Shall I disable my pagefile? I have 8 GB RAM

[Berryracer]

I have 8 GB DDR3 RAM running on Windows 7 Professional (x64)

Will I see better performance if I disable the pagefile?

I don't do any gaming or launch large programs

 

[lxskllr]

Keep it. Give it a 1gb minimum size, and no maximum. You likely won't need, but it'll be there if you do, and it doesn't degrade performance at all.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Disabling the page file will decrease performance in most cases. You should only disable it if you're short on disk space.

 

[Berryracer]

Ah ok, thanks for the confirmation guys.


What does setting it to a fixed 1 GB benefit me over the default 8 GB that Windows allocates then?

 

[lxskllr]

What does setting it to a fixed 1 GB benefit me over the default 8 GB that Windows allocates then?

Saves disk space. If disk space isn't a concern, set it to a fixed size of 8.1gb. That way you can collect a memory dump in case of crash. That's a marginal benefit if you can't read memory dumps, but that's the reason for having it the same size as your ram.

 

[postmortemIA]

you would need page file as long as you have less ram than OS supports max...

 

[janas19]

Saves disk space. If disk space isn't a concern, set it to a fixed size of 8.1gb. That way you can collect a memory dump in case of crash. That's a marginal benefit if you can't read memory dumps, but that's the reason for having it the same size as your ram.

+1

 

[Berryracer]

Oh no I have enough disk space.

So Ill just keep it as it is set by the OS

Thanks for all the replies.

 

[BadThad]

Oh no I have enough disk space.

So Ill just keep it as it is set by the OS

Thanks for all the replies.

That's the best move, just let it do it's thing.

In the old days I would install a second hard drive and set the page file there. That gave you the best performance because there was a lot of caching involved when RAM was measured in MB. It did help performance. It also reduced fragmentation of your OS partition. Jez, I'm getting old!

 

[LokutusofBorg]

I used to be a staunch proponent of never-touch-it. But on most of my systems nowadays I set the pagefile to 1024MB min, and the size of my RAM max. Most of the time it will stay at 1GB, but it can expand if it needs to. The next time I reboot it goes back down to 1GB. And setting it to the RAM size for a max allows the system to do a dump if that rare crash does occur.

 

[pandemonium]

Back in the day it improved performance on older OSs, but with Vista/7 - and even XP SP3 - there seems to be overwhelming evidence of no improvements and in some cases losses.

I personally see improvements with it disabled in Windows 7 x64 on my HDD, so I disable it. Not huge mind you, but my primary reasons for disabling it now are to reduce the amount of data being written/read from the drive. I'm not at all concerned about gaining/losing 1-8GB of space.

I say do some simple timed tests of tasks you'll normally be doing and see if it helps and determine for your individual system. And if you're at all concerned about disk I/O load up the performance statistics tracker from task manager and compare the total numbers.

Regardless of what everyone else says, test it for yourself and see what happens.