Virtual memory/page file - anybody turned it off?

Everybody is probably aware of all the advice about what settings to have your Page File set to - depending on your installed RAM, etc.

Has anyone turned it off all-together?

I've noted some people who have at least 2GB RAM say they have it switched off as 2GB RAM is plenty and doesn't warrant a Page File. I have 2GB and I am going to see if my Gaming PC speeds up.

I am going to test this now - see what happens - I've never turned it off all-together on any of my PCs.

I turned it off when I first had installed 2GB of RAM. Everything worked fine for a while, but one app (I can't remember which one) simply refused to work without VM turned on! Poor programming if you ask me...

Mmm, I'll play loads of games and stuff - see what happens.

If I do turn it back on then I might make the PF really small - like 250MB - 500MB or something - instead of the 2-3GB Windows tries to set it to.

I'm more interested in whether there is a speed gain in switching it off. If so, it is staying off.

OK be interested to hear your results.

I'm playing Company of Heroes now - I'm playing it as usual with all the settings at maximum. The gameplay area/map certainly scrolls a faster.

disabled it once. but the windows xp loading time jumped up to more than twice its original time.
I as well had the problem with applications that check for virtual memory on startup to ensure the working ...

above that, with trashy programmed apps like Firefox 2 + Hellgate London at the same time (firefox does not free its memory until quit, hellgate london will just send a message and die down without saving when it reaches full RAM -> deadly combination) you will need more than only 2GB of RAM to prevent a dead ends brick wall.

If you are running vista, go get yourself a nice fast 2 gig memory stick and use it and vista ReadyBoost to make the memory stick your cache. Speeds stuff up a LOT.

Heh good luck. Think it's turned off? Press control, alt + delete and look at performance. What's the PF usage? I bet it's >0.

I tried this and all it did was result in a very fragmented paging file when I turned it back on.

It is worth doing a massive defarg so you clearly have some free space and then remaking the page file for sure. Also worth having a small partition on your main drive, say 25% of it at the start (fastest part) and putting the OS and swap file on that OR have a 2nd drive partitioned in the same manner and putting the swap file on that. start of drives can be TWICE as fast as the end.

Battlefield 2 also ran very nicely.

Crysis too - I notice the motion blur more now - like COH, the gameplay is smoother. Bare in mind - I have Crysis wacked to full, with the hidden simulated DX10 settings.

I alt-tabbed out of Crysis - had half GB RAM left.

PF Usage History is a flat line - with a tiny little bump in it. However, it does show 1.17GB PF Useage. Mmm.

However, all seems well so far - games seem to play more smoothly.

Weird that games are smoother. I thought the page file would only be used if RAM was very low, but perhaps it's used as a lazy option a lot and when it's not there the system is forced to use RAM instead.

It is often used to preload data or outsource data that is not needed ie when a process is set to outsourced. while it is still "harddisk" its used different than normal hard disk especially in the meaning of beeing nicely aligned (if it isn't the performance drops)

Windows always will use the page file even if 1GB of RAM is free. thats why you should not disable it no mather what you do.
I've a virtual disk where the swap is on. So windows is happy and I am happy ;-)

I just found out that in Crysis, if you shoot the top section off a palm tree, you can pick it up and carry it around - basically, the whole 'head' section of the palm tree.

Total sausages.

I just loaded up Windows Movie Maker and a big video - that sucker is a lot faster doing it all in RAM.

and it will kill your whole work a lot faster if you use 3 bytes more than your RAM can hold.

Oooh. Potential sniffage.

However, it all seems faster without the PF.

I best stop now for the night - I'm catching my death here with no clothes on (pureley out of excitement).

I turned mine off a while back with no problems. Mind you, I'm using XP rather than Vista and I don't generally open tons of apps simultaneously.

I have XP too.

Run one of those memory optimisation tools and see what happens. They usually just dump loads of your memory into the paging file to give the illusion of more RAM. If your computer crashes, paging file is off. If it doesn't (and you get harddisk activity) then the paging file lives on.

Go here: http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

Jason

Turning off the paging file is not a good idea. There are a lot of good reasons why this is so (which convinced me that I shouldn't do it, because I was previously skeptical).

Turning off your paging file forces every application (and Windows) to keep every bit of their working set in RAM. Every device driver, every Windows service, everything. Windows can be quite clever in unloading parts of itself when an app or game is asking to use a lot of RAM, but that cleverness can only extend so far.

With a pagefile, Windows can dump not only big chunks of its own tasks (and their datasets) to disk, but anything else you might be running that isn't the foreground application.

This is easily visible when you quit a RAM-hungry program like Crysis because disk activity peaks whilst Windows reloads some common tasks back from the pagefile (it's better to do it in one big burst rather than just-in-time as you use Windows).

Also with no pagefile, you're reducing Windows' ability to cache data from disk. XP and Vista both silently cache just about everything read from HD as you work. This is why Excel loads much faster on the second try (a small example, but it illustrates the point). Lack of RAM for the cache will slow your overall Windows experience.

2GB is a pretty hefty amount of RAM, but you're not helping overall performance by denying Windows the use of a pagefile. Windows may not be regarded as a good piece of software by many, but its memory management, caching concept and pagefile usage are actually quite intelligent. Windows will only use the pagefile when the alternative (keeping stuff in RAM) would actually hurt performance.

It's exactly the same with Linux and its swapfile. Deny it the use of one, and you end up with performance penalties.

The only potential argument for removing the pagefile is for PC's used for single tasks, such as a media center, internet kiosk or MAME cabinet. Even then, the only advantage of removing the pagefile is the freeing up of 1GB or so of HD space.