Pagefile.sys

Just to throw my 2¢ in here...

<flame suit off>
While this article title would lead one to think it is intended to document configuration for 2008R2 servers, it applies 100% to other OSes (XP, Vista, Windows 7) and the article does cover those briefly:
How to determine the appropriate page file size for 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 and or Windows 2008 R2

Some salient quotes from the article, stressing Microsoft's official positions:

There is no specific recommendation for page file size. Your requirements will be based on the hardware and software that you use and the load that you put on the computer.

However, as the amount of RAM in a computer increases, the need for a page file may decrease.

The more RAM that you have available or is added to a computer, it generally tends to decrease the size of the page file needed. If you have enough RAM installed in your computer, you may not require a page file at all, unless one is required by a specific application. This all depends on how much virtual memory is used by your system and/or applications installed.

With all that said, however, there is indeed one thing people don't think about when running without a paging file, and I'm glad it was called out in the article:

Question: How about not having a paging file?

Answer: There are administrators that feel not having a page file results in better performance.

But having a page file means Windows can write pages on the modified list out to the page file, which makes that memory available for more useful purposes such as processes or file cache.

Thus, while there may be some workloads that perform better with no paging file, in general having one will mean more usable memory being available to the Operating system.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a proponent of leaving the paging file alone in most circumstances, and for most users. However, I also understand there are systems out there with 128+GB for servers, and 32+GB of RAM on even desktop machines. If you want to tweak, please follow this KB article (including steps for determining the commit limits of your usage behavior and patterns) and you should be safe. However, do remember that you are modifying the way the modified page writer works, thus running the risk of impacting some of the cache performance of the OS, as well as removing the ability to page in times of severe commit pressure (and thus bugchecking becomes possible).

My position is, it's *your* machine - do with it what you will. But only do it once you have *all* of the answers and facts, and have done your own performance research to make sure you don't run the risk of crashing, and you can live with the potential for a cache performance hit you may take when running without a paging file.

</flame suit off>

For those that want to turn off page filing; just do it and be happy. For those like me and many others that use page filing, do it and be happy. Most important to those that don't really know what to do. IMHO and doing a lot of reading on this subject, I would recommend letting Windows 7 take care of your memory and page filing.
I like most people here try to give help and information that help others.
Microsoft has spent millions of man hours and dollars creating Windows 7. They didn't put page filing in their operating system just because they had nothing else to do. Page filing might not be needed on every computer in the world but it works great on all the computers I have used.

Otase said:

As for me i dont let windows manage it while having 8gb or less,
with 8gb ram i would set Page file Min/Max to 1024mb just to be safe
and be done with it lol.

Reasons are: use memory ram in more efficient way and less/or no fragment to the disk at all.

Oh boy, really, you are not smarter than Microsoft Engineers, leave pagefile as system managed, unless you have a very small dic..i mean SSD and every gb of working space is really needed.