Vista - Virtual Memory Paging File - Change

Hello,

I recently tried to reduce my page file, to the point of turning it right off.

It started at 8.5GB Automatic. according to Performance tab in task manager.

And with it right off, the file was 3.9 GB


I have 4GB of ram.

Is that normal? Shouldn't it be Zero when i turn the paging right off?

Just for fun, i tried to over load my ram... I ran thunderbird, Firefox (with 5 tabs, including a running youtube video), Mediaplayer song, Real Player movie, MS Flight Sim X (in windowed mode while flying), Acrobat and a large PDF, and Photoshop with a 200Mb photo.

I only used 2.6 GB of my 4 GB of ram. At idle it sits at 1.3GB.

This was with my page file set to 210 MB min, 800 Max. Yet the Performance tab still showed a 4GB page file....?


I don't think I want to run with paging right off, but I just want to be sure its working properly and showing the correct size.

I think 8gb is way to big considering how well the computer handled the processing load i put it through last night.

Thanks

Corey

Hi Corey,

Did you use step 13 to remove the paging file, and restart afterwards?

I would recommend to have a paging file though to avoid potentially getting the "Out of Memory" error followed by a BSOD.

Hi Brink,

Yes, that's the way I tried it.

Before that point though, when I was simply trying to reduce it, I found that the Total page file as shown under Performance Tab did in fact drop by the minimum amount I had selected, but never equaled that minimum amount.

When I simply tried to tick off "No Page File" and restarted, i found it went down to a minimum of ~3.9GB as mentioned in my last post. So it seems to be off by ~3.9GB.


Would Changing that registry key to tell it to clear at shutdown help to "reset" the file size? I haven't gotten around to trying i quite yet.


Edit: As a side note: When i navigated to the file itself on C: after setting it to No Page File with restart, I moused over it and it showed the size as my previous minimum setting of 210Mb....

Its currently set to 250 as seen below.




Thanks

Corey

Update: Just tried to clear the page file with it set at 250mb

Restarted, no change. My boot time didn't even budge, still a solid 54 seconds.

So i tried it again, now with the page file set to OFF, and after the performance tab still shows an available page file of ~3.9GB, with ~1.6GB being used.

To confirm its off, the registry also shows No page file.

Corey,

My guess is that it may be using the RAM as a page file instead. I turned off the page file on a Vista in a VM and this is what I'm seeing as well.

I heard that page is written to even before the physical ram fills up, and consequently it slows down and causes wear and tear on harddrive, and that with 4 gigs or more of ram, it is advised to completely disable pagefile. I understand this has a higher risk of computer crashing but since I have 4 gigs I would like to disable pagefile if I get less wear on hardrive and faster performance. Any thoughts?

I read a few places that many programs will write temp files if paging is disabled or not. And, it is better to have it all in the pagefile with a min/ max of the same size.

Buy a fast hard drive.

What you heard is incorrect.

The availability of one or more paging files does not slow the system down (that would be a bug in the OS), and it has at least two substantial benefits: the provision of additional overhead should memory pressure reach the commit limit with just RAM, and the ability to generate memory dumps for troubleshooting purposes.

4GB is not little, but it's not exactly monstrous nowadays either. Many people can run just fine with 4GB and no pagefiles, but there's utterly no point whatsoever and the additional risk of a crash makes it unjustified.

I read an article on Tom's Hardware advocating no pagefile. Since I had 12 GBs of memory I gave it a shot. I found no performance increase, and, reading more on it, I went back to the full recommended pagefile.

I also tested the pagefile on different drives with no seen benefit. But with the added complication with backups. I have tested and read that the pagefile is best at a static size.

I am not using one on my main system. but, ReadyBoost can increase benchmarks like PCMark05.

What I would be concerned with is the needless Indexing of you drives. And the Prefech continually making notes on what you are not going to not do again. Oh, and Media Player tracking and noting all your activity and files. What a waste.

Well my pagefile wasn't set by default.
Set it to automatic, rebooted and now everything makes sense. Before I was using the pagefile and Vista was caching over 8GB's of RAM and only around 2GB's free. In general, Vista was lagging but it managed to run on 12GB's very well.
Now what it seemed fine for a bit is back.
I really don't know about these 1TB drives. Can't distinguish anymore if the micro-stattering on VIsta is caused by Microsoft's poor driver support for high volume drives or it is part of the firmware? I thought that the pagefile was a part of this issue but it's not. I've had smaller drives (200/500GB on RAID 0) & no micro-stattering occured even when prior to implementing performance options.
Regrettably, I'm starting to run out of ideas and overall support on the internet
Chuck, did you purchase any 1TB drives recently?
Cheers to everyone with the enlightful comments!