Page file used unnecessarily ?

I have an enormous (12GB, soon to be 24GB) amount of memory, surely using the page file is pointless? So why is Vista doing it? For example, having recently rebooted, I've got 7GB of memory free (not even used for cache), but 5GB of page file! Why not keep that 5GB in RAM for now? RAM is MUCH faster than hard disk!

I decided to try turning off the page file. Nothing happened. I put it to the minimum it would take (16MB) and it did nothing, it just keeps using slightly more than the amount of memory used by applications. Why? (And yes I rebooted after changing the settings, even though it didn't prompt me to).

Why don't you try disabling paging altogether? I have an 8GB quad core and I run no swap. I have prefetch set to only cache boot files. On Windows Seven I use prefetch default settings with 1 GB min/max page file. Runs smooth even though that machine only has 2 GB memory. Windows Seven seems to insist of a page file to avoid memory notifications. But my Vista64 SP1 doesn't seem to care.

If you have no max set on the page file it will probably want to use it. Try setting min and max the same, or just disable paging.

If you left Prefetch settings at default you may be better off to try setting both min and max to 1 gb. Vista is a little different but I noticed on Windows Seven if I made a 4 GB page file it wanted to use about 1 and a half GB. But if I set min and max to 1024 MB it was happy to use about 300 MB or less. Having free memory isn't that big a deal. If most of your memory is used as Standby that's ok as long as it dumps it when you need memory instead of giving an out of memory error.

I can not imagine needing 12 gig much less 24 unless you are using it as a server. Do you really need that much? Consider that and try tweaking your system like Miles said before spending more money. Just because it is using your pagefile does not really mean that you have a decrease in performance. That really depends upon what Windows is using it for.

MilesAhead said:

Why don't you try disabling paging altogether? I have an 8GB quad core and I run no swap. I have prefetch set to only cache boot files. On Windows Seven I use prefetch default settings with 1 GB min/max page file. Runs smooth even though that machine only has 2 GB memory. Windows Seven seems to insist of a page file to avoid memory notifications. But my Vista64 SP1 doesn't seem to care.

If you have no max set on the page file it will probably want to use it. Try setting min and max the same, or just disable paging.

Click to expand...

I have tried both those, rebooting inbetween. It ignores me.

MilesAhead said:

If you left Prefetch settings at default you may be better off to try setting both min and max to 1 gb. Vista is a little different but I noticed on Windows Seven if I made a 4 GB page file it wanted to use about 1 and a half GB. But if I set min and max to 1024 MB it was happy to use about 300 MB or less. Having free memory isn't that big a deal. If most of your memory is used as Standby that's ok as long as it dumps it when you need memory instead of giving an out of memory error.

Click to expand...

Where is the prefetch setting?

townsbg said:

I can not imagine needing 12 gig much less 24 unless you are using it as a server. Do you really need that much? Consider that and try tweaking your system like Miles said before spending more money. Just because it is using your pagefile does not really mean that you have a decrease in performance. That really depends upon what Windows is using it for.

Click to expand...

I use about 9GB of that regularly. I use a lot of large applications.

Also, I'm actually making a profit of £10 by upgrading to 24GB. The used price of my 12GB is more than I just got 24GB for!

I have tried both those, rebooting inbetween. It ignores me.

Click to expand...

It's quirky. When you set min and max, then you have to press Set button. When you click OK to back out of the dialogs, you have to click Apply if that button is enabled, then OK until you back all the way out. I always immediately go back into the settings to see if the change "stuck." If not, do it again. They really prefer you to let the system manage it if you get my drift.

Where is the prefetch setting?

Click to expand...

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/108833-superfetch-change-preload-data.html


If you have high memory requirement then perhaps you need to run a lot of swap. But modern memory management now doesn't leave a lot of ram hanging free. It's more designed to cache as Standby and chuck if something not in the cache needs to load. W7 is a lot better at it than Vista.

I tried going through it again carefully, pressing apply and OK everywhere. This time it actually asked me to reboot, which is hasn't done before, but it still didn't listen - it's using 8GB of pagefile, memory usage is 6.5GB, with 5.5GB cache. I'm assuming the Task Manager is correct!

What are the min and max page file settings? When you say it doesn't "listen" I don't know what you mean. If there's a page file it's always going to use some of it.

I have tried min and max both 16MB (which is the minimum it will do), and also set it to "off". The settings stick ok, but in the task manager, it tells me it is paging several GB. Just checked the pagefile.sys file in c:\ and it's 16MB, so I have no idea what the task manager is reporting! I think I'll believe the size of the actual file....

Windows considers executable image on disk to be "paged" and only pages data. I don't fully grok all the virtual memory stuff. But let's say you have no paging file whatsoever. Because the kernel is on your hard drive and the system can load parts of it back into memory if it needs to, then it can discard some parts from memory and consider the executable code on the drive as "paged." More complicated than that I'd suggest reading Mark Russinovich.

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Physical Memory - Mark's Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

I assume since I have plenty "cached" that this would also cache the kernel.

[Reads link]

EGAD! That's a lot of reading. It'll make my head explode.

I like this image though:
http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/...fWindowsPhysicalMemory_878B/image_thumb_1.png

2 TB memory, 64 processors!

I wish there was simple clear detail on all the Task Manager displays. What it represents is kind of vague. Anytime I search for info about Task Manager it's basically how to open it and click on tabs/menus rather than defining what the stats mean.

Found a little more info here but it's more about program memory usage:
how to interpret windows task manager? - Stack Overflow

edit: this may be a bit more helpful:
http://superuser.com/questions/84871/decode-win7-64-physical-memory-values-for-me