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DarkLogix
Texan and Proud
Premium Member
join:2008-10-23
Baytown, TX

DarkLogix to BronsCon

Premium Member

to BronsCon

Re: [WIN7] Recommended SSD System Tweaks?

said by BronsCon:

said by trparky:

So do I even need a page file for a system that has 8 or 12 GBs of RAM?

Depends what you're doing with it. I run 16GB with no pagefile, but I'm gonna have to turn that puppy back on when I start running my VMs again. If you're just surfing the web and checking your email, you're probably good without a pagefile even at 4GB.

Turn off hibernation, set the pagefile initial size to 0, max size to whatever (usually equal to the amount of RAM you have is a good policy, double your RAM if you have 4GB or less) and Windows won't page out unless it absolutely needs to. Disabling the pagefile altogether means a crash if you fill your RAM, setting it to a 0 initial size means it won't be used unless your RAM is literally full; giving it a nonzero initial size means Windows will page out enough data to fill that initial size as soon as there's enough disk idle time for it to do so without impacting performance. It does this and marks the paged out portion of RAM as disposable, so it knows it can just free that RAM without having to page it our first (since it's already written to disk), but if you never actually fill your RAM, you're using erase-write cycles on your SSD needlessly.

Actually ideal for the pagefile is set min and max to the same size so it doesn't re-size it

BronsCon
join:2003-10-24
Fairfield, CA

BronsCon

Member

You're thinking spinning disk, where there are performance implications to fragmentation. Taking that out of the equation changes the game; the ideal pagefile is the smallest one you can get away with at any given moment.

DarkLogix
Texan and Proud
Premium Member
join:2008-10-23
Baytown, TX

DarkLogix

Premium Member

said by BronsCon:

You're thinking spinning disk, where there are performance implications to fragmentation. Taking that out of the equation changes the game; the ideal pagefile is the smallest one you can get away with at any given moment.

Re-sizing is extra IO, though if you have enough ram then set a small page file, I have 24GB of ram so I set a tiny pagefile with same min/max size so its there but doesn't do anything.

If it has to change the file size that is more IO than if it just had to update the data of the file, so its still a good idea for a non-changing size. (though if you have enough memory to not need a pagefile then it's going to sit there empty and not have an effect anyway.)

and short of 2 programs I use nothing has come close to filing my ram and even those 2 haven't fully filled it.