Page file usage?

I dont know if this is in the right spot, so mods feel free to move it.

I know the purpose of the pagefile and all, but I just wanted to check one more time while I was thinking about this. I currently have 8gb of ram in my machine and never have enough stuff open to get anywhere near using that much. Therefore, I went ahead and told windows to not use a pagefile. I was just wondering though, would there still be benefits to using a pagefile that I am not aware of? Something I dont know about that would still be good to allow windows to manage a pagefile as opposed to just completely disabling it?

A pagefile acts very much like ram, but exists on your hard drive. Benchmarks suggest that you should still have a pagefile, regardless of how much ram you have.

How does still having the pagefile benefit you though? That's what I'm asking and trying to understand. Like I said I understand the purpose of a pagefile. Things are moved from memory to the pagefile to keep ram from filling up and such. I dont understand why keeping it would be beneficial due to the fact that it writing stuff out to the hard drive and reading it back would be much slower than actually reading directly from ram.

Can you give me any kind of specifics as to why it is better to keep it or give me some kind of link to something explaining it to me?

leave it alone, really, the only time the pagefile will be used is if a program needs it, some programs / games dont like working properly with out a page file.

if a program uses the page file it wasnt written very well if it is using it alot

Disk space isnt really a prob, but I dont see a point in having an 8gb pagefile either. I dont have a prob leaving it there, but I dont plan on having an 8gb pagefile..

If you have a spare HDD layin round drop it in (if pata use a seprate channel) and put PF on that set the pagefile size manualy
min/max the same size.
If no spare turn off the page file defrag then turn it back on set the pagefile size manualy
min/max the same size do not let windows control PF size as your PF will be all over the place. As to size I will keep my opinions to my self (768) but the rec. was 1.5 ram way back when.

Mr.Guvernment said:

leave it alone, really, the only time the pagefile will be used is if a program needs it, some programs / games dont like working properly with out a page file.

if a program uses the page file it wasnt written very well if it is using it alot

Click to expand...

That's the thing, the pagefile requirement is for application compatibility.

Some applications will give you a memory error if you launch it without a pagefile!

Project64 is known to display:

Error

FAILED TO ALLOCATE MEMORY

| OK |

(or similar) and terminate, without a pagefile.

Mr.Guvernment said:

leave it alone, really, the only time the pagefile will be used is if a program needs it, some programs / games dont like working properly with out a page file.

if a program uses the page file it wasnt written very well if it is using it alot

Click to expand...

this man speaks the truth. Especially if disk space isn't at a premium, at least keep a 2gig pagefile.

RJARRRPCGP said:

That's the thing, the pagefile requirement is for application compatibility.

Some applications will give you a memory error if you launch it without a pagefile!

Click to expand...

Because you don't have enough ram without a paging file?

Applications just allocates memory. They have no clue if the ram goes to physical ram or the paging file. The paging file is invisible to them.

so if the page file is invisible then why would it not work, it is very easy for a program to scan for a page file.

Yes, they can check if you have such a file configured. But they cannot say, hey, lets allocate some memory in the paging file. And then crash, if there isn't one.

cleary they did above though?

Why couldn't they do that? Wouldnt that be up the programmers?

especially with 32bit games / applications, it wouldnt matter if you had 4G or 8G of ram with the limitation thus the program would need to use the page file possibly...

The memory manager gives applications what memory they ask for. The application doesn't know and doesn't care if the memory is backed by physical ram or the paging file. Thus my claim it is invisible.

Edit: Windows have no API for doing that. So even if the programmer wanted to specially and only allocate memory in the paging file, he wouldn't be able to do so. The memory manager takes care of all that.

jdf_warrior said:

Can you give me any kind of specifics as to why it is better to keep it or give me some kind of link to something explaining it to me?

Click to expand...

The only reason to keep the pagefile, given more than 2GBs of ram, is in the remote case where you have multiple windows opens and an application requires more memory than you physically have. Windows will not warn you that it has run out of memory and strange things will begin to happen like IE windows refusing to open, applications not saving data and random crashing of windows.

I had this happen when I had 2GBs of memory and turned the pagefile off. With multiple windows open, suddenly windows refused to respond and wouldn't open; there was no warning of any kind from WinXP that memory had been exceeded, but looking at the page usage in the manager showed I had reached the limit of my physical memory. Turning the pagefile back on solved the problem. As a result I always let WinXP manage the pagefile. It isn't used unless its required so there is no downside to leaving it enabled.