Virtual Memory and 12gb of RAM

Hello,

This is my first post in this forum, but I was just wondering if any of you had experience with virtual memory in Vista x64 and the page file when you have a large amount of RAM.

I recently just build a machine which has 12gb of RAM. I am begginning to think that this was a waste of money, because no matter what I do, I cannot seem to get the ram useage to exceed 30 percent, or roughly 4gb of ram. I am a computer science major and completely understand how virtual memory works and what paging is; however, I was always taught that if the OS (Vista in this case) will only swap memory when the memory is full, but this has not been the case as I know that Vista is paging some of the memory onto the disk even though it has another 8gb of free memory to use.

I was just wondering what your thoughts were on disabling paging in Vista and if any of you have experience with doing so when you have a system with a large amount of memory. Also, I would love to hear anybody's explaination as to why Vista is paging the memory onto the HDD when in fact it's not neccessary in my case. Perhaps I do not understand it correctly?

Thanks in advance. I am currently on a different computer, but tommorow I will disable the paging in Vista to see what kind of performance difference I experience, if any and post what I find.

Hi braddk.....

i run 8gb on board & my pagefile has been reduced to 512mb freeing 9gb of disk space, with no issues at all....

disabling the pagefile completely is not recommended as some applications will use the pagefile no matter how much RAM you have, so reducing it to 512mb leaves a little for windows operation....

the OS will automatically set your pagefile to just over the amount of RAM you have, but it has no need to write to disk with lots of RAM...

with the pagefile reduced to 512mb i use about 2gb - 2.5gb idle, but as a result it does speed up response times...

unless your into CAD, heavy photo editing or running VM's you wont use anywhere near 12gb but as time rolls on the need for more RAM will increase...

but the answer is YES you can cut your pagefile usage back quite a bit....


SK

My page file is set to system managed.....4Gb of Ram and I have no problems

Its not the case that virtual memory is not acessed if you have plenty of ram , windows will still use the pagefile , some programs "request" huge ammounts of pagefile on startup whether they need it or not , windows will allocate these programs with that pagefile regrdless of how much physical ram you have.

and as you probably already know , Vista is very good at managing your physical memory , much better than XP , so just let it do its thing

Thanks guys, that makes sense. I will play with the settings this afternoon and let you know what found, just for fun of it.

Ok I played with the page file today... no difference at all in performance or in RAM useage. It idles around 19% and maxes out at around 32 percent.

Just posting what i found so that others know.

I guess, I should have not purchased as much RAM as I did. I will just use it as a RAM disk for now.

You'll find a good use for the RAM very very soon. RAM Drives can work great for things like Temp folders (imagine how much faster your browser would run if it was saving the entire cache to RAM and not the HD....)

Maybe you don't need 12gb Ram.....Try opening /creating a massive image or video file and see what happens.

The swapfile can still be required, as said. I would go for the minimum that you have not troubles with. I would never let it be managed by Windows nor having different min/max values. (to avoid swapfile fragmentation)

There was a game that required 1.5GB swapfile, regardless of having the minimum or above recommended RAM ammounts. I think it was Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines, nice game.

Swapfile is not required. It is antiquated for systems of yesteryear. If no pagefile exists, paging will still happen except it will be to memory instead of the hard drive. If a old software requires a swap file, it's still there in memory. It's a win win all the way around to not use it, assuming of course you have a high enough amount of ram in your system for all your needs. I have 12 gigs, I'm good to go.