Along the way we'll learn a lot and as we'll see come up with some pretty novel solutions that are immensely helpful beyond just the single goal of getting an optimised page file.
So no matter if you think you know it all or if you've never even heard of a page file before, we think you're going to learn something new along the way. From how best to set-up your page file, how to avoid the usual pitfalls, to some intriguing tricks that are just damn handy to know about.
When someone mentions swap file or page file to you what are they talking about? You can see why the two phrases are used interchangeably. However, the confusion doesn't stop there. All of this is connected to the Windows virtual memory system, which is what we're really talking about here. Virtual memory enables an OS to virtualise the physical memory space to another storage medium, usually a hard drive.
To do this both the kernel of an OS and the processor it's running on need to support the function. Over 20 years ago that might have been an issue, but not today. The whole point is that when an app requests a block of memory it may see itself being given a block of real memory.
In reality only part, or none at all, of this could be 'real' with the rest stored temporarily virtualised on the hard drive. If an app requests memory that's stored off in this virtual world, a 'page fault' is generated, the virtual memory is swapped over to real memory in chunks called 'pages' and everything carries on. The primary reason why this is a helpful thing is found back in the days when the amount of real memory a processor could access was limited to mere megabytes.
The virtual memory system typically works on pages of 4K, which are swapped in and out of real memory as a whole. This enabled a processor that could be limited to just 4MB of real physical memory to address potentially gigabytes of virtual memory, albeit with that data store on a hard drive. Even today systems with 2GB of memory can easily require virtual memory and with the majority of people running bit versions of Windows, 4GB is the practical physical memory accessible.
On the other hand, if you have oodles of RAM but are desperate for storage space, you can choose to shrink the size of your page file.
Below are instructions for changing your page file, and how big it should be. To change the size of your page file, navigate to the 'System' section of the Windows Control Panel. Open 'Advanced System Settings' and navigate to the 'Advanced' tab. Click the 'Settings' button under the 'Performance' section to open another window.
Click on the new window's 'Advanced' tab, and click 'Change' under the 'Virtual Memory' section. If you have a page file enabled on your machine, which you should by default, then Windows will dynamically adjust its size for you. Initially, Windows will configure a page file size based on the amount of memory installed and free disk space available. If you don't run memory intensive applications such as virtual machines and production software other than games, you can shrink the page file down to a fraction of your total available RAM.
You can also choose to disable paging completely, thus maximizing your space savings. I would strongly recommend against this as it could make your system and programs crash when you unexpectedly run out of RAM.
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