This is where I heard it:
low ram? - Minecraft Forum - Page 3 - Page 3
Not knowing the poster very well, and being on a video game forum, I took it with a grain of salt. Then again, I may be misinterpreting what they said.
I'm not an expert; just a DIY² geek.
Well, it is nonsense. A block of allocated contiguous memory (by an application) points to many small pieces in physical memory. Those pieces don't need to be contiguous.
If there is no contiguous block large enough in the virtual address space, the application will just fail to allocate the memory. It is not possible, having a page file or not, for the memory manager to defragment the application's virtual address space.
It is impossible, because the memory manager has no way of correcting all the memory references the application has to its data. All those references would be invalidated, if the memory manager began to shuffle data around.
sigh. RAM is Random Access Memory, stuff is horribly fragmented in there at the physical level, but being that a totally different technology than HDDs and SSDs it's completely irrelevant. It's like comparing apples to bananas.
pagefile is nowadays needed only for some minor diagnostic functions like generating a memory dump file (as we can get so huge amounts of RAM that it hurts), so if you don't have any issue, you don't need it, point is if you need it and it wasn't set correctly, you are a bit screwed.
OK, yeah. It seemed a little off to me too, and I had never heard of the need to "defragment" RAM before, which is why I just relayed it as something that I had heard that might or might not be correct, since I wasn't sure.
They unfortunately seemed to know what they were talking about though (and went into some detail about it), even if they actually didn't.
I would think that if the Windows 7 paging file was actually necessary under all circumstances, even if for just the more minor functions, they wouldn't have the option to disable it altogether in the settings menus, beyond maybe just a registry edit for some kind of troubleshooting, or the like.
Not much of it is true. They also talk about the page size will be 64kB when you disable the page file - when in fact the page file has no impact on this at all. The current x86 cpus don't even support pages at that size.
Well, if you wanted an OS that treated you like a child you'd have bought a Mac, or a tablet.
There are quite a few settings that are dangerous, but are useful in some specific circumstances if you know what you are doing.
Right, could be dangerous, but there aren't so many accessible menu settings that will be under any and all possible circumstances that I can think of off hand. Kind of late here though, and I'm a bit tired.
What I mean is, some of the people in that thread were making it sound as though disabling the paging file is never a valid usable option.
And yeah, not a Mac/Apple user, nor much of a fan of any mass marketed pre-built PCs as far as my home PCs are concerned.
I do have a Nexus 7 though, but not to be used for all the same things as my PCs.
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