Increase Performance by utilizing RAM instead of swap (Windows 8)

My computer is pretty fast, but I feel it may be getting slowed down by putting things in swap which would do better in RAM. I have 16 GB of ram, and even in conditions where only around 3 GB is used, the swap is already up around 500MB. I don't have the greatest understanding up how windows deals with memory and such (so correct me if I am wrong) but I think that performance would increase if that 500 MB of swap was put in RAM instead.

So my general question is how would I get windows to (force if need be) to favour RAM over its swap when putting stuff in memory.

Thanks

Colin

Posted 2014-04-27T03:42:14.907

Reputation: 103

1Your computer is smarter than you are about where to put things, when. It uses the swap file when it can't use RAM; should you disable the swap file, you'll just get yourself some "out of memory" errors, not a faster computer. – Debra – 2014-04-27T17:06:13.350

Answers

You wouldn't want to. This use of swap is effectively free and it saves the computer from having to write things later should the system ever become busy and under memory pressure at the same time.

By writing things to swap when I/O bandwidth is available, more of the contents of RAM become discardable. This allows the memory manager to make better choices later.

At some point the system may get busy and be under memory pressure. Would you rather it have to write things to swap then, when it will result in a slowdown, rather than now when it's effectively free?

David Schwartz

Posted 2014-04-27T03:42:14.907

Reputation: 58 310

The OP asked how they could do it not whether it makes sense to do it. – R Sahu – 2014-04-27T04:51:28.507

1And I explained that you can't do it. It's not using swap instead of RAM, it's using swap in addition to RAM. Given that, there is no way to use RAM "instead of swap", which is what the questions asks. – David Schwartz – 2014-04-27T05:13:27.970

A similar question was asked at http://social.technet.microsoft.com

Title

How to disable swapfile.sys on Windows 8?

Question

It's possible to disable pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys, however, there does not appear to be information on how to disable swapfile.sys.

The file swapfile.sys appears to be an additional paging file from Metro and I'd like to know if there is a way to disable it as well

One of the answers was:

Disabling the normal pagefile should also disable this one.

To disable the hiberfil.sys run this from a command prompt with admin rights:

powercfg -h off

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this.

R Sahu

Posted 2014-04-27T03:42:14.907

Reputation: 141