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11

I was contradicting the downvote. But to your last comment: I run 2 different machines w/o swap. It's perfectly fine if you know exactly how the machine is going to be used.
– spudone
Commented Sep 12, 2014 at 16:27
8

I suspect page file in a ramdrive started out as a cargo cult "workaround" for the fact that some software will refuse to start if it detects there isn't a page file. (I've been told Adobe's graphics/video tools do this.)
– Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight
Commented Sep 12, 2014 at 21:06
15

@DavidSchwartz The information you give is technically correct, and it's good information to know. But the conclusion that you come to that you should always have a page file regardless of how much RAM you have is not correct and I stand by my claim that this should not be the accepted answer.
– Jason Wheeler
Commented Feb 21, 2015 at 11:27
15

I just don't like hearing that "pagefiles are magic so don't turn them off or you'll be sorry" when I know that under many common circumstances that you can turn them off, and safely see an improvement in performance because you are no longer increasing disk I/O by 100% or higher whenever the MMS wants to do something. All I want to hear from the people on the other side of this debate is "yes, there are circumstances where you can turn them off and reduce disk I/O which can result in thrashing". I'm not saying pagefiles are always bad, maybe you can say that they're not always necessary.
– Fred Hamilton
Commented Jul 13, 2015 at 5:08
8

I realized what was riling me about all this is that one side seems to be saying "pagefiles never do anything but good" and the other side is "pagefiles are terrible" and then people get entrenched on one side or the other. The "truth" is that in some cases they're very useful and even crash-preventing and in other cases they are not needed and can actually cause performance to decrease. I'm happy with that as my final statement regardless. Live long and prosper, @David Schwartz.
– Fred Hamilton
Commented Jul 13, 2015 at 20:04

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