Windows 7 Page File

Ive been running the Win7 RC for 2 weeks hickup free and I'm very excited about what MS has working right now. I remember reading some people tinkering with the size of the page file in Vista. Im not sure how the page file is accessed in Win7 but with a system of 3GB of RAM, would changing the page file help or hurt performance at all? Also, how is the page file used? Thanks!

EM

 

I have always disabled teh stupid page file on all Operating systems that I use, be it XP 32 bit, Vista 64 bit, Win7 64 bit. Never ever had a problem using any program and I get super fast performance with increased battery life since there is no need to access teh HDD to retrieve any data.

 

That's all true assuming you don't use any RAM intensive applications or you have a lot of RAM.

 

Don't mess with the pagefile, it isn't faster whether you disable it or not. Better to be safe and leave it enabled.

 

I can't imagine how my quadcore computer will function without page file. How else am I going to get 10 more gigs of ram when running many VM at a time?

Anyways, it's best not to mess with the page file. If you want speed boost, use readyboost + eboostr 3.

Without eboostr 3, my netbook is pretty slow (or very fast in most people's view).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m84V-jAKRXM

With eboostr 3 installed with fast sd card, it's pretty much a night and day difference.

 

Eboostr eh? First time seeing that. Are you using the free edition or paid? If I saw this site on my own viewing, I would of assumed it was stupid software that doesn't work, but your video made it convincing it works.

 

My video is without eboostr3. After installing eboostr3, my bootime is cutdown by 2-5 seconds. IE now opens under 1s instead of 3s right after startup.

The responsiveness has also improved dramatically.

 

How does ebooster 3 work? What exactly does it do for a system? Also, how does ReadyBoost help a system out? Thanks for helping out a newb!!

 

Disable it.

 

Page file is useful if you use significant amounts of RAM. I use to disable my pagefile til I started getting low memory warnings. Firefox, Outlook, Word, Media Player and a few VNC clients will chew up some RAM.

 

Eboostr 3: preload small files such as thumnail cache to a fast flash storage so it's several times faster to load compared to hdd.
Readyboost: store small files from the virtual memory to fast flash storage so when the system needs something, it can get it faster from the flash storage.

I use both readyboost and paid version of eboostr3 and Windows 7 on my netbook is just as responsive (or fast depending on your point of view) as my quadcore desktop.

On Vista Ultimate 64bit on my desktop with 4GB of ram, I have about 8-16GB of page file and most of it gets used up when I run several virtual machines at once.

 

The real bottleneck in my system? The lame 6Mbps broadband connection.

 

I keep my Page File disabled. NB is more responsive as everything is loaded in memory. Nothing can happen except a sudden shutdown due to lack of memory. I have 2GB in XP and this happened only once or twice BC I had a lot of tabs open in a browser.

 

I haven't disable my pagefile yet.. though i have 4gb in and xp 32bit install. However I have loaded the kernel into the RAM which gives a much quicker startup and shutdown.

 

As far as disabling the page file... it may have been easier to make that choice on XP compared to Vista or Win7.

Both Vista and by extension, Windows 7, perform a lot of intelligent caching in the background. Typically not a megabyte of memory is wasted - the OS will load commonly-used files into memory to improve responsiveness and read access times. Vista/Win7 both monitor file usage and they "learn" what files you and your programs commonly access and pre-emptively cache them whenever memory is available.

So it can actually lead to a performance degredation if you disable the page file. If you disable the page file, everything must be loaded into physical memory - memory that would otherwise be used for the OS's intelligent caching. For example, the Catalyst Control Center on my desktop currently has 68MB memory allocated, but only 15MB resident in physical RAM. If I had my page file disabled, that means an extra 53MB of physical RAM would be used up on something fairly useless.

But if Vista/Win7 had access to that memory, it could start loading in more stuff into its memory cache, such as my start menu or desktop icons or internet browser cache. Whereas it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to need to start up the Catalyst Control Center. I found that on a system with an abundance of memory (>2GB) Vista was far snappier and more responsive than XP - and this memory caching is one of the reasons why.

My advice is not to tamper with it. Typically, the OS is reasonably smart about what to page out to disk (but not always). Unless you have a truly massive amount of memory available (like, 12GB) then it's safer just to let Windows deal with it.

 

There are whole thread devoted to the Pagefile vs No Pagefile......

 

I can sum it up for him anyway. If you never run out of physical memory (2GB or more), then page file is never getting used anyway, so there's no performance increase to be had. Too little physical memory, and you need page file, so what can you do? Here's a link that explain's it nicely.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000422.html

 

Let me sum it up for you correctly.

No matter how much ram you have, page file will always be used. OS page inactive or unused parts of the ram to the page file.
Enabling pagefile or disabling page file shouldn't matter very much unless you're almost running out of ram or you already ran out of ram to use.

New techniques have been discovered which can reduce the impact of too little physical memory dramatically.

 

Im sorry, I should have said that it didn't need to get used, not that it didn't.
Other than that my summary was fine, unless the blog is wrong.

 

seems pretty simple to answer...disable the page file and if you have no probs ...enjoy

if you have probs..re enable and...enjoy

some of you make this sound like the disabling is a " one time shot"...

 

ROFLMAO! QFT

Try out, if it doesn't work for u, renable it back.

But for me, I have always had it disabled and never ran into a single problem

kthxbye

 

if you have a gig of ram, does that mean your .pagefile will be 1 gig too?

 

no.
I think vista and 7 allocates pagefile= ram, but you can always change the size of a pagefile.

 

@uncensored410 - I think you're talking about hibernation file which will be the same as the amount of memory. Unless you do some reg hacks. Pagefile can be changed in size, you can let windows manage its size or you can disable it.

 

The pagefile usually has a max size equal to RAM, which is usually MORE than enough. Good thing be default it is dynamically sized.

 

Disabling the page file actually causes more RAM usage where there normally needn't be; this is one of several shortcomings of disabling the feature. With hard disk space costs so cheap, what are you really losing by having the page file enabled? Why do you think the career software engineers at Microsoft have it enabled by default? Do you really know better than them about reliably running a system?

 

No because Microsoft doesn't presume that all users have 2 GB + of RAM

Disable that useless page file FFS and utilize all your RAM its much much faster.

kthxbye

 

Which, when designing an OS that will run on hundreds of millions of computers, is a reasonable assertion. The page file existing still has a number of benefits regardless the amount of RAM present in a system. Being able to perform a memory dump when something goes horribly wrong in order to find out what caused it is an ability lost with the disabling of the page file, for example.

There is no performance loss when using a page file and I think you're a victim of placebo. You should read a decent book covering memory subsystems and the memory hierarchy. Care to post your real-world gains?

 

Reasons for using a pagefile

1. Not enough RAM
2. You want a dump file
3. A program refuses to run without a pagefile being present!

I have only heard about No. 3 but never run across it myself so not sure how true it is.


Reason for not using a pagefile.

1. More than enough RAM, not interested in dump files and none of your applications specifically require it

Do you really think that paging out RAM to the hard drive and then paging it back in when it's required is as fast as having it sit in RAM ready for immediate use?


Here's a snippet that made me laugh.

The guy must have the patience of a saint, I would not have lasted 30 seconds without hitting the power button.

So what would have happened if he had not been using a pagefile? Probably one of two things, the program would not have allowed it or the program would crash trying to allocate it. No waiting over half an hour to shut the program down. Heavy use of the pagefile can often be the cause of a slow and unresponsive system.

There is also a very small risk that some of the RAM that is paged out contains data that could be a security risk. You could have the PC wipe the pagefile of course but this will add to shutdown times.

 

@ O.O:

What you said is very true, I have never had ap roblem with any of the programs I run without a paging file, I do get more performance + less HDD thrashing (im using a laptop), and I never needed this stupid dump file

 

all pagefile disablers: have fun with your placebo. except maximus, you use an anxcient os, which has huge troubles with paging => you can disable it as it hurts performance. it doesn't on vista, so you can leave it on.

the pagefile is defined as a saveguard for the moment you don't have enough ram. never encountered? lucky you, then. the moment you encounter it, it'll suck. better save than sorry.

but yes, xp has very bad memory management and thus pages much too much. but it's from 2001 so i don't expect it to behave right with the todays amounts of ram.

for vista or win7, just leave it as it. there is NO gain in changing it.

 

For XP, instead of turning page file off, you can modify the registry to make Windows XP use all the memory before paging. Same effect, but a much safer and better method.

 

What I find optimal is to set the minimum amount of pagefile to 512mb and set the max to about 2gigs..... it runs fine and saves some space for what its worth

 

Having actually tested low memory scenarios I can say that I didn't find it suck at all. Vista might show us something like this when we get down to our last 100MB or so



and if we decided to close the program Vista offers a sub help file titled "Preventing low memory problems" which if we read will state "Although increasing the paging file size can help prevent low memory problems, it can also make your programs run more slowly."

I have also tested programs without enough memory being available to run them and many of them are not very graceful in the way they handle it but nothing I personally can not live with. If I have programs that are hogging the RAM whether intentionally or through memory leaks I want to know about it, not have parts of my other running programs pushed on to the hard disk to make room for them.

IMHO whether or not to use a pagefile and how much disk space to allocate it will vary on a case by case basis

 

i prefer to have my system slowing down instead of apps randomly crash.

which happens, as tested. and just because one app is a resource hog, doesn't mean that app will crash. it can then result in any other app not getting the needed memory, and kill that one.

and yes, sure, it makes your programs run more slowly ONCE YOU REACH THE MEMORY LIMIT.

but as long as you don't, and all the ones which disabled the page file don't, else they would have quite some crashes all the time, you won't notice a slowdown.

jackluo: thanks for the registry setting for xp, have to test that out.