I use RainMeter (Desktop Customisation Tool) and It comes with a widget that displays real-time RAM and Virtual Memory usage, and ever since I've had it - it always displays at least 10%-30% SWAP usage. Is comes to this % by adding RAM usage with "SWAP"/Virtual Memory usage, which comes in at a difference of +7/10% I have 11.6 GB (from 16Gb) available from application software. Is this healthy or a problem?
1 Answer
When a program allocates memory and doesn't use it for a while, the operating system can move it to the page file to free up memory to be used by the disk cache.
I believe Windows has a setting that lets you choose if this should be done a more or less aggressively. In XP it's in Control Panel under System -> Advanced tab then performance, click settings -> Advanced tab again. If you have lots of RAM, having to wait for your program to get swapped back in from the page file when you suddenly decide to use it may not be desirable.
