Page file needed in Win7 with 16GB RAM?

It depends on how much memory you need.

A good rule of thumb is half the installed RAM as a page file. If you have 4 GB installed, set the PF to 2 GB.

But after 8 GB of installed RAM, a page file larger than 4 GB becomes pointless.

Given that you are using Fully Buffered SDRAM, I'm assuming you're running a server. Probably best to keep your Page File at least equal to the installed RAM. So set yours to 16 GB.

It's a Dell Precision workstation, actually

do you stress your ram, do you use more than 80%?
if yes: keep the pagefile, if no; remove the pagefile.

If you keep it when you dont need it you risk getting unnecessary hard faults.

"when you stress your ram, do you use more than 80%?"


annoying that I cant edit my previous post...

maltenp, you are allowed, if you use the quick-edit function

With 16GB RAM, you could safely set the pagefile to some nominal minimum such as 512MB and set the maximum to 2GB. Then run your applications and see how or if the pagefile grows beyond the starting minimum. Windows will grow the pagefile as needed but it doesn't shrink again until restart.

Setting the pagefile below the amount of RAM will impact the ability of the system to perform full memory crash dumps, however. Full memory crash dumps are rarely ever required for debugging. A kernel memory crash dump will usually suffice.

In older versions of Windows, the default is to keep RAM clear of things which aren't of immediate value. This obviously lowers RAM usage, and increases usage of the page file. In newer versions (Vista and 7), the default is to keep objects which may be used in memory in order to keep the system running as efficiently as possible (plus the much denigrated caching routines).

What this means is that disabling the Page File in (XP) can result in some amount of increased performance because you are forcing the OS to maximize the number of objects in memory because it now has to maintain the objects that "might" be useful instead of just what's actually needed at the time. In Vista and 7, disabling the PF is unlikely to result in any performance differences since the OS already works to minimize PF/maximize RAM usage by default.

For this case, I would recommend manually setting it to some level you are comfortable with and, provided you note no issues, leaving it at that. As pointed out by TC above, all you should really need is a couple gig at most.

Resurrecting an old topic, I've been thinking of a similar setup with 16GB but using 4gb of that memory as a RamDisk for applications that don't like not having a paging file. Thus limiting hits to my SSD and keeping all data in ram.