Virtual memory size

[tungleboomps]

I presently have 16 Gigs of RAM about an ASUS Rogue. My virtual memory is presently set to 16 mb for both partitions of the C: drive. Am I doing right be setting it that small? I have never had any issues at least yet.
I have a 240 Gig Samsung SSD with about 40 Gigs of free space on the C: partition and 85 on the F: partition.
Also, when I am running everything I want, I have about 4.8 to5 Gigs of available RAM left. Would you folks think when it gets down that low that I should add more RAM or leave it alone?

 

[ShadyHamster]

16MB page file? What's the point of that, may as well disable it altogether, unless you mean 16GB?

I run a 2GB page file, only because i've come across a few programs/games in the past that refuse to run without it enabled.

 

[LucoTF]

I think he means 16gb, you cant set it lower than 800mb anyway.

But yes, with 16gb and an ssd just set the min max to 2gb / 2gb

Edit, i was wrong, you can go to 16mb now.

 

[Ralston18]

I would "leave it alone" with respect to the current RAM and configuration.

Philosophy being that if it is not broke don't fix it.

Barring some later obvious issue or performance drop best to do nothing.

If a problem occurs then it could well be something else and not necessarily memory related.

In any case if you do decide to "tinker" change only one thing at a time, wait awhile (relative) between changes, and keep notes should you need to reverse a change. The effects of some change may not become apparent until the next restart or power up.

 

[tungleboomps]

When I go to System Properties, Advanced, Settings, this brings up Performance Options and then I click on Advanced. I read there under Virtual Memory "total paging file size for all drives - 32 MB (not Gigs).
I then click no Change and on the C: drive which is partitioned, under Custom size and (for the C: drive which is partitioned) I have 16 MB for each partition.
Under the D: drive (which I failed to mentioned) I have it set as "none" -
I should have written this out for you the first time around to make it clear what I was driving at. Now hopefully getting a better picture of things, you can give me some advice.
I've had it set this way going 9 months and have had no problem. The reason I brought this up was because of the amount of Memory showing in the Task Manager under Performance that is remaining (showing right now at about 4.6 Gigs). I looked into this System Performance and was wondering whether adjusting the virtual memory would do anything. Obviously it won't.
Also, do you think with that amount of memory (which being shown in Task Manager) that is left after what I have up all that I need to work now, is sufficient or would you think it's time to be adding more memory. I should add again in Task Manager under Process it shows 70% being used. Remember, this is an ASUS Rogue Laptop.
Thanks for the replies.

 

[USAFRet]

I had 16GB RAM, now 32GB.
I've had the pagefile set to 1GB min/max for years, on one partition on the C drive SSD.
Zero problems.

 

[Ralston18]

I would say sufficient to provide a direct answer.

You have 16 GB physical RAM and only about 3/4's of it being used....

Open Resource Monitor and go to the Memory tab. See what processes are using memory and how much memory each process is using.

Take a close look at Physical Memory graph the bottom of the window.

Very much suspect that adding more virtual memory space is not meaningful per se as the existing virtual memory space may not be fully being used.

Yes you could add more virtual memory but there will likely be some trade-offs involved.

Leave things alone until and if Windows 10 starts complaining about low memory. Then use the Resource Monitor and Performance Monitoring tools to find what may be going on. Could be some buggy app not releasing memory....

 

[tungleboomps]

So would you say with regards to "only about 3/4's of the physical RAM being used " should be interpreted as saying "it is enough" ... and if so, how low would it have to go before you would suggest adding more RAM? If I see it go down to 2 Gigs remaining, would you personally add more? Also if Windows begin to groan, would you again add more physical RAM instead of increasing the virtual memory size from where I presently have it?
I am going to take your advice and leave things alone then. Thank you so much for the helpful reply.

 

[Ralston18]

If physical memory begins to "groan" then I would expect that Windows would begin swapping to virtual memory.

Performance might slow some but not enough to really notice.

Depends on what is being done: high end rendering perhaps - anything memory intensive.

At that point some obvious performance drop might be overcome by making more virtual memory available.

Beyond that, if the combined physical and virtual memory are not enough for the application(s), then more physical memory could be added.

For the most part a memory related problem will result in errors: "Insufficient Memory" predominate.

It used to be that we seemed to spend a lot of time tweaking performance by tuning virtual memory: maximizing and minimizing the allocated drive space, etc. in conjunction with the available physical memory.

Eventually Windows seemed to handle all that very well on its own via auto-sizing. Still tinkerer's could overule that with their own settings: some setting combinations would work out. Other setting combinations would not.

Direct memory was faster. Swapping to a slow hard drive could be counter productive. Goal was to strike a balance.

I honestly do not remember when I last had to manage virtual memory. Maybe some older system where no more physical memory could be added so virtual memory was used to give things a boost. Albeit a limited boost.

Pretty much all moot with today's much larger and less expensive RAM modules. Faster as well. Same goes for HDD's and SSD's. And with video cards having their own memory that also made a difference in it all.



Just my viewpoints. There may be others. No problem with that on my end.

 

[USAFRet]

I set my pagefile to 1GB min/max (5 years ago) strictly due to the small size of my original 120GB SSD. Sucking up 10-20GB of that for the pagefile was unacceptable.

Since I have seen zero performance impact, I've left it at that.

 

[tungleboomps]

Ok, thank you for the helpful replies. This has been informative and much appreciated!