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I don t know how to set my paging file size. While google says the initial should be 1.5 of my RAM and maximum should be double, Windows says my recommended "total paging size for all drives" is 1939 MB I have 2 GB of RAM and I don t know how windows calculated this 1939 MB, can someone please shed light? Should I go with what the internet tells me or what windows tells me?
Hosa
Posted 2019-08-28T13:10:39.313
Reputation: 23
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Around the days of Windows XP this was a hotly-debated subject. Since around Win 7 things got simpler.
Basically go with what Windows says. You can actually just leave it on automatic & things will be fine most of the time.
The only slight downside of fully automatic is that Windows can get a tad laggy as it's changing the size dynamically, so.. you can gain just a tiny fraction of speed by doing it manually & setting both minimum & maximum size to the same figure as Windows recommends.
Tetsujin
Posted 2019-08-28T13:10:39.313
Reputation: 22 456
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You should set Paging to Automatic. Windows does this best for you.
In the above case it is paging to disk roughly the amount of your total memory. 2 GB is not really enough for a modern computer so you may wish to increase this.
John
Posted 2019-08-28T13:10:39.313
Reputation: 5 395
1I'm assuming 32-bit OS, so going over 4GB total isn't going to gain anything. – Tetsujin – 2019-08-28T13:23:23.313
@Tetsujin not necessarily. Just because you have access to 4GB of physical RAM doesn't mean that you cannot load more than 4GB of programs when the swap file is larger. Each program is limited to 4GB, and the system itself can only use 4GB physically, but you can have multiple 4GB programs that are loaded but paged out to the swap file. Sure the system might run like a dog, but there are some cases where it might be usable or preferable. – Mokubai – 2019-08-29T10:18:59.083
@Mokubai - sorry, it's been over a decade since I last had a 32-bit OS, seems I was confusing VM & paging. I found a good ref, from MS themselves - https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/294418/comparison-of-32-bit-and-64-bit-memory-architecture-for-64-bit-edition
– Tetsujin – 2019-08-29T10:45:02.017Just use the Automatic paging settings - host or virtual machine – John – 2019-08-29T11:58:22.107
It used to be 1.5x your RAM, but that was back in the day. – spikey_richie – 2019-08-28T13:23:38.100