Ram and page file

[Slick Fork]

Hi there,

I recently upgraded my ram from 8 to 16gb as I do a lot of photo editing etc. plus it was cheap to buy.

Anyways, I'm finding that windows 7 is still maxing out my page file (observed via MSI afterburner) and not touching the extra ram. It recognized it in the system folder of control panel.

Any ideas why this might be? I was under the impression that the page file was supposed to be used only when you ran out of ram.

 

[easp]

For Linux and OS X, the OS will often spend actual RAM on disk cache and page out program data that isn't accessed very often. I suspect Windows is similar.

You say it is maxing out your page file, that doesn't mean much without knowing what your page file size actually is.

I don't know about the software you are using, but as I recall, at some point Photoshop let you give it hints that it used in managing its temp-files. If that is still the case with the software you are using now, and you haven't updated the setting, it may be that it is using temp files, rather than main memory, and the OS is probably caching those temp files.

 

[Phynaz]

That's how it's supposed to work. Google "backing store".

 

[Ketchup]

Set your page file manually to a small number (like 1 GB or less) and see what happens.

 

[Deders]

I think the afterburner reading is false, it shows the maximum allocated not the amount used.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Since your post seems sufficiently vague to admit a possibility you may never have tried to manually manage the swapfile/page-file, visit the Control Panel-->System dialog and choose "Advanced System Settings" from the upper left-hand panel. Then select the "Performance 'Settings'" button. and then the "Advanced" tab and the "Change" button in the Virtual Memory section middle of the page.

You can distribute pagefiles across more than one drive, or keep it on one disk. You can allow Windows to manage the size by itself, or automatically. Or you can manually set the size -- if I remember, even the upper and lower boundaries.

Usually Windows will report a range with upper bound equal to your RAM size and then some. I think I recall seeing 150% or 1.5x as a rule-of-thumb. Whatever size happens to be used at a given time may be partially accessed by the OS at one time or another. You could certainly reduce the pagefile size manually for an SSD boot-system and certain types of applications and their various priority rankings may actually benefit, but the consensus of wisdom is to leave it as is, and even let Windows manage the size.

 

[Cerb]

That's how it's supposed to work. Google "backing store".

That.

The PF gets a lot of data pushed to it, so that if it runs into RAM pressure issues, it can have lots of stale data in the swap file already. So, it can just discard any memory that exists in swap, zero it, and give it to a needy application, rather than push it to the page file when it runs into RAM pressure problems, increasing the IO needs when it's already low on resources.

 

[Slick Fork]

Thanks for all the replies, to be more clear; I haven't messed with the page file at all and nothing is really going wrong. I just noticed the usage and it surprised me.

The display in afterburner shows ram hitting the 8gb line and then it flattens out and changes to yellow. Which suggests it's not using the full 16gb. I also noticed the page file did the same thing (8gb). I saw this in skyrim and DCS Ka50.

 

[tweakboy]

IF you have 8GB or more turn off page file disable it. Itrs slowing down your system big time. GL

 

[Ketchup]

Thanks for all the replies, to be more clear; I haven't messed with the page file at all and nothing is really going wrong. I just noticed the usage and it surprised me.

The display in afterburner shows ram hitting the 8gb line and then it flattens out and changes to yellow. Which suggests it's not using the full 16gb. I also noticed the page file did the same thing (8gb). I saw this in skyrim and DCS Ka50.

And this is why most of us here don't recommend more than 8 unless you are doing things that really use it, such as video editing.

 

[Slick Fork]

Yeah, I thought it would really help with some of the photo stuff and had thought windows would prefer ram to the page file but now I see why it does this.