Pagefile.sys vs. RAM

[Anonymous Danny]

I have a question about the pagefile.sys. I know that it is essentially taking memory from your cpu and using it as RAM, except that RAM is faster. So my question is, if you have enough regular RAM to run applications without a problem, will deleting the pagefile.sys, or making it smaller, actually make your PC run faster?

 

[Nodsu]

Not really. Making it smaller will save you some disk space. Turning the pagefile off could make your system faster in some cases but it can also break some applications.

 

[PanicX]

Configuring page files for optimization and recovery in Windows Server 2003, in Windows 2000, and in Windows NT(microsoft.com)
How to configure paging files for optimization and recovery in Windows XP(microsoft.com)

 

[Anonymous Danny]

In the case of applications being broken, would that be if the cpu ran out of real ram but had no virtual memory to go back on?

 

[PanicX]

Some applications specifically request to page out data. Without a pagefile, these applications will crash.

 

[Anonymous Danny]

so if u were to say, set a pagefile.sys to even 1mb, will these "breaker" applications work becuase they recognize that a page file exists? Or do they specifically use virtual memory to run?

 

[Nodsu]

When the application requests to write 2MB of data to the pagefile then 1MB pagefile wouldn't really help, would it?

I suggest you set your pagefile minimum size to be really small like 64 or 128MB and maximum somewhere safe like 1024MB. Then go through all those memory tweaks to tell Windows that it should use the pagefile as little as possible.