won't happen with 4GB+ unless you are doing something very intensive (lots of VMs).
 
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With Windows NT, 2000, and XP, a 2 MB pagefile was necessary on the boot drive for debugging purposes, but you could put the rest of the pagefile anywhere.
 
I'd move your 2gb pagefile (fixed size) to the large 2TB Caviar Black data drive. Extra writes to your SSD are not needed. Otherwise, you're all set.
 
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