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

[tgfyhre]

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.

 

[GokAy]

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

 

[tgfyhre]

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?

 

[GokAy]

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)

 

[tgfyhre]

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.

 

[GokAy]

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/magazine/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]

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.

 

[tgfyhre]

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.

 

[carwiz]

There's no magic happening inside the box. Everything acted upon has to first be stored in memory, including the program that does the acting. There's no direct flow of data from drive to drive. And you're sharing space with everything else running including Windows. The pagefile is used to temporarily store memory "pages" when a higher priority task is running. The pagefile is then read back into memory and another task resumes. The only way to keep this from happening is by adding more RAM. But that's not happening on a 32-bit machine. For this, you should only run the rar extraction and nothing else. Also check your startup list and background apps that run unnecessarily. OEM PCs are usually heavily loaded with crapware monitors and few owners will let go of their Gadgets (and their own crapware). Slim down active tasks and everything will run faster.

 

[GokAy]

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.

 

[Alejandro85]

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?

Some RAM is always used for everything. In particular, running compression/uncompression algorithms can sometimes be very memory-intensive , that's not specific to WinRar, but most if not all similar programs eat some considerable memory when working. Particular to WinRar, the memory usage is highly dependant on the dictionary size used when creating the file, WinRar is very specific about it (it warns when using one larger than 128MB), but the global file size doesn't affects that much.
For extracting the files there is no way around using some amount of memory for that task, as it takes some serious effort to decode the compressed thing into the usable form again. When RAM is limited, Windows will fall back to use the pagefile, so it can grow very big during such operation, clogging the IO for that drive. You can mitigate that by uncompressing to a different physical drive instead if you have one, then moving the whole thing.

Moving page file to another partition or drive to me is a no no.

Just curious, why is that?

 

[tgfyhre]

Thank you.

Does having a large dictionary size affect the memory consumption of encoding/decoding if I have winrar set to"store"? Or is it only affected if I actually use compression?

 

[Alejandro85]

When using store, there is no compression at all being done, so no, it uses minimal memory (in fact I believe that the dictionary size is ignored in such case). Store is just a plain copy-paste plus some internal file formating, nothing that requires substantial memory/CPU. But using that would defeat the purpose of using compression programs in the first place I suppose.

 

[Layback Bear]

From post #11

Just curious, why is that?

I personally know of no good reason to do such a thing. But I'm willing to learn if their is a good reason.
If a system needs more ram it doesn't seem to me moving page files around does anything good. Windows 7 doesn't need to be looking for page files to do what needs to be done.

Like I said, I'm willing to learn and eager to do so.

 

[Alejandro85]

I personally know of no good reason to do such a thing. But I'm willing to learn if their is a good reason.
If a system needs more ram it doesn't seem to me moving page files around does anything good. Windows 7 doesn't need to be looking for page files to do what needs to be done.

It won't get more RAM, but there is a performance thing with this. Putting pagefile on a separate phyisical drive allows the OS to balance the IO load between it and other tasks (that is, Windows can use the pagefile and at the same time read/write some other data on a different disk). With all together both tasks compete for the drive attention, and usually end up waiting for each other to finish, slowing things down.
I think the OP is victim of this effect to some extent, as he says disabling the page file speeds the unpacking, but then he falls to the "insufficient memory" problem.

Putting it in a separate partition achieves nothing of this, it's just an administrative measure, like the "where do I want to take the disk space hit", as partitions share the same physical disk, hence use the same IO.

 

[lehnerus2000]

RAM Disc

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 best idea would be to upgrade to a 64 bit OS with more RAM (if possible).

However, if the OP's motherboard can take more RAM, they could add more and then create a RAM Disc.

My previous setup had 8GB of RAM and I was triple booting:

• XP (32 bit)
• W7 (64 bit)
• LM17 (64 bit)

Since XP was only 32 bits, I had 4GB of RAM that couldn't be used.

I created a 4GB RAM Disc and then moved the page file to it.
XP seemed to run very smoothly with that arrangement.

 

[gregrocker]

Have seen problems with WinRAR so I'd uninstall and try 7Zip which never causes problems.