Pagefile - Do you have it enabled or disabled?

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Omnipotent

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Do you have the windows pagefile enabled or disabled? I have 16GB of RAM and have it enabled on my HDD instead of my SSD, what should i set the allocated RAM to? Would i be better off disabling it since i a lot of memory?
 

Vasudev

Level 33
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Nov 8, 2014
2,224
If you've enough memory, you can disable it. Also, you could set it to a custom value i.e. 512MB as min and max value.
You can see this discussion about PF here too, Discussion about Pagefile.sys
The discussion has been going on since ages and no one can rule out completely who is correct and incorrect.
All I can say is that, if you are a developer or someone who writes codes I prefer the PF to be set to a bare minimum value to avoid possible BSoD's even if you've >32GB.
 
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Myriad

Level 7
Verified
Well-known
May 22, 2016
349
I have it enabled.
I want to ask though on SSD should be enabled or disabled?
I read many articles but i can't come up with a clear conclusion.

Some SSD users are concerned that an enabled page-file means that the same block of cells
are constantly being written to .
It is simply not so .

Any good quality SSD will have a "wear-levelling" algorithm in the firmware that prevents this happening .
 

chrcoluk

Level 1
Verified
Aug 6, 2015
23
I suggest enable it.

A few reasons.

1 - There will be occasions where for whatever reason your ram gets saturated (e.g. buggy memory leak), if you have no pagefile then windows will crash, whilst a pagefile would slow things down in that situation, it beats a frozen system.
2 - The OS will intelligently page data that has sat unused in memory for a long time, in preference to flushing and shrinking the cache size, in essence a swap file allows a bigger filesystem cache. It is my opinion this is good behaviour, overall it should yield a performance improvement.

On win8.1 x64 after about a day or so uptime with lots of tabs open in chrome, some multimedia use, occasional gaming, outlook and few small tools, my page file usage tends to settle about 5% usage. This is with 16gig of ram and an 8 gig swapfile.

Now my page is on my boot SSD which is a 3d nand MLC drive. The swapfile is dynamic with a min of 8 gig and a max of 16 gig, I think on a ssd dynamic is fine to use, but try to not have it constantly resizing so set the min size to be enough for your every day use.

On a hdd I would use a static size so it stays unfragmented.
 

Evjl's Rain

Level 47
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Apr 18, 2016
3,684
I have 8gb of ram and I'm happy to disable it
because of that I've been using my laptop for 4 years without degrading my HDD. Never experience ram insufficiency even with 512mb of ramdrive created. General performance is much better after disbling pagefile
I just want to increase my HD lifespan so I MUST disable pagefile to decrease io activity

if you have at least 6gb ram with light usage, you can disable pagefile. I play games on my laptop
 

Vasudev

Level 33
Verified
Nov 8, 2014
2,224
I kept pf at 1024MB sine i utilise a internal gpu so RAM gets shared. You can safely disable PF if you're using only using apps,games, browsing etc.
Now, if you're a developer I recommend setting a decent amount of PF since a badly written code could lock up my PC.
 
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NekoHr

Level 3
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Well-known
Feb 5, 2016
139
You can safely disable PF if you're using only using apps,games, browsing etc.

If you need PF depends on programs you use. If you just browse, play some simple games ok but try running Premiere, Aftereffects and Photoshop. Often these are used and opened at same time too.

So recommendation goes back to leave as it is unless you know what you do, know programs that you use and are willing to fix if it doesn't work.
 
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Aura

Level 20
Verified
Jul 29, 2014
966
It's enabled, I have 16GB of RAM on my computer, and there's only a 1GB pagefile.sys file on my SSD. Looks like I don't really need it, but it never caused me any issue, so I don't see why I would disable it.
 
O

Omnipotent

Thread author
Wow it's amazing how reformatting a PC can fix a lot of problems. I set my page file to 2048MB and whenever i tried playing a game it would keep saying that i'm running low on memory, found out that my PC wasn't recognising that i had 16GB of ram installed. Whenever i would check in task manager it would say 14.4GB i thought that it was normal, just like how some 4GB usb's read as 3.90GB etc. When i let windows manage my pagefile size before it would be 6-7GB, now it's 2944MB.
 
H

hjlbx

Thread author
Enabled, Windows managed - even with 12 GB RAM installed.

There's a lot of mis-information about the pagefile all over the web.

upload_2016-9-6_12-37-50.png
 

Neno

Level 6
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Well-known
Jan 4, 2012
277
16GB of ram with pagefile disabled on 850 EVO SSD. The things i hated most in computer hardware last 2 decades are HDD's :)
 
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jamescv7

Level 85
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Honorary Member
Mar 15, 2011
13,070
I think the safe keeping here is leaving it by default [ON]. The operating system itself contains numerous performance optimization that goes very well without messing the configuration.

RAM problem? Upgrade instead.
 
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