Virtual Memory disabled ClearPageFileAtShutDown still slowing shutdown

I'm confused. My shutdown times shot up recently. MS Performance Analyzer traced the problem to large volume writing on diskat shutdown. I disabled ClearPageFileAtShutDown. Everything good. However, due to (admittedly exaggerated) securityconcerns I wanted to keep it enabled and decided to try reducing virtual memory to a minimum instead. Thought clearing a small pagefile.sys file at shutdown would be faster. Result: everything back to slow. In other words no difference. Why? I know it would be simpler just to disable the overwrite of pagefile but I really want to know why Disk I/O is showing the same thousands of operations at shutdown whether allotted virtual memory is very large or small (0MB).

Is this an SSD and what was the original size of the pagefile?

When the pagefile was set to 0 the first shutdown after doing this will still be slow. At shutdown the pagefile was still at it's original size and needing to be cleared. Only at the next startup will the pagefile be set to 0. This may have been your issue.

Clearing the pagefile can be useful in a highly secure environment but it makes little sense outside of a comprehensive security policy. Creating and implementing such a policy would require quite a bit of work on your part. Most systems have security problems that are more serious than an uncleared pagefile. Typically a hacker can obtain what he wants with much less effort than that required to access the pagefile.

There is considerable misinformation on the Internet concerning this option. Contrary to some claims it has no performance benefits of any kind.

logicearth said:

Are you on an SSD? If you are you want to turn that off. Due to the way SSDs work, this can cause severe degradation.

And to add. The security you get from this is nonexistent.

Normal harddrive.

I thought ClearPageFileAtShutDown simply overwrote the allotted virtual memory. But, mine is now 0MB. Despite that over 2GB are being written at every shutdown. So, what does it really do?

LMiller7 said:

Is this an SSD and what was the original size of the pagefile?

When the pagefile was set to 0 the first shutdown after doing this will still be slow. At shutdown the pagefile was still at it's original size and needing to be cleared. Only at the next startup will the pagefile be set to 0. This may have been your issue.

Clearing the pagefile can be useful in a highly secure environment but it makes little sense outside of a comprehensive security policy. Creating and implementing such a policy would require quite a bit of work on your part. Most systems have security problems that are more serious than an uncleared pagefile. Typically a hacker can obtain what he wants with much less effort than that required to access the pagefile.

There is considerable misinformation on the Internet concerning this option. Contrary to some claims it has no performance benefits of any kind.

A closer look at the data from the shutdown trace showed that hiberfil.sys was occupying the harddrive not pagefile. I've removed hibernate and returned pagefile.sys to a higher level. 0MB was only for diagnostics not performance. Thanks.

It should be understood that clearing the pagefile on shutdown and hibernation are incompatible. Clearing the pagefile would make a resume from hibernation impossible so the setting is ignored. And what good would it do when there is a complete copy of memory in the hiberfil.sys file?