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I read a lot about disabling pagefile pretty much everywhere and some places tell you that doing so is a great thing for performance (given a lot of ram) and other places tell you that even with a huge ammount of ram it can lead to an unstable system.
Context: I work with a windows 10 machine, 4 slots of ram with 4gb each running @ 1600 MHz, an i7 4790k 2 SSDs and a normal HDD. My peak load was around 12 gb, this machine does not shut down ever (well, rare occasions maybe). Running win 10 pro.
I disabled pagefile in all drives and since then, performance increased like 10 times; pretty much everything opens significantly faster and some hangs i encountered every once in a while are no longer there; so far there is no stability issues nor any other problem.
My question is: On the long run, how it can affect me negatively? Since this computer is always powered on and run some services (game servers, iis...) could this be an issue? Should i look at other configurations before actually shutting pagefile off? Should i keep an eye for page faults while running on this configuration?
Do have in mind i don't really care about critical system crashes nor stuff like that; such information is not valuable to me in any way (at least not now, this system has been stable for months with pagefile on and if ever necessary to diagnose such problem i can turn it back on to do so).
Also, my focus is on pure performance and i don't rely on cache to do the trick (that's why 2 high-performance SSDs with programs i open often), so stuff like superfetch has little to no utility here (also, most programs are always loaded on memory from the startup, at least the ones i use the most so there should not be any need to access disk to get anything often).
Additional context: All the memory i have should be all the memory i need; over-commiting is not an issue and i can manage what goes in and out if really needed (as i said before, i know very well my peak workload and the available ram i have is more than 'nuf for the task). The main idea is to have everything in memory without the need to i/o to disk or whatsoever. I keep at least 4-6GB of ram available at all times for critical tasks and to handle situations where a process might ask for more memory, if it asks too much it will be denied memory (as it should be) instead of swapping; in such event i can manually shut down other processes to free up ram if extremelly necessary.
Carlos Cortez
Posted 2016-05-04T15:46:48.937
Reputation: 3
1The only reason it is faster is because you have SSDs, and disabling your page file, is one of those optimizations you are suppose to do if Windows is running on a SSD. It sounds like your not aware of how the page file helps an operating system running on a mechanical drive. You should do some research on that subject. – Ramhound – 2016-05-04T15:51:28.467
http://www.howtogeek.com/199990/should-i-disable-the-page-file-if-my-computer-has-a-lot-of-ram/ – Manoj – 2016-05-04T15:52:02.683
Windows pagefile size with large RAM and SSD. In other words benchmark your system and determine if you actually need a page file based on your usage habits. – Ramhound – 2016-05-04T15:52:40.023
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possible duplicate of http://superuser.com/questions/810170/should-i-disable-swap-file-if-i-have-lots-of-ram-or-should-i-move-it-to-a-virtua
– Manoj – 2016-05-04T15:54:58.6731
possible duplicate of (Windows Swap (Page File): Enable or Disable?
– Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2016-05-04T16:15:21.003Also see: http://serverfault.com/questions/23621/any-benefit-or-detriment-from-removing-a-pagefile-on-an-8gb-ram-machine/23684#23684
– Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2016-05-04T16:17:10.043My system is not in the SSD; both SSDs are dedicated to other programs (like servers, games....) this is sort of a hybrid computer, i use it to play some stuff as well as host some services. About the research, i read a lot of what you guys are referencing but still, most of what is there is not fitting my scenario, thats why i asked it in a separated place. Have in mind i only keep necessary tasks running and i keep an eye for unecessary background stuff, so there is nothing "idle" in memory for a long time. Also, since i know my peak workload i don't really care about overcommit. – Carlos Cortez – 2016-05-04T21:57:32.827
1I very much doubt that disabling the page file made your system any faster. You're probably just convincing yourself. Also, programs may reserve a lot more memory (commit charge) than they actually use. Disabling your page file means those reservations count against physical memory, even if never used. – Daniel B – 2016-05-04T22:19:44.973
Well, at least boot up sequence and the applications i use the most seem to be running much more smoothly; boot up speed seem to have improved somehow, but i don't know if pagefile was the reason for it; might be worth noting that along with pagefile, i disabled prefetch/superfetch which im not totally sure how they work but i believe they would try to load stuff preemptively and that should put some extra load in startup sequence. I don't really care if something takes some extra time to load because there is no cache but i do want things that are loaded to run at top speed. – Carlos Cortez – 2016-05-04T22:43:50.537
Disabling prefetch is an absolutely horrible idea. Prefetch speeds up the running of programs when you start them; it does not load any code files "preemptively", whatever that means. Superfetch does cache files predictively, but it is completely inactive until after the boot is done, so it cannot possibly slow down your boot. It also does not take away from available memory. – Jamie Hanrahan – 2016-05-07T05:18:34.720