In XP times I used to work with virtual memory disabled and computer was running smooth and without problems. Im planning to run my win10 1607 without pagefile. (Fast wake up of minimized programs that I dont use for long time) Do you have any advices? I know that I have to take care about running out of memory or Ill get a black screen when memory empty. Any memory management program suggestion to run along computer without virtual memory? Maybe some ram cleaners when certain limit reached?. I wonder if exist a memory manager program that start to use virtual memory only when physical memory is empty.
Between using an out of date OS and bypassing technology designed to make your system work faster and more efferently, there is no possibility you will accomplish what you are setting out to accomplish. Having enough RAM and picking which apps automatically load on boot is almost the entire equation. If you want to do something exotic, you can move your pagefile (and anything like systems temp folders and browser cache) to a used Optane drive. You might not get any performance benefit from this but at least a bunch of random reads and writes are moved to a drive literally designed for enduring lots of reads and writes forever.
If you have enough RAM, just use IM toolkit RAM disk, and put the swapfile there. Set the ramdisk as dynamically growing/shrinking, set the swapfile to a minimum like 256 MB and a maximum depending on the ram you have and your lickings. Ruining w/o a swapfile at all always lead to problems sooner or later, given there are always programs written considering it present, no matter the RAM you have. Once you have the ramdisk enabled, place there also the temp directory and the caches of browsers, so you will have a great improvements in speed, a vastly reduced traffic on SSDs/HDDs, and your storage wont be filled by the huge amount of crap that browers produce.
There are max and min values for a reason. There isn't any need to start with a fixed size big swapfile. If you don t need a full dump, in case of crash, 64MB as a minimum is more than enough. If you need/want it, the minimum is 400MB for win10+ or 256 for older flavours
My honest opinion... don't touch the pagefile. Windows knows what to do with it. Feel free to move it to a secondary drive in case your C: drive is running out of space and that's it.
MS set most of the settings for the average Joe, that doesn't prevent the users to turn on some neurons and mod the settings to fit their needs. Otherwise according to that logic we didn't need a control panel at all. MS knows well what desktop backround is best for you, what programs you need and so on.
from what i read online. i need for crash dumps. logs. one source claims to keep 1GB only for crash dumps .. bla bla since i can't validate ... if it needed or not ..
Read above. It's 400MB If you don't trust me, try to set your pagefile smaller than 400MB and windows will tell you what I already said.
Looks like they adjust the value according to the amount of RAM you have installed. This is on a 4GB machine BTW, just set the dump to reduced size. So the above limit won't apply. Reduced dumps are enough to investigate the blue screens, for normal users and normal technicians. Full dumps are useful for MS itself, via telemetry, and for kernel driver developers and other advanced scenarios.
If you set a value that is too low or zero, once you run out of memory, windows will kill the app that is consuming the most memory. <- this is a problem. If you set a value that is too high, you will waste hard disk space <- this might be a problem. Leave it to MS defaults. That's it. There's no magic in the pagefile. If you are under high memory pressure, setting it to use a secondary drive used to improve the performance, especially in the HDD world 10 years ago. Now with SSDs and cheap RAM, the pagefile is just a failsafe for apps that leak memory or to dump the kernel in case of a BSOD. If you never run out of memory, the pagefile will be kept at near 0bytes usage at all times so whatever you do with it is insignificant.
Thank you for all your replies guys. Its very instructive follow the topic and read the replies. I forgot to mention that Im using a computer that is limited in several ways. -Its a N4000 laptop that is limited by video drivers to use only win10 or newer. -Its a laptop that have the memory soldered to the board.. so you cannt upgrade. 4Gb available. In this scenario I wonder if a tool like cleanmem should help. I never needed a tool like that even when I was very limited of ram in XP years. Also I always though that these tools were just a placebo. Do you have any experience to share using tools like that?
In which planet? Windows, if not instructed differently, used to set the pagefile to twice the amount of the RAM installed (which was really dumb given you need a bigger file if you have little RAM). Now that huge amounts of ram are common, that rule is mitigated, but still the pagefile is very big, if set to automatic. Perhaps 10/11 IoT, Win Embedded, ThinPC, Win XP flp are set with no pagefile.sys by default, so is nothing out of this world. Just there are poorly written SW (including some by MS) that assume the file is there so having no swapfile may be annoying.
Paging is not binary. Its used more based on how much RAM is left and how infrequently the contents of RAM is accessed. You can move the page file to a different drive and then watch its access which will be limited to paging alone. It's never going to be 0.
You can use rammap.exe which is a tool written by the legendary Mark Russinovic (and now downloadable from the MS website). It does marvels freeing the ram (but most of the ram freed is because it moves thing to the swapfile), btw is still an essential tool if you need real RAM space and you're in short of it
If you are playing around Virtual memory, I would leave as default.. But if you have 4GB Ram, I highly recommended get 8GB or more.. 16GB is more standard today.. As my system, I am using 32GB ram and I set my Virtual memory as 16GB which works for me.. Let me remind you having 4GB I suggest increase Real RAM to 8GB or 16GB and you can lower 1/2 of Virtual Memory.. Should be fine.. ATGPUD2003
Unfortunately, that will not work on soldered RAM. There's always the Linux way... for such a low spec device, linux is quite capable as you won't be doing much more than internet access and word processing with it.