Long ago I turned off my Pagefile

[Zak33]

I have 4 gig of ram, and have never looked back.

But I'm just running Defraggler for the first time (lovely) and look there... in the middle of my hard drive... is the Pagefile... horrible earwax coloured thing.

It's not being used... but it's still there. Cheeky monkey...

dya think I should force it to exist as a tiny space.. then turn it off....cos its a huge part of my hard drive partition according to defraggler

[shaithis]

If you have switched it off, I am surprised it's still there....just delete it if you can.

[[GSV]Trig]

Ayer dont forget to delete the pagefile.sys files..

[Zak33]

can't find the file itself to delete it!

So I'vwe reset it to the minimum size 16mb and max 16mb rebooted and it's shrunk... and turned it off again, and it's stayed shrunk.

Where is this file and how do I track it down to delete it? It SHOULD be in C: but I cant see it and I've got folder views showing all.

[Moby-Dick]

you are still hiding operating system and protected files , shoudl be another option on folder view

[kalniel]

I have 4 gig of ram, and have never looked back.

But I'm just running Defraggler for the first time (lovely) and look there... in the middle of my hard drive... is the Pagefile... horrible earwax coloured thing.

It's not being used... but it's still there. Cheeky monkey...

dya think I should force it to exist as a tiny space.. then turn it off....cos its a huge part of my hard drive partition according to defraggler

Sure it's not the MFT?

[shaithis]

Unhide the files or try deleting it blindly via a command prompt.

It should be in the root.....you might need to drop the hidden and system flags from it first though:

attrib -S -H c:\pagefile.sys
del c:\pagefile.sys

[Funkstar]

Zak, do you have hibernation turned on or off?

If off, while you are at it, check to make sye hiberfil.sys isn't there either. It will be the size of your RAM.

[peterb]

Sure it's not the MFT?

As he says - are you sure this isn't the second copy of the MFT (which default is approx 12.5% of the file system size...)

[Singh400]

Just delete pagefile.sys from x:\ if you can find it, turn hidden files and folders on, as well as show system files to on. Might be worth searching for *.sys files too, to see if you can track it down.

Or you can just turn it back on, and set it to a static size say 2GB min and max.

In my opinion, turning off and increasing performance is a pure myth. Just turn it back on

[shaithis]

It isn't a myth.

The swapfile isn't just used when you run out of RAM, the OS constantly monitors what's in memory and occasiaonally decides that something isn't that important and will page it out in case the RAM is needed for something else.

Turning it off stops this pre-emptive swapping, ergo, increasing performance.

I've tried it myself a few times, it can be noticable although I always end up doing something sooner-or-later that pushes me over my physical RAM limit and then have to turn it back on

[badass]

It isn't a myth.

The swapfile isn't just used when you run out of RAM, the OS constantly monitors what's in memory and occasiaonally decides that something isn't that important and will page it out in case the RAM is needed for something else.

Turning it off stops this pre-emptive swapping, ergo, increasing performance.

I've tried it myself a few times, it can be noticable although I always end up doing something sooner-or-later that pushes me over my physical RAM limit and then have to turn it back on

Upgrade to 12GB RAM. Then it won't be a problem.

I mentioned the pagefile deleting on another thread here but it was overrun by developers justifying windows crapness with memory

[Singh400]

Upgrade to 12GB RAM. Then it won't be a problem.

I mentioned the pagefile deleting on another thread here but it was overrun by developers justifying windows crapness with memory

It doesn't matter if you have 128TB of RAM, Windows was designed with pagefile usage in mind. Even if you have 8+ GB of RAM, it's still recommended to have a small pagefile at least, just because of how Windows works under the hood.

That being said, everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and personally I would never run without one.

[shaithis]

Upgrade to 12GB RAM. Then it won't be a problem.

Yes of course.....and no one would ever need more then 640k of memory either

[pipTheGeek]

I mentioned the pagefile deleting on another thread here but it was overrun by developers justifying windows crapness with memory

ummm... I may have been one of those developers
However, my main argument was that windows is bright enough with it's memory management that turning off the swap file won't improve anything. Although I did mention that there are some memory allocation functions that require swap space.

My main evidence for this is from work, if I point spotlight at a random server, or my workstation (running 32bit XP) then the swap usage is hardly anything, like 3MB.

However, I can see that with particular workloads, removing the option of swap might improve things.
If you start getting out of memory errors, even if you have loads of RAM, then turn it back on, it may be a particular app is specifically requesting swap space.

I personally hate people that set their swap relative to their RAM. (I have 12GB RAM so I MUST need 18GB Swap!) I normally set around 1GB fixed size and put it on a small FAT32 partition of its own.

Apologies if this appears like deja vu to anyone (badass)

[TheAnimus]

Well thats kind of the problem, out of memory errors.

what do you do with an out of memory exception (assume .Net here)?

Catch it and display a message box? Oh wait, can't do that, no memory left (mabye)

Throw a new exception with it packed in the inner field, oh wait, another stack walk is sometimes too much memory.

What do you do? So lots of out of memory events are simply not handled well enough by the developers.