Can I make a pagefile larger than 700 GB in Windows 8.1.1 x64?

Discussion in 'Windows 8' started by chinobino, May 26, 2014.

  1. chinobino

    chinobino MDL Member

    Jul 28, 2009
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    Long story short - I am rendering some high res video (3200x1800) with some filters in Sony Vegas Pro 13 using CUDA.

    The source video is uncompressed and when I render the final video project to MP4, the CUDA code dumps everything it processes into pagefile.sys, meaning that I require 2TB-3TB of virtual memory to finish the render.

    In Windows the maximum pagefile size I can set is 716800 MB (700 GB) - I want to know if it is possible to manually make it as large as 3TB on a single partition?

    When I set it to 'System Managed' it won't even expand beyond my RAM capacity, which is pointless.

    I have got around the problem by creating 8 partitions that are 700 GB, and setting up a pagefile on each.

    While this works it is not the ideal way to have my 3TB drives partitioned - I will have to set them back to to a striped array to capture video footage again.

    So.. can I make a pagefile larger than 700 GB in Windows 8.1.1 x64?
     
  2. pisthai

    pisthai Imperfect Human

    Jul 29, 2009
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    AFAIK, and I could be wrong with that, the limit of the Pagefile is depend an on the size of the HDD used in some percentage! And also it's limited to the physical HDD's, means even if you use RAID for to expand the total size, it wouldn't work.

    A customer of mine, who's working in Video Business was moving from Windows to Unix because of that limits a few years ago. He was try with RAID and a total of 54TB bundled HDD's and it wasn't working! Than he was testing some Unix and moved finally to SCO Unix.
     
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  3. chinobino

    chinobino MDL Member

    Jul 28, 2009
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    Hi pisthai, so if 700 GB is approximately 25% of a 3TB drive then 25% could be the theoretical limit, right?

    Well I just put a spare 500 GB drive in my computer and I could completely fill it with just the pagefile - so it seems the hard drive size is not a factor.

    Any other ideas?
     
  4. GezoeSloog

    GezoeSloog knows a guy, who knows another guy.

    Feb 10, 2012
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    Have you tried to manually set 'PagingFiles' in registry?

    HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
     
  5. pisthai

    pisthai Imperfect Human

    Jul 29, 2009
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    As I wrote, I could be wrong!! Anyway, why not ask the techies from MS directly?

    MS implemented quite a bit limitations in Windows. That applies for Memory and even for the max total size of HDD's! Intentional? Maybe yes or maybe no! Possible that the OS Developers set's their limits max to the available hardware?! You could run SCO Open Server 6 (Unix) on an normal PC Platform with Intel and/or AMD CPU's as multiple physical Single Core CPU's and/or a bunch of Multi-Core CPU's! Still the HDD limit is 1TB!!! AIX (which seems to be dead by now) didn't differs and even has some problems to get to work on PC Platform! OS-X? I don't think that could handle what you're looking for!

    In a few years the NAND Technology will (maybe) replace the traditional mechanical storage systems. Maybe there will be some complete new storage system come up?! One of them could be the industrial Diamond Data Storage, somethin Siemens were working on!

    Still, doesn't matter what is available, are the OS developers able to change "their" mind what people need, want or looking for?
     
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  6. chinobino

    chinobino MDL Member

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    #6 chinobino, May 26, 2014
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2017
    (OP)
  7. pisthai

    pisthai Imperfect Human

    Jul 29, 2009
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    That wouldn't work!

    Not sure but the limits could be part of the pagefile.sys file?! Didn't have time for to use an Hexeditor etc. for to open up that file, and no need for me to do that, but that's something the OP may could do for to get some more deep infos. But that limits could be also on many different places located! It's a quite tricky and dangerous 'work'! Not worth for me to start with!
     
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  8. chinobino

    chinobino MDL Member

    Jul 28, 2009
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    Haha! I was hoping someone else might have already discovered the limit.

    I find it odd that it is limited to 746 GB on a single partition, but it's ok to fill up as many drives as you want with 746 GB partitions.
     
  9. pisthai

    pisthai Imperfect Human

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    Frankly: How many user would need such huge Pagefile? Just quite a few, me think!

    Get the info from the "Horse's mouth" which would be the way I would go first!
     
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  10. chinobino

    chinobino MDL Member

    Jul 28, 2009
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    Ok - I'll try to get an official response.
     
  11. GezoeSloog

    GezoeSloog knows a guy, who knows another guy.

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    #11 GezoeSloog, May 26, 2014
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2017
    OK. How about this?

    Code:
    d:\pagefile1.sys 524288 524288
    d:\pagefile2.sys 524288 524288
     
  12. chinobino

    chinobino MDL Member

    Jul 28, 2009
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    #12 chinobino, May 26, 2014
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2017
    (OP)
    Ok, so I finally got the WMI commands to work, I must have not removed the previous pagefile the first time I tried.

    This is how I did it for those that want to know, from an elevated command prompt;

    Code:
    wmic.exe pagefileset create name="D:\pagefile.sys"
    
    Instance creation successful.
    Code:
    wmic.exe pagefileset where name="D:\\pagefile.sys" set InitialSize=2861192,MaximumSize=2861192
    
    Updating property(s) of '\\IVYBRIDGE\ROOT\CIMV2:Win32_PageFileSetting.Name="D:\\
    pagefile.sys"'
    ERROR:
    Description = Value out of range
    Code:
    wmic.exe pagefileset where name="D:\\pagefile.sys" set InitialSize=2861191,MaximumSize=2861191
    
    Updating property(s) of '\\IVYBRIDGE\ROOT\CIMV2:Win32_PageFileSetting.Name="B:\\
    pagefile.sys"'
    Property(s) update successful.
    So the entire 3TB single partition can now be used for rendering :).

    Thankyou to all those who replied!