16 GB, what to do with the Pagefile

I have 16 Gb in my XPS 17.

The point is, the Pagefile is now also 16GB. And with a SSD drive it feels a bit like a waste of valuable SSD space.

What can I do best now?

Turn it off?
Set it to a fixed size of, say, 1 GB?
Put it on the normal harddrive?

I would say, the more RAM, the smaller the pagefile could be, but if I let Windows arrange it, it costs me 16GB of SSD space.
What will be written to the pagefile if everything fits in RAM?

 

No page file especially with an SSD. Useless IMHO!

 

Turing page file off or shrinking it is a hot topic that really depends on the person. Me, I would probably just turn it down to like 0.5-1GB so if it needs it it has it. But with 16GB you aren't likely to need it I should think.

 

Monitor your RAM usage to check how much of it you normally use, and what the maximum utilization levels are. If the maximum is 70~80%, then it should be perfectly safe to turn paging off. Continuous paging is certainly detrimental to an SSD, which has a limited number of read/write cycles.

 

@ sesshomaru Great point,

When you say normal HDD I assume you have a 2nd hard drive. If you really need it make sure it is on the HDD not the SSD.
I have a similar SSD/HDD (8 GIG ram/1 GIG pagefile) setup and have it this way & have yet to hear the HDD spin up when runnng programs from the SSD.
My answer assumes you are not running an application such as Photoshop.

 

Yes I have the original harddisk as second drive in my XPS 17.

But there has to be a reason Windows creates a 16 GB file and not let the size grow if needed. Or even don't use it at all if not needed. If it would work that way there would be no problem at all.

And since Win 7 is aware of the SSD and turns off defragmentation and indexing for the SSD drive, why did Windows not place the swap file on the second drive directly if this is better for the SSD?

 

Never completely turn off the pagefile. It shouldn't cause a problem most of the time, but there are applications out there that force use the pagefile even if you have more than enough RAM. If you happen to run one of those programs, you will crash. The pagefile also is used to cache startup programs to speed up boot times. You also can't due a memory minidump after a BSOD for diagnostics unless you have at least a 512MB page file. Set it to a fixed 512MB and leave it there. If the system doesn't need it, it won't use it; if it does, it will be there to prevent crashes/log errors/speed up boot times.

Also, if you have an SSD, set the pagefile to the SSD, not the HDD. The SSD is much faster, and with that much RAM and such a small pagefile, the amount of write wear on the SSD will be quite minimal.

 

I set mine to 512MB and leave it alone. I've also run without one with no issues at all either.

 

Having NO page file can cause problems. Just minimize the space it uses.

 

Hmm, different opinions I see. I think the last 3 people convince me most. Just a small file. Windows indeed warns when you set it to 0 so that is no option.

The only bother is to set it to the SSD or to harddrive. If it isn't used much, there would be not much difference to put in on the harddisk or SSD. If it is used often it would be better to have it on SSD, but the downside still is the lifetime of the SSD. Is there a monitor program how much the pagefile is used?

 

Now that I read the other posts, it does make sense to allocate a small amount to the mechanical drive maybe. But as an earlier post stated, SSDs have a limited number of writes so I wouldn't put the PF on the SSD. Put it on the HDD. About to myself.......

 

It should go on the SSD. It will be rarely used with 16GB RAM but you will benefit from it being on the SSD.

As you can see, varying opinion on this...

 

Under normal circumstances, most people never require the diagnostic dump created during a system crash. Unless you are running some programs where system integrity is crucial, and data loss is intolerable, you *could* do without a pagefile. it isn't ideal. It simply is more practical.

That said, I would support keeping a pagefile on the normal mechanical HDD, if it is absolutely essential. As it stands, if you have hibernation enabled, the hiberfil.sys also compulsorily resides on the system drive-the ssd in your case. With 16 GB RAM, hiberfil.sys will also be similarly sized. There is no point to sacrificing both more space and the longevity of your SSD.

P.S. Ever since I first used 8GB RAM in any of my systems, I have always either turned the PF off, or had it at 256MB, depending on the presence of a mechanical drive in the system. The only exception is my workstation, which has a 32GB PF, for 64GB RAM. However that is intensively used for designing and simulations, so normal rules don't apply. And it boots off a SAS drive, with 4TB of secondary storage, so no space constraints either.

 

I would say that if you have a large amount of RAM, and an SSD, you should disable hibernation. This is a fairly standard SSD tweak. It will save a lot of disk space (same amount of disk space as you have in RAM), and hibernation isn't as helpful with an SSD as it is with an HDD, as boot times are super-fast anyway.

If OP is was interested in this, just hit the Windows key, type "cmd", hold CTRL+SHIFT (to make it an administrator prompt) and hit ENTER. In the command prompt type "powercfg -h off"

Other easy space-saving tweaks would be to shrink the amount of space set aside for the Recycle Bin, and reducing the amount of space reserved for restore points. Some would even advocate for disabling system restore, but I'd highly recommend against it. One bad driver install or corruption, and you might be forced to reinstall Windows because it's irrecoverable (this happened to me once with the Intel AHCI drivers).

 

I will not read all topic.
What I say is:
I have 6 GB of RAM. I7-740qm CPU. HDD
I rarely render video, sometimes play hard games, HD video, web, music etc.
I set paging file to 50MB. NEVER had problems.
I suggest you set the same or little bigger (like 100MB).

That's it.

EDIT: OK. I have read 2 posts above... Delete that hyberfil.sys. Total waste of space.
Do NOT set paging file to HDD. It will slower your computer. You can use either USB 3.0 fast flash drive or RAMDisk. RamDisk will slower boot speeds but it will not slower overall speed like HDD will. Maybe flash drive also will slower it but lesser than HDD.
Set Ramdisk to save its image on HDD before shutdown and load from it when you turn laptop on. If you need more help about RAMDIsk PM me or write a post here.

 

ever since my systems have had 8GB, and maybe even back when 4GB was a lot, I have disabled the PF. I figure if I'm crash once, no biggie. It happens. If I crash repeatedly then i can turn it on.

I have noticed no problems at all, probably haven't even crashed since I started doing that. The only problem I could see is if you were playing a game with a memory leak, performance may start to degrade or it could crash.

 

Can someone explain why setting an initial size (of a previously mentioned number like 256mb) and a maximum size of 4GB (or whatever) would not be the ideal solution?

This way, it starts out as a negligible loss of space, but if something happens to need more, the file will grow as needed.

Also, from what I understand, Windows 7 will keep the page file together as 1 piece, when possible (i.e. will allocate space for the maximum but will put stuff in that spot if you're out of space).

 

I indeed turned off Hibernation, that was an easy decision.

And thanks about the tip on the Ramdisk, but what's the difference between setting up an 1GB pagefile in a RAM-disk, and no pagefile?

I guess when a BSOD occurs, the log can't be written as the RAM-disk crashes too.
And for use as virtual memory I can't see the advantage because the total amount of memory incl. RAM-disk can't exceed 16GB.

Not sure if I understand the function of a RAM-disk in this situation

 

Limited read/write cycles. Windows usually is not a well behaved OS, when it comes to paging. If there is a pf, it WILL use it, and thus eat away at your SSD bit by bit. In most consumer situations, saving the dump isn't a crucial necessity. It all depends on what is most important to you. Longevity, or stability.

 

1. RamDisk = RAM which means it is still MUCH faster than SSD so in that rare case when system needs paging file it will use it fast.
2. Example: you have paper dollars and no coins you will pay for everything but when your sell-phone dies and you will try to call from street phone you will need coins and doesn't matter that you have much money. The same is for RAM and paging file. You have 16 GB of RAM but it's better to have 15.9 GB of RAM and 0.1 for paging file.
3. Even if it will be Super-Duper-RamDisk which is able to stay turned on when system crashes dump file will not be saved on any drive except drive C.
4. I had couple crashes and i have read that dmp files after next boot. I understood nothing. That is why I decided after that to set paging file lower than that 400 MB.
5. Should I repeat a difference between no paging file and paging file?
6. In any case I suggested you to create little one paging file no matter where it will be.

There are 2 working laptops in my house: mine and old mother's-younger sister's. I use eBooster+Ramdisk (for FF cache) and 50MB paging file. I have HDD. Old lappy has eBoostr+1GB Temp partition in the beginning of drive (eBoostr cache, Temp directories and FF cache)
As you see there are many variants of setting up tweaks to boost performance on HDD. Now when SSD came it is even more.

 

Well I was thinking that if you reserve 1 GB for the RAM disk, 15GB RAM is left for the OS. So when Windows needs 15,5 GB, 0.5GB will be put in pagefile, on RAM-disk.
But with no RAM-disk the whole 15,5GB would have fit in RAM.

But this is probably a too simplified way of thinking.

 

This is so simply... that it took to read 2 times before I got your thought..
1. Windows almost never needs 15 GB of RAM...Unless you like to open in Photoshop RAW files with Gigs size.
2. As I said the only benefit to lower amount of RAM in this scenario is to guarantee stability for every program. This will make ram image very little (100-50MB) so it will take only couple extra seconds for boot.
I do not tell you to create it for FF cache or temp files like I did.

 

I did some testing. I set the initial size to the smallest possible value, 16MB. The maximum is set to 16GB
After that I started an application which contains a database that gets filled by downloading things. And I monitored how long it took before the pagefile got bigger. And that was at the very last moment. When I used 14GB of RAM the pagefile was still 16MB, so I guess it wasn't used.

So in that case, if the pagefile isn't used as virtual memory before all RAM is used, it's ok to put it on HD instead of SSD. In the rare case I use all 16GB of RAM it's ok the systems get's slower because it will use the pagefile on HD. And in that case it is better anyhow to reconsider closing some files or programs.