Pagefile.sys

[seth500]

Does it run better without a page file?
No! No reputable source has ever published benchmarks establishing any performance gains deleting the page file.

Is there any advantage to disabling the page file?
No! There is no documented evidence to suggest there is any advantage to disabling the page file.

Are there any downsides to disabling the page file?
Yes! There is much documented evidence that shows disabling the PF affects memory dumps and some programs.

Exactly and those some programs being adobe products and other big ram suckers. I have never had any performance issue's by having a paging file and I would never not have one. The facts that Digerati has stated above are true nobody has documented anything as to the claims of disabling the page file. It's been nothing but guessing. I don't go off of guesses..

 

[pparks1]

But mark my words it will happen and as we progress with Technology and we will find a way to accomplish that.

From a server administration standpoint, every single system that I work with incorporates a page type file...be it Windows, Linux (swap) or VMWare ESX/i hypervisors (swap). I'm not aware of any design initiative to simply eliminate the use of a swap file.

There's no question by setting a Pagefile it increases disk activity BUT it does slow performance, especially on an SSD.

If by an increase in disk activity, you count "anything" as more..well then of course. But unless you have a very small amount of RAM, it's going to be a dismally small amount of disk I/O.

As to slowing down performance...I've not encountered that. I don't think it's even more true on an SSD.

That was the original question before this huge debate and the question was "Should I set a Pagefile on an SSD?" My answer was no simply because based on my specs (read my very first post) I don't believe you need Pagefile on SSD running 64bit with a large sum of Ram.

I would agree that "many people probably don't need a pagefile with large sums of RAM". However, I would not persuade anybody to disable a pagefile as I don't think it leads to any real performance gain, nor does it cause a performance problem. I'd suggest leaving it as designed and being better safe than sorry.

 

[Calabrache]

Simple question from : win7x64 with 8go ram. What most efficient approach between letting window determines the PF value and fix it. It seems if you click 'automaticaly manage.." it set it to a value equivalent to RAM, but in the recommend value there is about 12go. Any clue ? Best regards

 

[Digerati]

The best approach is to just let Windows manage it. The is NO evidence whatsoever indicating any other approach is better.

 

[pparks1]

The best approach is to just let Windows manage it. The is NO evidence whatsoever indicating any other approach is better.

Agreed. The only time I make an exception is when drive space is at a premium. For example, my work laptop has 4GB of RAM and an 80GB SSD. The recommended amount from Windows is 6GB..but that's nearly 10% of my total usable disk space for something I won't likely ever need. So, I set it manually to 2GB of space as a min and a max. It wasn't done in any attempt to improve performance, but rather to just limit disk usage.

 

[Digerati]

Right. But as I mentioned earlier, that is more or less a patch, not a solution. The real solution is to free up disk space, or buy more disk space - though admittedly, on a notebook that is not always an easy task.

And certainly, on XP and before systems, when disk space was limited, there was a problem with "fragmentation creep" - where the expanding and contracting page file would contribute to file fragmentation - so a fixed size PF would remedy that. But again, later versions of Windows memory management has minimized that being a problem.

 

[medeiom]

Digerati...for your information, I have been a SevenForums user since Dec 2009 and I love this site. I am a technical experienced analyst who has dealt with computers and networking since 1997. So I am NOT anonymous NOR am I expressing any false claims. In the past, yes I have enabled pagefile on my old systems because Ram was limited. Now that I have an SSD with a vast amount of Ram, I wanted to experience the pros and cons of having a Pagefile. It's my choice, it works and in my opinion...I wouldn't enable Pagefile on an SSD with a ton of Ram. Simple as that.

No offense and forgive me, but if Microsoft "recommends" not to disable Pagefile....than why give us that option under Advance Settings?? And the words "not needed" is the same as I DON'T NEED which under Advance Settings is DISABLE!

Truthfully, I respect your technical background and I'm sure you're quite the experienced analyst, but I am not the only one out there that feels like Pagefile is not needed on an SSD with vast amount of Ram.

 

[pallesenw]

I see several posts have been deleted. At least the last one about Marks blog is relevant and informative, is it not?

 

[Teerex]

Just to recap - when faced with a ton of RAM Windows 7 will adapt and use almost no pagefile - sometimes literally not at all. There is no need to force it not to use it by not giving it any - there's no gain! It does not use it anyway!

However, when faced with a memory leak, you have some additional leeway before you run out of memory.

 

[Graemzy]

i know some people say that it is best to leave it alone and let windows mange it but i like to use it, i find it helps.

so if the recommended size of your page file is twice your ram what may be the downfall or what can happen if you go above twice your ram size? will it even matter?

also will the page file cause errors if you go above your OS version max amount of ram?

for example i have 3g of ram and the page file set to 10g, im using windows home premium which i think has a max of 8g ram, i may be wrong there tho. i also have the max and min page file set the same, 10g, is this a good idea or not????

 

[cluberti]

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>

 

[Teerex]

Pavel Lebedinsky
24 Nov 2008 11:06 PM

By the way, there are actually 2 separate reasons why pagefiles are necessary.

The first reason is to allow dirty pages that are never (or very rarely) referenced to be moved to disk, freeing up more RAM for other purposes.

The other reason is to enable better use of *virtual* memory, given that physical memory is allocated on demand. Remember that when a process calls VirtualAlloc(MEM_COMMIT) there are no physical pages allocated at this time. Physical pages are only allocated when the app accesses virtual pages for the first time. This is good because it makes committing pages a relatively cheap operation, so apps can commit memory in bigger chunks, without having to worry about each page they may or may not use.

Now, even though committing memory does not allocate physical pages, it still guarantees to the application that reading from/writing to the committed pages will never fail (or deadlock). It might be slow if other physical pages have to be moved to disk in order to make room, but it will eventually succeed.

In order to make that guarantee the memory manager has to assume that every committed page in the system might eventually be written to. And that in turn means that there has to be enough space in the physical memory and all the pagefiles combined to hold all the resulting data. In other words, the total commit charge has to be less than the system commit limit. Once the limit is reached, the memory manager will refuse to commit any more memory, even if there is still plenty of unused (free+zeroed) physical pages, or plenty of unused space in the pagefile.

In a sense, pagefiles are like stormwater ponds. Most of the time they are (almost) empty, but they have to be large enough in case a big storm happens.

Some more techspeak on this topic.

 

[medeiom]

Just to throw my 2¢ in here...

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>

I couldn't agree more as I have been running without a Pagefile for over 18months and without any crashes.

 

[Layback Bear]

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]

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.

 

[OldMX]

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.

 

[pallesenw]

you are not smarter than Microsoft Engineers

That phrase is getting old.

 

[JimLewandowski]

From the command line:

wmic process list full | find "PageFileUsage"


WMIC has all kinds of goodies.

 

[Otase]

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.

Whats the point leaving system managed if it is fragmenting HDD everytime it will acess it
even 512mb fixed min/max values is enough for pagefile with an 8gb ram,
i just leave 1024mb to make the favor for pagefile.

Only one thing i dont recommend for anyone is disabling it lol.

Note: (Only pointing my opinion)

 

[miki69]

I've found this article making comparison with/out pagefile:
The Windows 7 Pagefile And Running Without One » TweakHound

Cheers,
Miki