Disabling pagefile in windows 10

Question

I read a lot about disabling pagefile pretty much everywhere and some places tell you that doing so is a great thing for performance (given a lot of ram) and other places tell you that even with a huge ammount of ram it can lead to an unstable system.

Context: I work with a windows 10 machine, 4 slots of ram with 4gb each running @ 1600 MHz, an i7 4790k 2 SSDs and a normal HDD. My peak load was around 12 gb, this machine does not shut down ever (well, rare occasions maybe). Running win 10 pro.

I disabled pagefile in all drives and since then, performance increased like 10 times; pretty much everything opens significantly faster and some hangs i encountered every once in a while are no longer there; so far there is no stability issues nor any other problem.

My question is: On the long run, how it can affect me negatively? Since this computer is always powered on and run some services (game servers, iis...) could this be an issue? Should i look at other configurations before actually shutting pagefile off? Should i keep an eye for page faults while running on this configuration?

Do have in mind i don't really care about critical system crashes nor stuff like that; such information is not valuable to me in any way (at least not now, this system has been stable for months with pagefile on and if ever necessary to diagnose such problem i can turn it back on to do so).

Also, my focus is on pure performance and i don't rely on cache to do the trick (that's why 2 high-performance SSDs with programs i open often), so stuff like superfetch has little to no utility here (also, most programs are always loaded on memory from the startup, at least the ones i use the most so there should not be any need to access disk to get anything often).

Additional context: All the memory i have should be all the memory i need; over-commiting is not an issue and i can manage what goes in and out if really needed (as i said before, i know very well my peak workload and the available ram i have is more than 'nuf for the task). The main idea is to have everything in memory without the need to i/o to disk or whatsoever. I keep at least 4-6GB of ram available at all times for critical tasks and to handle situations where a process might ask for more memory, if it asks too much it will be denied memory (as it should be) instead of swapping; in such event i can manually shut down other processes to free up ram if extremelly necessary.

Answer 1

In Windows 10 Microsoft changed the paging a lot. Now Windows compresses data that would go in pagefile in earlier Windows versions and stores it in SYSTEM process. This reduces the pagefile usage a lot and Windows is now much more responsive. There is no need to disable the pagefile.

Answer 2

Regarding the question "how it can affect me negatively?", disabling the paging file can sometimes cause apps to hang or crash if they are badly-designed and depend on the paging file to operate, or over-commit memory.

I too run Windows with the paging file disabled for various reasons, including potentially serious security issues related to the paging file which, strangely, are rarely mentioned in the responses to kinds of questions.

I experienced the hanging and crashing problem described above in one install. Never happened until I switched to Windows 11 though so I think the fact that various applications were popping up with memory errors might be more do to with my particular system. Under Windows 8 right up to and including 10, I had the paging file disabled and never had any memory management problems. Here's my SU post about that: Memory errors since disabling Windows paging file (for data security and other reasons)