Timeline for Should I disable swap file if I have lots of RAM or should I move it to a virtual RAM drive?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Dec 8, 2021 at 10:20 | history | edited | Twinbee | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Link wasn't being directed to actual forum post any more, but to the thread beginning, so corrected.
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| Apr 1, 2018 at 0:33 | comment | added | Jamie Hanrahan | otoh, moving your OS partition (including the pagefile) to an SSD can help, because all of those other "paging files" (EXEs and DLLs, mapped data files, etc.) can now benefit from the fast seek performance of the SSD. | |
| Mar 31, 2018 at 19:22 | comment | added | Jamie Hanrahan | 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! | |
| Mar 31, 2018 at 19:18 | comment | added | Jamie Hanrahan | 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. | |
| Mar 31, 2018 at 1:04 | comment | added | Twinbee | @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". | |
| Jul 31, 2015 at 22:51 | comment | added | Jamie Hanrahan | 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! | |
| Feb 12, 2015 at 6:15 | history | bounty ended | user1306322 | ||
| Feb 7, 2015 at 18:54 | comment | added | user1306322 |
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
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| Feb 7, 2015 at 15:07 | history | answered | Twinbee | CC BY-SA 3.0 |