How to tell W7 that extra memory is for page file only

[robilong]

or no virtual memory at all.

Probably the most asked question, which I hope I'm asking from a different angle

In one sentence, it should be very logical, when 8 GB RAM is sufficient + adding 8 GB RAM extra= no need for slow HDD swapping.

That is, I have on my W7x64 PC 8 GB of RAM and virtual memory rotating on HD disk. Everything is fine, or for a Windows 7 at least, while I'm suffering of some impatience always, when W7 swaps Lightroom catalog to and from HDD...

But when I add another 8 GB of fresh memory, how to tell windows 7, that no need to use slow HDD as instead there is another 8 GB of extra memory, which Windows could eat or at least to move it's page file to this extra RAM memory?

 

[tomaskucinskas]

Start > right click on Computer > Properties > on left column advanced system settings > popup will open ant click on settings from performance (first button) another popup will open and when advanced tab and change button and select no paging file > set ok, ok, ok and restart.

Hope it helps.

 

[DeaconFrost]

The LAST thing you want to do is start messing with these settings. This isn't Windows XP you are dealing with, so don't "tweak" it as such. Windows 7 is much smarter with your memory, so it will use what you throw at it. All OSes still using virtual memory, even if you think you have it disabled, so it was even debatable 10 years ago when Windows XP was released.

There's no reason to disable paging in Windows 7, and it will not give you any kind of performance increase. The best tweaking advice for Windows 7, for 18 months now...has been to leave it alone....

...unless of course you don't like stability.

 

[whs]

If you delete the page file, I guarantee your system will crash. You can try the minimum settings which is 200MB (I believe). But some programs need the pagefile even if you have acres of free space.

BTW: If you have a pagefile smaller than your RAM, you will not get any dump in the event of a BSOD. It is in the pagefile space where the system stores that dump.

 

[unifex]

Well, there is one possibility - if you actually go for 16 GB RAM (which seems a bit too much at the moment), you can use RAM-disk software (a free one you can find here) to create a virtual drive made out of RAM and place your pagefile on it.

There are opposing views (you can find them if you search the Forums on page file and RAM disk) on whether this makes any sense: on one hand, you gain in speed since your RAM is obviously faster than your hard drive; on the other hand, you're sort of wasting your RAM.

My personal experience with it was mixed. If I put the IE9 or FF cache on the RAM disk, then parts of web pages load instantly, but then you notice the delay with other parts (of the same page). Windows tmp folder did not work at all on RAM disk. Not sure why. In my SSD setup I moved it away from the SSD, but to a regular hard drive. If I put it on RAM disk, the system then created various temp folders across the system somehow.

 

[Bill2]

Read.

Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done

 

[unifex]

Bill, here's my typical workload. Of course, I am not editing any video at the moment, but even then (with 90% CPU load) I've never seen more that 3GB used memory. So, if the OP is thinking to go to 16GB ... well, I don't know what he's doing with his PC, but the possibility of memory overload seems rather remote to me. Of course, some programs actually need the page file no matter how much RAM is installed, for these placing the page file on a RAM disk might work just fine. Until some app will come up that will need all 16 GB. For now I am unaware of any such app.

 

[Bill2]

Bill, here's my typical workload. Of course, I am not editing any video at the moment, but even then (with 90% CPU load) I've never seen more that 3GB used memory. So, if the OP is thinking to go to 16GB ... well, I don't know what he's doing with his PC, but the possibility of memory overload seems rather remote to me. Of course, some programs actually need the page file no matter how much RAM is installed, for these placing the page file on a RAM disk might work just fine. Until some app will come up that will need all 16 GB. For now I am unaware of any such app.

Lol...I cant think of anything to do with 16 gig RAM either. I guess its about being future-proof. My ancient desktop started out with 64mb and most of my machines now have 4 gig- thats like 60 times over. So futureproofness is difficult to predict.

But my only point was no purpose is served by getting rid of the pf completely- whats a couple of 100 mb on giant sized disks?

 

[robilong]

Actually rather controversial if not to say absurd! HDD is times slower then DDR3. When we have 8GB of DDR memory and Windows suggests 1.5 times of it virtual memory, which is sooo muuuuch slower, why can't we add for this purposes more DDR3 memory???
Or even worse, when we add memory and have 16GB, the suggested virtual memory amount is also increased, as a result by adding memory we degrade our PC from other end (by pushing it to use more slower HDD memory).
I use a lot of imaging software, which likes to expand in memory and Windows doesn't let to stop it with physical RAM. Therefore my workflow is rather often interrupted by unexpected HDD page file swapping, which IMO doesn't have any justification except poor programming. Memory is cheep nowadays but still not waste.

 

[Bill2]

Actually rather controversial if not to say absurd! HDD is times slower then DDR3. When we have 8GB of DDR memory and Windows suggests 1.5 times of it virtual memory, which is sooo muuuuch slower, why can't we add for this purposes more DDR3 memory???
Or even worse, when we add memory and have 16GB, the suggested virtual memory amount is also increased, as a result by adding memory we degrade our PC from other end (by pushing it to use more slower HDD memory).
I use a lot of imaging software, which likes to expand in memory and Windows doesn't let to stop it with physical RAM. Therefore my workflow is rather often interrupted by unexpected HDD page file swapping, which IMO doesn't have any justification except poor programming. Memory is cheep nowadays but still not waste.

You'll mostly get cautious advice in this matter but there're many people out there who dont use a paging file particularly when they have 8 gigs or more of RAM. Its upto you, if it works, go ahead. If it doesnt, go back to a paging file.

You can read more here. Page also contains several good links.

windows server 2008 - Any benefit or detriment from removing a pagefile on an 8GB RAM machine? - Server Fault

 

[DeaconFrost]

Actually rather controversial if not to say absurd! HDD is times slower then DDR3. When we have 8GB of DDR memory and Windows suggests 1.5 times of it virtual memory, which is sooo muuuuch slower, why can't we add for this purposes more DDR3 memory???

I said it once in this thread, and it's been said countless times since Windows 7's release. It isn't XP, so please don't sell yourself short by assuming it works exactly like Windows XP.

What you are doing, is akin to arguing that cars are still powered by horses in front of them, not realizing the technology has changed quite a bit. Do yourself a favor and do some readon on the subject before calling other viewpoints absurd.

Windows 7 is not Windows XP, and should be left alone to tweak and optimize itself. Yes, that's the exact opposite of what one would do with XP...but that's just one of many reasons why Windows 7 is the most superior Windows desktop OS ever released.

 

[whs]

With 16GBs of RAM, the Ramdisk idea may make a certain sense. The controversy stems from the fact that the space that you take away for the Ramdisk will not be available for caching, thus working against you from that aspect. But if you take e.g. 4GBs away for the Ramdisk from a total RAM of 16GB, there is still ample space for caching that will probably never all be used.

Best is to observe your RAM usage behavior in Resource Monitor. There is also a graph on the bottom right of that page which shows you the recent history of hard page faults.

 

[DeaconFrost]

Definitely, and with 16 GB of memory, you won't be paging much and it won't be happening that often....but you need to always allow the OS the ability to do so. There's no need and certainly no benefit to disabling virtual memory.

 

[whs]

I think the whole discussion regarding the pagefile is kind of behind us. In previous times when RAM was scarce and paging happened a lot, attention to the pagefile was popular (although most tweaks were useless).

But with recent systems that come with at least 4GB of RAM, the whole subject is really irrelevant. There is so little paging going on, that it does not matter where the pagefile resides. The overall performance impct will be minimal even with the slowest device.

The main use for the pagefile is for the few processes that use it for whatever reason. They propably use the pagemanager as a subroutine because that was the easiest way to implement a certain function. That you find very often in the system (e.g. the partition shrink process using the defrag service).

The other use of the pagefile (as I said before) is for storing a memory dump in case of a BSOD.

So if you are not short in diskspace (like e.g. on a smaller SSD), I would just leavee it up to the system to manage. Deleting the hiberfile is a less consequential option - especially with 16GB of RAM.

 

[snahl]

to 'robilong':

...I'm suffering of some impatience always, when Windows 7 swaps Lightroom catalog to and from HDD...

Well the answer to your question is not really Windows 7 related.
Check your pagefile when using Lightroom and you will find little activity there.
Lightroom (LR) itself does what you think is swapping, because LR is constantly reading from and writing to the catalog ...\Lightroom 3 Catalog Previews.lrdata\
So even a RAM-Disk won't help to increase LR processing, unless your machine is always on and your LR-catalog resides on that RAM-Disk. Not very a advisable solution at all.

What you can do is to create a RAID1 on two identical disks connected the fastest controller you can get a hold off.
This is the simplest solution to increase LR processing speed.

I am using LR that way and I find it quite responsive with at catalog of 100'000 plus images.
Speaking of LR, in the catalog settings, deselect the option of deleting thumbnails after 30-days. This measure of course increases needs for disk space but that commodity is cheap and LR will not have to recreate thumbnails when they were not used for more than 30-days.
My 5-pennies of LR experience.
Good luck.

 

[robilong]

Thanks for replies. Obviously I must work with my problem longer. It started from the fact that upgrading old XP Pro PC to new hardware with 8GB RAM and W7x64 didn't changed "wait times" during what the HDD red light is furiously blinking. That's most disturbing with Lightroom (today ver 3.3), that I can't browse photos fast and also I can't edit photos when I want but I must wait until W7 and PC agree with each other, that I can do it now.
And all my web searches ended with warning, that playing with page file is dangerous...

And in other hand adding into W7x64 PC extra DDR3 memory for page file instead of slow HDD, should be a most obvious conclusion now, when memory doesn't cost much.

 

[logicearth]

Lets get this out of the way. Your problem is not Windows, is not the pagefile, is not the amount of RAM, not anything related to hardware or Windows. Your problem is Lightroom. Any setting or alteration in Windows will not fix your problem with Lightroom. That is all there is to it.

Lightroom is moving its catalog to and from the HDD, not Windows, not to the pagefile.

 

[whs]

Lets get this out of the way. Your problem is not Windows, is not the pagefile, is not the amount of RAM, not anything related to hardware or Windows. Your problem is Lightroom. Any setting or alteration in Windows will not fix your problem with Lightroom. That is all there is to it.

Lightroom is moving its catalog to and from the HDD, not Windows, not to the pagefile.

Absolutely right. If you used "normal" tools, you would not have that problem. And Btw: rather than adding more RAM, I would consider an SSD - or even better: a Revo drive.

 

[snahl]

...upgrading old XP Pro PC

You need to make sure your disks used to upgrade from XP to Win7 are properly aligned.

...the HDD red light is furiously blinking

This is a possible reason that your disks are NOT properly aligned and thus all software (OS and programs, not only LR) has to work a lot harder to retrieve data off the disk(s).

My suggestion:
Clear your drives fully with 'diskpart.exe' using the 'clean' option.
Then make a proper clean install of windows 7.

Also, carefully read and follow the many great tutorials available in this forum.

Then when Windows7 is up and running properly AND you still have problems with LR, then it's time to move to a forum that is LR related.

Personally I do NOT recommend the use of a SSD to store your LR catalog. Yes it's very fast, but the many writes LR preforms constantly is also a burden to the SDD and may decrease the great performance of your SSD soon and dramatically.

Good luck.

 

[Layback Bear]

robilong please keep in mind that the people here give advice only to help others. I think it is plain to see that most agree on what to do with page filing. I also agree to let Windows 7 handle the page filing and the ram. Mr Bill and Microsoft have finely given us a Operating System that does the job correctly. IMHO I would not change things just to try to get one program to work better. As has been said before; it's the program and not the Operating System. Just a thought. Many have tried as the next step to install a 3rd part program to (tune up ram, operating system and the like). I have found no such program that works. Most do more damage than good.