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  • Thanks for compiling this list. It should help bring forward some evidence that theory and practice differ in this matter. Virtual memory − A paging file is an area on the hard disk that Windows uses as if it were RAM. Yeah, as if :p Commented Feb 7, 2015 at 18:54
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    this conclusion is flawed. the fact that the OS writes things to the pagefile even though it apparently has "massive amounts of RAM free" does not prove anything about "flawed design and philosophy". It means you don't have enough information to properly evaluate the OS's decisions. Just for starters, consider the case where there are many modified pages. They get written to the pagefile and moved to the standby list - now they're part of "available". Do you get it? The RAM is available BECAUSE its contents got written to the pagefile! Commented Jul 31, 2015 at 22:51
  • @JamieHanrahan: That doesn't explain why people still have issues despite rarely using more than a fraction of the RAM. Comments in that thread include: "I've never really used more than half of it", "Page file usage is about 2.7GB where RAM usage is 3.23GB out of 16GB.", "I had a dramatic performance increase using Illustrator when I created and moved my pagefile to RAMDisk".
    – Twinbee
    Commented Mar 31, 2018 at 1:04
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    Most of those comments are due to poor information. Performance issues are unlikely to be solved by keeping stuff in RAM that isn't being accessed often. The pagefile is not the only file involved in paging; there are hundreds of others, so it is unlikely that doing something that affects only the pagefile (and takes GBs of RAM away from the rest of the system, thereby increasing the pagefault rate) will have any "dramatic" effect. Such reports are usually not sustained when properly controlled tests are done. You can find anecdotes to support just about any belief; I find them unconvincing. Commented Mar 31, 2018 at 19:18
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    In particular, the claim "the pagefile is being used" demands proof. Just having GBs of stuff in the pagefile does not prove that the pagefile is being used in a way that puts it in a critical performance path. To evaluate this, isolate the pagefile on a partition by itself - or at least, one that isn't actively in use for anything else - and then you can use PerfMon on that "logical disk" to monitor its IO rates. If the pagefile is not being read often then it doesn't matter how much has been written to it! Commented Mar 31, 2018 at 19:22