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I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit on a mobo with 24GB RAM.
Of those 24GB, 20GB are assigned as a RAMDISK via ASRock XFastRAM. This RAMDISK has the drive letter X assigned to it.
On X:\ I'm storing the temporary files folder, as well as pagefile.sys. Pagefile.sys has 6GB of size. The X:\ has usually around 14GB free space, so the temporary files are negligible, it's mostly the browsers which are storing their caches on there.
Now my issue is that Firefox is crashing a lot on me, no error message pops up, but I know that this is because it's out of memory.
I could kind of live with that, but now that I switched from using Eclipse to Android Studio, I know that I'm in trouble, because Java isn't capable of allocating, and Android Studio, together with the Java instances it launches, is quite a memory hog.
So I tried to figure out what's wrong, and apparently Windows isn't swapping out memory onto the paging file.
While my applications are crashing (firefox) / not starting (java vm's), the paging file is only using constantly around 15% of its size (checked with the performance monitor). 15% equals to 1GB aprox.
I know that the correct solution would be to switch to 64 bit Windows, but I had to use the 32 bit version because of driver issues which I had about two years ago, and I guess that I'll have them again if I reformat and install the 64 bit version.
Also, the machine is running quite stable, the only issue is the memory, so I'd like to use it as it is (as the apps are installed and configured)
Is there a way to make Windows use the paging file more efficiently? None of my processes require more than 1GB, I'd just like it to swap out some seldomly used stuff, like GoogleCrashHandler.exe and stuff like that in order to have "more physical memory avaliable". Is that possible?
Daniel F
Posted 2014-05-28T01:40:20.073
Reputation: 751
Well, the issue got settled after moving over to 64bits, now it's the graphics card device driver which behaves very odd. We love computers. – Daniel F – 2014-07-11T15:19:05.817
Putting a pagefile on a RAM disk is ridiculous. – Jamie Hanrahan – 2015-04-25T19:03:25.907
@JamieHanrahan I've got a 24GB system. 10GB are assigned to the RAM Disk, which leaves me with 14GB of RAM for the OS. I read that it is recommended to have a Pagefile, even if you have enough RAM, since software may rely on it. So I created a 4GB paging file on the RAM Disk and have 6GB remaining for TEMP + Browser caches. My SSD won't get any of those pagefile writes. Ridiculous? Nope. My pagefile is almost as fast as my RAM, if it ever should be used. Think about it. – Daniel F – 2015-04-25T22:04:55.537
@DanielF: The RAMdisk takes RAM away from normal OS use, which makes page faults more frequent than before. And not all paging involves your pagefile! You haven't done a thing for the many dozens (maybe over 100) of other files involved in paging... well, except to make faults to them more frequent. Yes, for faults resolved to the pagefile, that will be faster than if it was on a real disk or even an SSD. But page faults that you don't incur in the first place (because you didn't tie up that RAM with a pagefile on a RAMdisk) will be far faster still. – Jamie Hanrahan – 2015-04-25T23:45:40.597
@JamieHanrahan: I'm starting to doubt my perspective on this. I used to believe that I'm always below the 14GB mark, but I'm wrong there, so that this is certainly an issue. But I want to use a RAM Disk for the TEMP and Browser Caches. ASRock's XFast RAM has this pagefile stuff as a feature. At that time I found positive things to read about it. – Daniel F – 2015-04-26T00:23:25.197
I would also point out that Windows already has a mechanism that acts much like a pagefile-on-RAMdisk... except that it works for all virtual memory backing stores, not just the pagefile: The modified page list and standby page list. And of course, the more RAM you take away from the OS by committing it to a RAMdisk, the less room these have to work in. Temp and browser caches... that is another discussion. – Jamie Hanrahan – 2015-04-26T02:01:49.420
1Your problem is that your running 32 bit operating system. 32 bit operating system can't allocate more than 4 gb of memory. You need a 64 bit windows operating system. – meguroyama – 2014-05-28T02:20:37.660
@meguroyama 32 bit Operating systems can use more than 4GB of Ram, or more than 2^32 although they can only physically address as RAM 4^32 without something like PAE... That said, a RAM disk is not seen by the OS as memory and should bypass that limitation. Finally, it does not cause instability, the OS simply can not address the ram beyond the addresses of a 32 bit processor. – Austin T French – 2014-05-28T02:23:49.570
Did you disable page file on other drives (i.e. c: drive)? Also, can you verify in task manager that the available RAM is growing smaller? – Ryan Griggs – 2014-05-28T02:37:18.593
Only the ramdisk has the pagefile enabled. I rebooted the PC, and noticed that afterwards the page file usage was able to increase to 30%. It's all a bit strange. It's an i7 930. Following the steps from http://superuser.com/a/468019 my system tells me that PAE is enabled. I'm seriously considering switching to 64 bit now, but it is so time consuming to configure all the details of the computer :( Any other ideas?
– Daniel F – 2014-05-28T05:42:55.117@meguroyama The idea of using the pagefile was based on this assumption Addressing limits on 32-bit hardware Maybe it has to do with fragmentation, since the computer was running for many hours using the RAM maxed out almost all the time.
– Daniel F – 2014-05-28T05:56:00.123@DanielF. See this documentation even on the Microsoft's documentation it isn't recommended to use a 32 bit OS on more than 4 GB of RAM.
– meguroyama – 2014-05-29T20:20:11.670@meguroyama yeah, thanks. I've already settled with the idea of having to move over to 64 bits, as soon as I can. – Daniel F – 2014-05-29T21:15:37.843