Why is my pagefile going nuts when I extract something with Winrar?

I have some large .rar archives (several GB each) stored on an external drive. When I extract them to my main C drive (by right-clicking and dragging the .rar file to a folder on my C drive and selecting "extract here"), my C drive slows to a crawl and if I open resource manager I can see the pagefile is active, chewing up my hard drive. I have lots of issues with my pagefile often bogging down my PC. I'm on Windows 7 32bit so I'm very limited with memory (3GB). It seems everything I do results in my pagefile going nuts. I don't have this issue when copying files to other drives without a pagefile. is this just the way it is with 32bit? Does everybody have these pagefile issues? In my settings it's selected for auto manage. I've asked before in here about my pagefile, but I don't see why just extracting something should set it off.

You are most probably running out of RAM and start writing to pagefile on drive which is also read/writing the extracted folders, hence the trashing.

Maybe you can try: create another pagefile on another drive (not another partition on same drive!), make it larger than C

I didn't think extracting a .rar directly (by using drag-and-drop) used RAM - that's why I was confused. I thought it just extracted from the .rar directly to the drive without using RAM? I guess that isn't the case? Is there a way to extract zip and rar files without using RAM?

You can search "winrar ram usage" to get some idea.

If you have 2 drives, try either extracting to the 2nd drive or setting an another pagefile on the 2nd disk (in case this doesn' work - further remove pagefile on C for diagnostic purpose and see if it helps)

I've tried removing the pagefile completely in the past and my PC ends up crashing when I open lots of tabs in Firefox, or have multiple software running. I no longer had the thrashing of my drive constantly which was nice but I was running out of memory all the time resulting in crashes.

No, you misunderstood. If you have a second internal hard disk, create a new pagefile on that harddisk and remove the one on C. You can also have a pagefile on both, it is just I don't know which one would be used first.

You can also try to extract to 2nd internal hard disk without changing pagefile.

The above are to see if you will get the same amount of trashing while extraction. You can decide on what to do later if these help.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/.../ff382717.aspx

Using multiple page files split over two or more physical disks is an even better idea, because your disk controller can process multiple requests to read or write data concurrently.

So try creating a pagefile on 2nd harddisk without deleting the C pagefile first.

Layback Bear said:

I take a more simple way.

If you are running out of ram because you are doing more things at one time than you have ram to do them the only cures are doing less at one time or adding more ram.
Let Windows 7 manage the ram because their is no magic tricks when you need more ram. Of course to use more ram you will need to install Windows 7/64 bit.
Moving page file to another partition or drive to me is a no no.

The problem is when I extract a large rar archive to my C drive it takes 5 times longer because my hard drive is thrashing thanks to the pagefile at the same time it's extracting. Sometimes I don't always have the space free on another drive to work with and it's more convenient to extract to my main drive.

Bear: I do have 3 pagefiles (10GB) on RAID0 dynamic volume, another 10GB on yet another RAID0 dynamic volume and C has a small 500MB pagefile to stop volmgr errors in event viewer and for crash dump reasons. It works alright, no problems at all. Possibly overkill :)



For OP, it may help to have 2 pagefiles as the TechNet article advice.