Windows 10 - Enormous page files?

[jim]

So I've noticed a couple of virtual memory errors on my PC over the last couple of days, so thought I'd check out my page file.

Windows 10 has set it to 48GB!

I've done some searching, and it seems like I'm not the first person this has happened to. It seems like it might be related to upgrading between Windows versions in the past, but no-one seemed particularly sure.

I was just staggered at how big it was. For some people that could be the driver for them to go out and buy a new SSD.

In case anyone's interested, I have 16GB of RAM. And I'm going to drop it to the Windows recommended 3GB now, setting it manually, and see if that gets rid of my issues.

Has anyone else got this?

[[GSV]Trig]

Good old Windows..

tbh I haven't played with swap files since the Win 7 days, what are you running on there that might be making Windows think you need that size?

[jim]

Good old Windows..

tbh I haven't played with swap files since the Win 7 days, what are you running on there that might be making Windows think you need that size?

Literally nothing. I've never seen my system use more than ~14GB. Windows is actually recommending 3GB as the optimal size - and it seems that other people have had similar situations where the page file size is inflated beyond all logical size but Windows still recommends something more sensible.

Still, I haven't come across anyone with 48GB or more yet!

[ik9000]

will check mine this eve. 32GB RAM installed, fresh install of 1809 last w/e so will be a good yardstick to see what it is doing by default

[Jonj1611]

Mine is 2432MB, I have 16GB ram, obviously gets larger or smaller as needed, was yours a fixed size?

[Ttaskmaster]

No idea, so I Googled.... yeah, sorry, but I like to live dangerously.

Found this:
"Ideally, your paging file size should be 1.5 times your physical memory at a minimum and up to 4 times the physical memory at most to ensure system stability".
Source: https://www.poweradmin.com/blog/pagi...usage-counter/

So mine should be up to 128GB... which is bigger than my entire SSD?

[kalniel]

No idea, so I Googled.... yeah, sorry, but I like to live dangerously.

Found this:
"Ideally, your paging file size should be 1.5 times your physical memory at a minimum and up to 4 times the physical memory at most to ensure system stability".
Source: https://www.poweradmin.com/blog/pagi...usage-counter/

So mine should be up to 128GB... which is bigger than my entire SSD?

Why would 4x RAM ensure any kind of system stability? Doesn't make any sense. Paging is for: not crashing if you run out of RAM, and dumping memory contents for debugging if something does crash. If you have lots of RAM then you don't need to worry about running out, and if you don't routinely dig through memory dump files to debug programs then you don't need the second case either - and even if you do you only need about 2GB max since the most important files will be in a kernel memory dump of up to that size.

Save the space or increase the speed and life of your SSD by adding it as overprovisioning instead.

I have 32GB RAM, and Windows is recommending 4985MB.

[AGTDenton]

No idea, so I Googled.... yeah, sorry, but I like to live dangerously.

Found this:
"Ideally, your paging file size should be 1.5 times your physical memory at a minimum and up to 4 times the physical memory at most to ensure system stability".
Source: https://www.poweradmin.com/blog/pagi...usage-counter/

So mine should be up to 128GB... which is bigger than my entire SSD?

Just an FYI
If you have other drives you can put the paging file on there.
When W7 came out everyone was going mad for fast USB sticks to put it on there. However, I wouldn't bother with that now.
I've never felt the need to change my paging file configuration from System Managed.
Having 24GB I've yet to encounter a paging issue.

On my 8GB RAM laptop it does appear to have used that theory of 1.5x the RAM as it's sitting at 12GB.

48GB on a 16GB RAM seems like an application once decided to just consume all the RAM and then some and caused the paging file to react badly.
It would be interesting to know if it ever resets itself or it just says well you used this amount once so I'm just going to consume it from now on.

[jim]

So I set it to a fixed size of 4096MB as a test, and Red Dead Redemption 2 caused a virtual memory crash.

Weirdly though, I still haven't seen my system use more than 16GB at once. So really not sure what it is using the massive page file for.

[scaryjim]

... So really not sure what it is using the massive page file for.

At a random guess, caching textures/maps/resources that the game wants to have in memory. I'd guess it's quicker to retrieve the data from a pagefile than stream it from the game directory as the pagefile should be a contiguous, coherent addressable space, so no expensive seeks and random access. OTOH, who writes a game engine that tries to load 48GB of resources into memory?!

[Jonj1611]

So I set it to a fixed size of 4096MB as a test, and Red Dead Redemption 2 caused a virtual memory crash.

Weirdly though, I still haven't seen my system use more than 16GB at once. So really not sure what it is using the massive page file for.

According to the support page(if you can ever access it!) it says Windows should manage its own size to prevent that error from occuring. Lots of people reported memory errors with the game, as you have probably found out