Windows 7 Paging file apparently not being used

07
2014-07
  • Daniel F.

    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?

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  • pineapple

    I have 2 GB RAM. Can I make paging file size size to 0 (means "No Paging" option). Because my peak RAM usage goes only upto 1.5 GB. So I think there is no need for paging.

    Will there be any performance issues? or it is not recommended?

    What should be the recommended size?

    I suppose performance will increase since there would be no swaps now. Everything will be in RAM now. Am I correct?


    • Related Answers
  • bobince

    I've been running swapless happily for years. On XP swapless at 1GB is doable and 2GB comfortable; on Vista you might consider bumping it up to 4GB first. RAM is cheap, swap is slow. OK, swap still has purpose for storing inactive background processes, but if you can it's better just to kill the background processes you don't need.

    If you're sure usage never goes above 1.5 at all then fine, but that's really not a lot of headroom for temporary large allocations that you might not have noticed.

  • artifex

    I've been running win 7 swapless for 4 month now and no problems, 8GB ram, 64bit ofcourse.

    I mainly use it for steam games, new and old ones.

  • Moshe

    You generally should not go swapless, especially if you are doing things like video/photo editing - Not that you've said that you are.

    I've seen Live Linux Distros (Running all in RAM, hence little to no swap) hang miserably on amazingly powerful systems.

    Edit: Spellcheck ;)