That's why I apologized. I though ram just kept on being used. I'm getting my Linux learning (unused ram is wasted ram) crossed with the almost nothing I know about Windows. Not that I know anything about Linux either... I just thought that was how all ram was utilized. As I said I apologize.
I'm not sure you are getting clear answers here. I think your question is fair. It is worth thinking about what the pagefile does and how that compares to swap on Linux and how all that relates to memory usage, and why setting a large pagefile wont help with performance.
The adage "unused ram is wasted ram" is as much true in the Windows world as it is in the Linux world. (It is also a personal favorite of mine. If you search this forum you will see that I've used it many times.) Because unused ram is wasted ram Windows essentially keeps all your ram in use all the time (unless you really have lots of ram like 32GB+, in that case it can run out of stuff to keep in memory). Ram not used by programs running gets used to cache frequently accessed stuff from the drive.
Because ram is essentially full every time something needs more memory the Windows memory manager has to evict something else from ram. In order to decide what to evict the memory manager keeps track of your usage patterns and assigns each page in memory a priority (from 1 to 7 if i recall correctly) and will first evict low priority stuff. Mostly that low priority stuff is cached stuff from the drive. But it is also possible that the memory manager will kick out some stuff used by a program in favor of keeping some cached stuff around. This mostly happens if there is some program that marks part of its memory as low priority. If the program that you are using starts needing a lot of memory Windows will also kick other programs out of ram because the application with focus gets higher memory priority.
When the memory manager kicks something out of ram what happens to that memory depends on what is in it. If the memory happens to be a file loaded from the disk windows will just forget about it since it can always load it from disk again. On the other hand if the memory contains data the program has generated or gotten from somewhere else than the disk windows will write the data to the pagefile.
So how do size limits on the pagefile affect this process? The important thing is running out of memory. If you have some memory hungry application that is filling up memory with data then you can end up in a situation where the combined ram + pagefile size limit is not enough and Windows will have to start throwing out of memory errors. That usually means things will start crashing. Even if the situation doesn't get so bad that you run out of ram and pagefile but the current program still ends up with using all ram and having part of its memory in the pagefile you will experience a huge performance drop because it constantly has to read and write to disk to do its work (aka trashing) .
But would a pagefile size limit hurt your performance if you don't end up in any of the bad scenarios above? Not usually. If you ever hit a situation of running out of pagefile you will hit out of memory errors, which will ruin your experience much more than slow performance. There is a corner case if some application is caching stuff in memory that it will throw away in case of memory pressure because it can regenerate it, but usually this sort of stuff starts happening when running out of ram. Another corner case is if you have lots of ram but a tiny pagefile and some program has lots of low priority memory that would get thrown out to make room for high priority disk cache. There are also more complicated scenarios where the availability of memory affects the willingness of the Windows memory manager to commit to memory which can affect the behavior of allocators and garbage collectors in the programs.
I promised to compare the pagefile to Linux swap, which I haven't done yet. One key difference is that on Linux swap is a separate partition. This has the effect that the size is fixed. On Windows the pagefile is just a file (hence the name) and so growing it is no problem. In fact, by default, Windows will grow and shrink the pagefile as needed. This is why your suggestion to set a big pagefile is completely unnecessary. If Windows needs more pagefile space it can always grow that file and then shrink it back when it no longer needs it. This is also why the OP's quest to fiddle with pagefile setting in Windows was misguided and wont have any beneficial effect on performance. The one catch is that growing the pagefile can cause it to become fragmented, which can have a negative effect on performance if the pagefile is on a hard drive. On an SSD like in this case it doesn't matter.
One hardware aspect worth mentioning, not directly related to Windows memory management, is that SSDs slow down as they fill up so setting a large pagefile would actually hurt performance from that side as well.
There are some other interesting differences between how Windows and Linux handles memory commit that relates to pagefile/swap size, but this post is getting long enough as it is.
EDIT: Oh dear, I didn't actually realize how long this thing was until I actually posted it.