- Joined
- Jan 3, 2021
- Messages
- 2,680 (2.21/day)
- Location
- Slovenia
Processor | i5-6600K |
---|---|
Motherboard | Asus Z170A |
Cooling | some cheap Cooler Master Hyper 103 or similar |
Memory | 16GB DDR4-2400 |
Video Card(s) | IGP |
Storage | Samsung 850 EVO 250GB |
Display(s) | 2x Oldell 24" 1920x1200 |
Case | Bitfenix Nova white windowless non-mesh |
Audio Device(s) | E-mu 1212m PCI |
Power Supply | Seasonic G-360 |
Mouse | Logitech Marble trackball, never had a mouse |
Keyboard | Key Tronic KT2000, no Win key because 1994 |
Software | Oldwin |
Yes. But. The definition of "filled" in an ecosystem of an OS and user applications with user data is anything but simple.Page file is used only when system memory has been filled.
This is an excellent introduction to virtual memory and all related things. It appears to be the last blog post by some guy named Brian Catlin - unfortunately he didn't continue writing posts like this.
For me, the short takeaway is this: do keep the page file and let Windows manage it. Windows will grow and shrink it however it likes, no worries, it basically just reserves virtual memory by doing this. Windows does it to accomodate applications that are poorly written, poorly optimised, unable to adapt to more or less RAM, allocating gigabytes just for fun, or flawed in any other way in how they manage memory. The size of PF doesn't indicate how much data is actually written to it - it may be very little. People who wrote Windows know what spinning rust is, they understand it's best to avoid sending gigabytes to it just for fun.
Everything OK so far. But if the PF does suffer a lot of writing then there's something more wrong. Really poorly made applications or games. Or, well, an actual lack of RAM, but that isn't trivial to determine for certain. I'd start worrying if my PC wrote more to the PF, per day, than the amount of RAM it has (16 GB). Also if it spent more than about a minute per day writing to and reading from the PF.