Pagefile OFF vs Pagefile ON vs pagefile on ramdrive? - Page 2

MY experience is that pre-2001 games generally look for this. Probably having to do with how windows XP worked and the way game coders used it, debugging maybe or using it to manage textures.. or whatever.

I just set mine to the max limit so it is not dynamic, but if anyone could say if Windows 7 uses the pagefile at all if you have enough ram? I only have 6 gigs but the only thing that ever seems to use the pagefile is Windows 7. I have mine on my raid array so I hardly notice any performance hindrances if it is being accessed.

Never place a paging file on RAMDisk... this is stupid.

I keep a 1GB paging file on my SSD just in case even though I have 8GB RAM.

As a programmer you cannot touch the page file, only the kernel can do that. The logic behind the check, which a few appliations make, is related to fear of running out of memory.

If you have tons of RAM, you're apge file will never get used, and if you place the Page File on a RAM Disk, you're taking up RAM which will force the Page File to eventually get used, but accessing the Page File will have more overhead than the RAM directly.

As DuckieHo said, make a small 1 GB page file on your SSD/HDD just for those programs that look for one, chances are it will never get used anyway, and 1 GB is not that much space.

I'm late by about half a year to this thread, but at least I have a clear example of where a pagefile
on a RAMdrive is actually useful and needed.

Like mentioned before, many older games/programs look for a pagefile, and one such game
is Lineage 2, which came out around 2004 I think.

A personal experience reveals that even the latest versions of the game are still prone to certain
memory leaks and engine bugs that cause the game to crash every so often if you either:
a) leave the pagefile to "system managed", or
b) disable the pagefile.

The problem seems to lay in the fact that the game often requires more than 2GB of memory to
load everything properly, while the process itself is a 32-bit one, of course. Setting the pagefile
to a constant size of over 2GB alleviates the crashes, but you can really "feel" the point at which
the game starts paging.

Putting the pagefile on a RAMdisk smoothens things out considerably.

This is just a single example from personal experience and is in no way enough to justify the
general concept this thread is about, but it goes to show that it's not entirely useless, even if
only to overcome a certain developer's incompetence

I don't know the game, but I do know that the page file doesn't fix memory leaks. If the process is limited to 2 GB and then tries to grow beyond that then it will run out of memory space regardless.

just found this thread tanks for the info.

Been running windows 7, 16GB RAM, Crucial M4's in RAID 0 with no pagefile.

Might try setting up a 6GB RAMdisk and putting pagefile onto it see what happens.