Speculations. Common, mdl users are not your average office granny awaiting retirement while playing solitaire - because most relatives already blocked her on social media I also get around that or more, no matter if I use a 4GB, 8GB or 16GB RAM device. It's often the same for PCs I service, with all kinds of usage from gaming to media to cad to office. Fact is, nobody does just one task these days, you always alt-tab to the browser, chat with friends, play a bit then back to work and so on, and this can go on for days or weeks for home pc's, with just a suspend in between. Another fact is, that Windows can flop hard at managing RAM - it took fking years to tame the standby-memory bug - and I say tame, because it's not 100% fixed ( Spoiler: specifically the "agents" inflating it with what you do or do not on the pc and outside it - urls, clicks, environmental recording via speechruntime, live cam, video and photo recognition via cortana & co, and lately, whole gaming sessions on a silver platter via gamebar.. ) All that time, ms was acting like "it's just in your heads". Yeah, who cares about gaming on windows - ms certainly did not, until it started to affect business software too, and enthusiasts with 32-64GB+ of RAM were baffled at the sight of 80GB+ os "managed" pagefiles. I hate to use the "it's 2019" meme, but ffs you have 16GB RAM but can't afford a 2-4GB pagefile just to be safe?! Safe from gpu and other driver bugs causing a black screen or no audio or whatever after suspend? Safe from crashes just in the midle of you objectively inspecting tessellation on Lara Croft's.. do you know how dangerous that can be? blue balls! Windows offers the freedom required by programs to grab the whole RAM, but it needs the pagefile to fall back to for all the other s**t running - and there's increasingly more s**t built in the os itself.. I'm glad at least nobody was that dumb to bring performance into question - because there is not much difference random rw a file 512MB, 2GB, 4GB or 80GB even; This is all the advice you need. /Thread
I honestly doubt that a 96GB page file would be optimal for my system. If anything, the current page file on my system is actually 9728MB, and that is with the system managing the page file automatically. Unfortunately, the hibernation file is quite large, weighing in at around 25.5GB (I haven't found out how to change the size of that, but it seems to fluctuate which means the system probably manages that as well). For older systems though, like my old 2013 Acer laptop, following that rule actually has helped in the past, especially when I foolishly upgraded to Windows 10 Home when it was first released, which was very taxing on system resources. Nowadays the pagefile is rarely used, since I run a version of Windows 10 2019 LTSC that I modified myself to remove various unneeded components.
That is expected because hibernation file simply saves the current ram memory contents so if you are using 25gb out of 32gb ram & decides to hibernate the system then hibernation file will use around 25gb.
Some games crash without pagefile. No idea why, it's very specific. For example, Deus Ex Mankind Divided would often crash when player inventory is accessed if there is no pagefile. That's with 16GB of RAM and optimized OS, nothing, except for Steam, running in the background. The same goes for Far Cry 5 and Far Cry: New Dawn. Both of those Far Cry games crash without pagefile, most often when trying to access the map or inventory. I doubt either of those games need pagefile for whichever functions, but I think they check for it's existence.
Great way to toot your own horn. NOT My advice still stands, been offering it to people for decades, never had one complaint, but sure, go ahead and waste space. As you pointed out, some folks around these parts aren't your typical consumer desktop or laptop computer owner and want the very best performance possible which means the most efficient system they can get. That of course means not setting up ridiculous page files that waste space and never get actually utilized, but whatever. Best practices: - 1GB static page file on every physical drive in your system if you have more than one - please note that a physical drive does not mean partitions, it means physical hard drives or SSDs or any and all kinds Why multiple page files? Because even today's most awesome high end mad performance screamer NVMe hardware still has one critical flaw by design: they can't read and write from the same drive at the same time. Yep, that means if you need to write a page of data to the page file during a read operation Windows can't, it has to sit there - even if we're talking about micro and milliseconds here - and wait for the drive to be available to write the data. But... if you have multiple (static is best, seriously, it's a no-brainer) page files, one on each physical volume somewhere, Windows can actually read from one drive and write to the other simultaneously which makes a system run way more smoothly overall, even if the degrees to which it's running better aren't anything a simple Human being can or would ever notice. In the question for performance, there's always a better solution. And yes, some applications are hard coded to require a page file while others aren't. Adobe products are notorious for not working and sometimes not even being able to be installed on systems that are set for no page file, amongst others. It's usually some high end serious piece of software but yes there are games that will balk on no page file being present as well. So again, 1GB static page file, one of them on every physical drive in your system if you have more than one physical drive, and your system and your operating system will thank you for the more efficient use of multiple avenues of storage access. In 40+ years of building 'puters, never had one problem at all using any software for any purpose, and that's including hundreds of machines I've built and set up for service bureaus (photographic services) where 64GB of RAM a decade ago was expensive but useful for such places and situations where using the page file is actually required by the application software those places use. We're talking about places that edit photos and image data with TIFF files that can be several gigs in size, never had any problems. But whatever, just offering up some info that can help folks have better performing machines even in today's world of multi-gigabyte per second solid state storage solutions. Every little bit helps...
I use 2 1TB SSD's. The first one I overprovision 99% and install Windows 95 to the 10GB partition. The second one has a 1 TB static pagefile. My setup is faster than anyone else's.
rofl on the "best practices" according to JeanYuhs what is write-caching I wonder.. but fine, have it your way, split the pagefile over multiple drives for "performance" might actually reduce reliability but who cares about that now when the only thing left to butcher is the pagefile size, in total disregard of specific os commit. I only have one question: do you set a 1GB pagefile on each of the 4 drives of a system for example, or you divide that by 4? in an admin cmd: POWERCFG -H -Size 50 this will set the hibernate file to the smallest size possible (no less than 1/2 RAM).
This is the reason for the recommendation in my earlier post for a small amount, anything above 400 MB would do the job on a system with enough RAM. Windows 10 seems to have pushed things further in the sense that there are times when the page file in use is 0 which was never the case with earlier systems, but it is still safer to allow for a small page file regardless.
FWIW - Just for comparison to what I see recommended and what Windows 10 does - My workstation has 64gb of memory and I let Windows 10 Pro for Workstations manage the pagefile. It recommends 8.86gb and currently keeps it at 9.5gb.
I have it on System managed (two drives) with 32GiB RAM, and it has allocated 64GiB Pagefile (32GiB on each drive).
Obviously your lack of adequate reading comprehension is more of an issue than page file optimization so, have fun with that.
Build 1903 is some worth broken. As with any installs, it is recommended that you perform a clean install, to avoid any issues whatsover. I have had to perform system restores on 3 PCs while using the update function.
Unless you regularly see your physical ram usage above 70% I suggest to manually set a page file size of 4GB(& preferably keep it on a ssd drive).If your ram usage regularly hits 65-70% usage then set it to 10GB.
As I use virtual machines regularly and max out my RAM, I just leave it at System managed for the time being. Chances are it will fine-tune itself over time.
Your commit size memory require the amount of physical RAM + page file + some extra (about 20%). Open Task Manager and enable Commit Size column to see what reserves memory in your system.
This thread and some of the "expert" opinions which are posted here in this thread are lowering the reputation of MDL as the leading Windows forum. Some gamer's unique experience with exposure to only few systems seems to be rated higher by some than the blog of one of the core architects of Windows OS and another architect of a well-known product which enhances Windows. It is like buying a car and after tweaking the engine to squeeze a little bit more performance for the owner's specific conditions to pretend that the mechanic doing the tuning knows more about cars than the team that actually designed the car in the first place, put it in production and ultimately sold it to millions of people.
I hate to admit it, but I'm lost here. When I bring up Task Manager, I can select the Memory tab, which shows (at idle) 5.6gb/11.5mb in use/compressed, 58.2gb available, 5.8/73.4gb committed, 58gb cached, 617mb paged pool, 762mb non-paged pool, 131mb hardware reserved I can't see/find anyway to enable a "Commit Size Column" as you indicate (and did not know it was possible). Can you explain please? EDIT- NM - My bad - It's on the details page
Maybe I should clarify a bit here, after reading your original post again. I didn't realise that you actually have 64 GB RAM in the system. Windows (after Windows 8) when configured to have the page file as system managed, uses default values other than what says under Recommended. The reasons are unknown and how the recommended value is calculated is also unknown, at least to me. If you do few tests with various RAM values and no other applications running, you would find the default values. This would be either in a virtual machine or artificially limit your memory with msconfig. In your specific situation, I believe that the 9.5 GB page file is the default value and has little to do with the considerations presented in my other posts, which are for manually configured page files. The idea with committed memory is still valid. Normally Peak Committed + about 20% of that value should be less than RAM + Page File. Peak committed can be determined with Process Explorer after the system was running for a while with a typical pattern of use. For busy file servers which ideally should cache a lot in RAM (the standby value in Task Manager), the expected cache should be added to the previous value when sizing RAM + Page File. For best performance, the calculated value should be less than physical RAM for obvious reasons, while the page file (on disk) should be kept to a minimum. Otherwise it is only wasting space on disk, although it is not harmful. But if there is not enough RAM, then the only option is to compensate with page file on disk. The laziest approach is to leave the system to manage the page file, which for most people would do a reasonable job, but those performance minded should know better. In your specific case with 64 GB RAM, it may not matter how you manage your page file.