Windows - do I absolutely NEED pagefile?

Yes. These days a consumer "normal" HDD (can't speak for those super expensive enterprise grade) won't outlast a SSD. From my experience as a PC technician.

 

see process explorer or processhacker. click the graphs then tab "Memory"
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/memory/memory-performance-information
http://wiki.webperfect.ch/index.php?title=Process_Explorer

 

It depends on what you do on the computer. Personally i always erase it, even on 4gb systems, and have never had any problems. For years. I am a "normal" user.

If you search the net for info you will understand that it was important way before, but not longer.

It`s necessity is old knowledge.

 

Pagefile is required if you use Hibernate. If you don't hibernate your laptop then you don't absolutely need a pagefile.

 

There is a way aroung that to.

 

Yeah... I'm not an expert, but I don't believe hibernation requires the page file. It's stored as a separate file called hiberfil.sys instead of pagefile.sys. There's also a third one called swapfile.sys. (You can see all three in the root of your drive within Windows Explorer if you select "File | Change folder and search options | View" and check "Show hidden files, folders, and drives" and uncheck "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)".

Hiberfil.sys, Pagefile.sys, and Swapfile.sys. What is the Purpose of these three files?

I don't know for sure as I don't believe that I ever utilize hibernation. I believe Windows 10 defaults to hiding hibernation as a power down option, and instead lists sleep which leaves everything in RAM. I utilize sleep.

Someone also inquired about tracking pagefile usage. I am not aware offhand of any applications that do so.

Don't be confused, as many programs, including Windows' own taskmgr.exe can track page faults (a cumulative metric) and the PF Delta (a snapshot current rate metric). But you have to remember that page faults apply to the entire virtual memory management scheme within the operating system. Turning off pagefile.sys does not turn off the OS's virtual memory manager and it's page supervisor.

In addition to "virtualized" memory that can be backed by the pagefile.sys on disk file; there is also a separate concept called "memory mapped I/O" which is utilized frequently by the OS and many applications... and most importantly by the image loader routines within the operating system itself. The image loader is responsible for reading in an executable file and starting the application. The loader doesn't have to read in the entire application into RAM, it can treat the executable file as virtual memory with the executable itself as the read-only backing file for the paging operations. That is, if it needs to free up some pages in RAM (and they belong to the executable xyz.exe, the page supervisor can just drop the pages from RAM; if needed later, it can simply read them back in from the on-disk xyz.exe file). These count as page faults also, and are completely separate from the dedicated pagefile.sys.

It's all very complicated in reality, and I certainly don't know all of the details. Someone in the comment thread above makes a reasonable point; namely, because of the complexity, I shouldn't substitute my judgment for Microsoft's by disabling pagefile.sys. And that's a fair commentary, but it's also overstated... as by Microsoft's very own expert admission... the darned thing is "optional." They wouldn't call it optional if, in fact, it was mandatory.

I suspect they leave it enabled by default as just sort of a safety mechanism. If an end-user calls in about a crashed operating system, then Microsoft support can likely ask for the crash dump as long as pagefile.sys was enabled. If it wasn't on by default, then they wouldn't be able to do so... and they would have to tell the end user that they would have to enable it, and then wait for the crash to occur again before they could perform any root cause analysis.

 

@Alec In my case, I think that the saving of crash dumps is a very good reason to leave the page file enabled. Not that I really feed the need to disable it anyway. If I get a BSOD, I want to be able to use BlueScreenView, to hopefully pinpoint the cause of the crash.

 

Ditto!

 

How often do you get BSOD's?

 

These days, pretty much never. But when I have got BSODs, having the crash dump saved, has often - with the aid of BlueScreenView, let me determine what file caused the BSOD. Then I can take action to stop the BSOD from happening again.

 

+1

 

Bluescreen...what`s that?!...he.

This proves my point, and as i mentioned before, old knowledge. Pagefile in todays computers are, obsolete. Case closed.

Microsoft, as we all know, is a little behind the development of reality.
They haven`t even got the controllpanel to function, yet. A bug of the ages, man.

 

You can pretend but BSOD happen to just about everyone. Sometimes I don't have one for a couple years. But then Nirsoft's BlueScreenView comes up aces.

 

Controversy again. Polarized opinions.

We need, in this case, the expert comments of software engineers and stop speculating.

In my experience with 8GB + RAM I have never had any issues disabling pagefile. But that's me only? In my own personal scenario?
DON'T KNOW.

To handle bsods I think engineers should make Windows able to save the crash dump even though the user has disabled the pagefile. Is this possible? Only gods know.

 

BDODs is from the old times? Ummmmm... Install Comodo lol

 

I doubt the gods care about that, but here's someone who does -

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...opriate-page-file-size-for-64-bit-versions-of

 

Since day one, my now seven year old i7-3770K clunker has had a custom pagefile set at Initial size 200 MB and Maximum 1024 MB. It had 8 GB RAM, upgraded to 16 about 4 years ago. Pagefile.sys hovers at about 204,800 KB.

 

Page files are not obsolete. If you choose not to use one, that's fine. But, the example I gave with BSODs is a very good reason why it can be very useful to have page file.

Maybe you never experience BSODs, but I do.

 

On a modern Operating System with enough RAM it does no harm having a pagefile, and besides a very small gain in free space, disabling pagefile doesn't improve the machine or performance.

I can't see any reason to disable or modify it, but that's just me.

 

Too too true!

As to BSODs ... the last 2 I had (a few years ago) both came shortly after a Windows update. That's why (a) I never allow auto updates, & (b) I install updates no sooner than 10 days after bork Tuesday. Works for me. YMMV.

Why so much RAM? "640K ought to be enough for anyone!" Quote attributed to Bill Gates, but he denies it (see HERE).

 

Over the years from 4g now to 16g of ram, I set a fixed size pagefile of 64MB and forget about it.

[No hibernation, no extreme multi/heavy application usage and no BSODs]

 

oh! very good topic I will try to disable
pagefile

 

I remember from way back that it was said some programs rely on the pagefile. Programmed that way or simply won’t work. What programs? I don’t know. Is that still true today? I don’t know. But as Krusty said, disabling the pagefile does not increase performance so what is the point? And like guest said we are not in the days of XP where such tweaks may have helped. We even use to pagedefrag for a contiguous pagefile. We tend not to bother with these things these days. I agree with guest and just let Windows manage.

 

Photoshop was one of them. Is it still? Unsure. As others have said, there is no performance gain to removing it. The only reason to do it is space and if you are that short on space you have other problems. This reminds me of service tweaking. It's probably going to cause more problems than it will solve.

 

Photoshop will work without a pagefile, it's only when you load a huge image (while designing a billboard i. e.) that it will crash with a page fault exception. The same is with editing large video/audio files. Running out of RAM while running 2 or more concurrent virtual machines will result in a BSOD.
These are the cases I can think of atm where a pagefile is necessary. I am not aware of an app that will not work at all without it, but perhaps this was taken out of context.