I've been running without a pagefile on my PCs since the days of Windows XP. Every single PC I've ever built had large amounts of RAM (even for gaming PCs), and I always thought, why the feck do I need a pagefile if I have gobs of RAM just sitting there?
I've even advised people on this very forum, to disable the pagefile if they have more RAM than they need..
This line of thought stayed with me for years, and I bet many others that disable their pagefile believe similarly. They want to force Windows to use as much RAM as possible, and stay away from the dreadfully slow (comparatively speaking) HDD/SSD.
So what changed my mind? Despite always having had large quantities of RAM in my machines, there's been a few times over the years when I've gotten warnings from Windows that I was running low on RAM. How could this be I thought, when task manager is showing that I still have lots of available memory left?
My most poignant recollection, was on my previous rig before the current one in my sig. It was an X79 build with 16GB of DDR3 2133 and Windows 8.1. I noticed that if I played several games back to back in short order, I could trigger this warning..
So something was obviously wrong, but I never really gave it much thought until I upgraded to Windows 10. Windows 10 supposedly has much more efficient memory handling than any previous OS from Microsoft. So imagine my surprise when the same damn thing happened again!
But instead of blaming it on my lack of a pagefile, I believed it was some sort of memory leak. And it wasn't an unwarranted belief mind you, as Windows 10 was a newly released OS at the time and it had issues.
I didn't zero in on the pagefile being the culprit until I built my latest X99 build, which has 32GB of RAM.....more memory than I could ever need truth be known, but it was on sale so I bought it.. Although this time I never ever received a low memory warning. What got me thinking, was that I noticed that Windows seemed like it never recovered RAM. Everything I was doing on my PC, would get cached and would remain there.
Then I made the connection that this behavior was what caused my low memory warnings on my previous builds.
So I started researching and I read this interesting thread on superuser.com.
One of the posters named David Schwartz made a compelling argument against disabling the pagefile, and sold me:
This mirrors my own experience, and answers why I was getting low memory warnings from Windows despite having plenty of available RAM.
Since enabling the pagefile which I have on system managed (windows allocated 4.8GB), I've noticed that games actually slightly MORE memory, around 200-300MB.
So in synopsis, regardless of how much RAM you have, never ever disable the pagefile if you want Windows to use your RAM as efficiently as possible
I've even advised people on this very forum, to disable the pagefile if they have more RAM than they need..
This line of thought stayed with me for years, and I bet many others that disable their pagefile believe similarly. They want to force Windows to use as much RAM as possible, and stay away from the dreadfully slow (comparatively speaking) HDD/SSD.
So what changed my mind? Despite always having had large quantities of RAM in my machines, there's been a few times over the years when I've gotten warnings from Windows that I was running low on RAM. How could this be I thought, when task manager is showing that I still have lots of available memory left?
My most poignant recollection, was on my previous rig before the current one in my sig. It was an X79 build with 16GB of DDR3 2133 and Windows 8.1. I noticed that if I played several games back to back in short order, I could trigger this warning..
So something was obviously wrong, but I never really gave it much thought until I upgraded to Windows 10. Windows 10 supposedly has much more efficient memory handling than any previous OS from Microsoft. So imagine my surprise when the same damn thing happened again!
But instead of blaming it on my lack of a pagefile, I believed it was some sort of memory leak. And it wasn't an unwarranted belief mind you, as Windows 10 was a newly released OS at the time and it had issues.
I didn't zero in on the pagefile being the culprit until I built my latest X99 build, which has 32GB of RAM.....more memory than I could ever need truth be known, but it was on sale so I bought it.. Although this time I never ever received a low memory warning. What got me thinking, was that I noticed that Windows seemed like it never recovered RAM. Everything I was doing on my PC, would get cached and would remain there.
Then I made the connection that this behavior was what caused my low memory warnings on my previous builds.
So I started researching and I read this interesting thread on superuser.com.
One of the posters named David Schwartz made a compelling argument against disabling the pagefile, and sold me:
No matter how much RAM you have, you want the system to be able to use it efficiently. Having no paging file at all forces the operating system to use RAM inefficiently for two reasons. First, it can't make pages discardable, even if they haven't been either accessed or modified in a very long time, which forces the disk cache to be smaller. Second, it has to reserve physical RAM to back allocations that are very unlikely to ever require it (for example, a private, modifiable file mapping), leading to a case where you can have plenty of free physical RAM and yet allocations are refused to avoid overcommitting.
Consider, for example, if a program makes a writable, private memory mapping of a 4GB file. The OS has to reserve 4GB of RAM for this mapping, because the program could conceivably modify every byte and there's no place but RAM to store it. So immediately, 4GB of RAM is basically wasted (it can be used to cache clean disk pages, but that's about it).
You need to have a page file if you want to get the most out of your RAM, even if it's never used. It acts as an insurance policy that allows the operating system to actually use the RAM it has, rather than having to reserve it for possibilities that are extraordinarily unlikely.
This mirrors my own experience, and answers why I was getting low memory warnings from Windows despite having plenty of available RAM.
Since enabling the pagefile which I have on system managed (windows allocated 4.8GB), I've noticed that games actually slightly MORE memory, around 200-300MB.
So in synopsis, regardless of how much RAM you have, never ever disable the pagefile if you want Windows to use your RAM as efficiently as possible