Who Still Has Pagefile On?

Do you still use the pagefile?

  • Yes

    Votes: 140 84.3%

  • No

    Votes: 26 15.7%
  • Total voters
    166
F

fullvietFX

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 1, 2004
Messages
2,015
After I jumped on the Sandy Bridge ship and got 16GB of ram I turned off the pagefile. So far so good. What about you guys? If you don't use Pagefile please state how much RAM you have.

16GB for me.
 
yes I use it. Everything I've read says it doesn't hurt preformance any and still helps more than it hurts. Windows 7 utilizes it more efficiently with some of the 'fetch' type functionalities it employees.

My system has 12GB of RAM, my OS is installed on a OCZ Vertex 2, and the OS is Windows 7 x64 based.

I tried it off with 8GB for a while, but couldn't see any improvement, so I turned it back on. Some games require a page file. Dawn of War is one of them IIRC.
 
8GB and ran into some weird issues where apps throw random errors even if they aren't out of RAM. They look for a pagefile anyway.

Bottom line? There are for more important things to worry about. Let Windows handle it.
 
The only reason to turn it off is if you only had SSD's in your system and had lots of RAM, otherwise there will still be an occasion where some programs will flipout without having a pagefile (especially a program with memory leak). Having tons of RAM may mean the system never needs to use the pagefile, but why risk it? If you have a desktop running an SSD and have a large mechanical HDD for storage, just make a static 4GB pagefile on the mechanical HDD and forget about it.
 
For the sake of the lifetime of my SSD, I turned mine off. You will not see any significant performance gain when you turn it off if you use an SSD because the read and write are also very fast but it will add a lot of wear to it. The page file idea is just dumb if you have enough memory in your system. I don't understand why the OS even uses it before it runs out of physical memory but I guess they all do to try to be "smart" and store all the rarely use data to free the DRAM.
 
Even if you turn off the pagefile windows will still page. If a machine boots it has a pagefile, simple.

You can turn it off in a gui no problem, the OS still pages, Microsoft designed it that way.
 
Some programs require that a page file be present to even work. No reason to turn it off completely, but no real reason to leave it system managed either.

And you can set it to wipe when you reboot or even manually wipe it every once in a while to keep it from getting fragmented.

A fragmented and/or corrupted page file can cause all sorts of weird issues.
 
I put it OS managed on a 7200rpm storage drive, just to gain some space back on my SSD. I haven't noticed any performance hit with 8GB.
 
LOL @ page file tweaking. Just pick a drive and let it be like the above poster did.
 
I just left it on the SSD, if it gets used for whatever reason at least it'll be lightening fast. It takes up little space, not bothered, just left it alone.
 
I have 12GB and I have my pagefile set to 500MB to handle the little crap that Win7 'needs' it for. Back in the XP days though I used to run no pagefile with 2GB of ram.
 
Has anyone tried putting the pagefile on a Ramdrive? With how cheap ram is I would think that this would be the best way to go these days when many of us are building SSD OS drive computers.
 
Nanan said:
Has anyone tried putting the pagefile on a Ramdrive? With how cheap ram is I would think that this would be the best way to go these days when many of us are building SSD OS drive computers.
Click to expand...

I'm interested in reading about improvements from this...but I wonder if they wouldn't only be noticable in a benchmark? My machine absolutely flies and has no lag in anything now as it is.
 
There is no reason to turn it off. So I don't.

delvryboy said:
I put it OS managed on a 7200rpm storage drive, just to gain some space back on my SSD. I haven't noticed any performance hit with 8GB.
Click to expand...

This is what I did and for the same reasons.
 
My windows drive is an SSD while my storage drive is a 2TB traditional drive. I set the pagefile to 0 on the SSD and "windows managed" on the HD
 
Dan_D said:
There is no reason to turn it off. So I don't.



This is what I did and for the same reasons.
Click to expand...

Would there be an appreciable/noticable difference in moving the swapfile off the SSD and to a storage drive if it were a WD Green drive as opposed to faster traditional drives (lets say a WD Black)? This is my only real concern in moving the swapfile off my SSD.
 
Just use a small pagefile if you have lots of RAM. Just to keep stuff from bitching. If I had 16GB of RAM, I'd probably use like a 256MB pagefile, or at least I hope that would keep stuff from complaining.

To all programmers out there: You should be disallowed to program if you continue making programs that require a pagefile.
 
24G of RAM, no swap file. Bumped into a couple games that want it, so will enable it for them. (Titan Quest, I'm looking at you!)
 
THOMO said:
Even if you turn off the pagefile windows will still page. If a machine boots it has a pagefile, simple.

You can turn it off in a gui no problem, the OS still pages, Microsoft designed it that way.
Click to expand...

You are right, paging cannot be eliminated, but paging is not the same as the pagefile. The pagefile is just a place where data can be stored if needed.
 
I like actually getting crashdump information if something breaks. Requires pagefile.
 
12 gigs here, gonna upgrade to 24 gigs. Leaving the page file on. :p
 
Monkey God said:
Yep.

If you have an SSD put it on another drive, but otherwise, leave it alone.
Click to expand...
That's not what Microsoft suggests:

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...
 
Man.....turning off pagefile....the shit we used to do to try to get Windows XP to actually use the DDR400 OCZ Platinum ram we paid megabucks for.......

Man this thread takes me back a couple years.......glad those days are over...and in case you didn't figure it out, mine is on still on win 7 x64
 
I haven't worried (that means, I don't change any settings and leave it be) about the page file for many moons. Not since the first time I had two physical drives in one machine and moved it to the other drive for the first time. I don't even mess with that anymore.
 
There is no reason to disable the pagefile. This comes up again and again. It does not improve performance, if anything, it is possible to reduce performance. And in rare instances it can lead to programs not working correctly. Microsoft, real-world testing, and professionals all say LEAVE IT ALONE.

It's like saying "disable your L2 CPU cache because it's slower than L1" or something like that. Dumb. It's another resource to be there for the O.S. to have if it needs it.

The only reason to disable it is if you are in a storage-limited scenario. Like a very small (30-40GB SSD) as your only drive.

I limited the size to 2GB on my SSD (space constraints), and put a system-managed pagefile on my 7200RPM HDD.
 
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Really the only thing more foolish than disabling the page file all together or sticking it on a HDD when you could put a small one on an SSD (pro-tip set the size range with a small minimum and a reasonable max, will probably never grow beyond the min anyway), is sticking the pagefile in RAM.
 
Oh, I can think of something more foolish, definitely... opinions, yanno, they'll come back to haunt you in the long run. :D
 
I read up on page file/windows 7 memory management yesterday....it's pretty complicated. I put a fixed amount on my OS drive (300mb) and moved the rest to a second hard drive (windows managed). In most instances, the page file is not actively used by my machine. But, if you monitor your "hard faults/sec", I think you'll see it's still used when starting/booting your programs, etc.......also keep an eye on your "commit" memory usage to determine if you need to use/increase your page file space.

Edit: FYI............Monitoring the number of Hard Faults/sec will show how frequently a program needs to access the swap file, which could show if adding more memory would speed up applications, and therefore, reduce or eliminate page file use.

.
 
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Back in the Win9x days, I'd mess with the pagefile and set it at a certain size. Today, with all of the improvements with memory management, I doubt it makes a difference at all so I simply let Windows 7 manage it. It probably does a better job than I could at figuring out how much I need.
 
dekruyter said:
Edit: FYI............Monitoring the number of Hard Faults/sec will show how frequently a program needs to access the swap file, which could show if adding more memory would speed up applications, and therefore, reduce or eliminate page file use..
Click to expand...

The pagefile is not the only thing that causes hard faults. They happen even without one.

To add a bit... every memory mapped file will cause them. So the act of loading your exe/dll files will cause them.
 
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GreenMonkey said:
There is no reason to disable the pagefile. This comes up again and again. It does not improve performance, if anything, it is possible to reduce performance. And in rare instances it can lead to programs not working correctly. Microsoft, real-world testing, and professionals all say LEAVE IT ALONE.

It's like saying "disable your L2 CPU cache because it's slower than L1" or something like that. Dumb. It's another resource to be there for the O.S. to have if it needs it.
Click to expand...
A pagefile has a couple of major disadvantages

1: The OS has to decide what to page out based on heuristics, unfortunately these hurestics are imperfect and can result in the OS optimising for things that don't really matter (such as speed of an overnight virus scan) rather than things that directly impact the user experiance (like how long firefox takes to start working again when you come back in the morning).
2: In many cases it is better that something fails when memory runs out than grinding the whole computer to a halt.
 
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