RAM usage 40% Page file usage 99% ???

[1N07]

Isn't the page file supposed to fill up when your system starts running out of RAM?
I know there's some preemptive paging, but I'm at 99% even though my RAM usage is 40% (of 8GBs)
How come?

 

[Rami Zerker Reini]

Paging file will use space on your hard drive even if you have free RAM space. This is why it is almost recommended to turn paging file off if you're not going to run out of RAM.

 

[beegmouse]

What do you mean by "I'm at at 99%" 99% of what? Your Hard drive?

 

[Ra_V_en]

Paging file will use space on your hard drive even if you have free RAM space. This is why it is almost recommended to turn paging file off if you're not going to run out of RAM.

Actually it's not, if it was recommended then M$ would set it this way. It could be worth testing in very specific situations but not as a general suggestion. And this specific case would be having a highly responsive machine at which you can predict RAM load. General use PC's are far from such environment, even a web browser can suck RAM in no time when you open new tabs endlessly. OS is handling unused resources and throw it into a swap file, it does exactly the same as so popular crapware like 'game-boosters' but certainly OS can handle it far more wisely.

Having a swap file is normal and if there is no reason to consider turning it off you shouldn't. If there is some system bottleneck then still a swap file is not you should look after in the first place.

 

[Rami Zerker Reini]

Paging file will use space on your hard drive even if you have free RAM space. This is why it is almost recommended to turn paging file off if you're not going to run out of RAM.

Actually it's not, if it was recommended then M$ would set it this way. It could be worth testing in very specific situations but not as a general suggestion. And this specific case would be having a highly responsive machine at which you can predict RAM load. General use PC's are far from such environment, even a web browser can suck RAM in no time when you open new tabs endlessly. OS is handling unused resources and throw it into a swap file, it does exactly the same as so popular crapware like 'game-boosters' but certainly OS can handle it far more wisely.

Having a swap file is normal and if there is no reason to consider turning it off you shouldn't. If there is some system bottleneck then still a swap file is not you should look after in the first place.

Page file using your hard drive space instead when it isn't exactly needed slows down the PC. So atleast personally I keep it off.

 

[Ra_V_en]

I'm not gonna create another debate or a tutorial is it or not sensible to turn it off, since there is tons of articles covering this, here just one of them:
http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

If you understand whole idea of swap file correctly then you should know the only benefit of turning it off is a responsiveness of applications that stay in the background inactive for a long period of time or when some application needs huge amounts of ram at a moment then all processes with lower priority will get swapped. Also with copying a huge files some apps are swaped to free RAM for the copy process so read/write operations are cashed in which case copy process takes a whole lot less.

But if you turn it off totally then in a scenario when you somehow put a load beyond the point of the RAM available some process will start crashing due to "not enough memory" error.
As you read my second sentence in previous answer i didn't say it's bad idea in specific situations but suggesting such for unaware PC users in general can make far more damage then benefits.
Yes when someone have 16GB RAM then probably most of the time there won't be any issues, until crash happen in the least expected moment, but again with 16GB RAM even windows will not swap anything that much since there is no need to do so, so what is the point of turning it off?
But on the other hand when someone has 4GB of RAM then i can assure you he gonna get crashes sooner then you might expect.

"Page file using your hard drive space instead when it isn't exactly needed slows down the PC. "
Page file is used when it's needed and it's needed when RAM can be utilized more efficiently in a moment or there is lack of it, if you feel it slows down your PC then it's not a swap file issues it's lack of RAM issues and turning it off only makes it worse!

 

[1N07]

Yeah, so turns out it was that high because it was only 200MBs
turned it to 1024 - 2048. Much better now.

 

[Ra_V_en]

Yeah, so turns out it was that high because it was only 200MBs
turned it to 1024 - 2048. Much better now.

Yea set minimum limit, so the file will be allocated on the drive, meaning after the windows boot you will see it has 1GB but actual usage inside the file probably will be much lower (page file usage in % can be seen in perfmon counter). But don't set maximum or set it to 2-2.5x of your RAM size. It will expand when needed but probably very rarely. Setting minimum limit was one of the recommendations with HDD drives, after which you should defragment the whole page file drive so it was placed at the very beginning of the partition so its performance was boosted. If you have SSD placement and defrag doesn't matter anymore since performance across the whole disk is practically the same.