Page File Usage - Can We Get Some Feedback On It?

Well it's always been my understanding that this is the Page File in a nutshell:

Its purpose is to extend the amount of physical RAM and make it available to the system.

So if you have enough ram, begs the question, do you really need it?

Some say yes, some say no, it seems to be a mixed can of worms here on this one and many barking if you don't have it, you're going to run into system instability.

One thing I'm playing with is the idea of not even having it, as long as you have enough ram in the system, because when you have some bad apps that leak, well you get what's called, 'Page File Leak', and I figured, no page file, no leaks to mess with it and you can then not worry about your system being dragged down and getting sluggish because of this issue.

So my main point of interest is trying to understand Page File leaks and not having a page file, to see if this helps with system performance?

THANKS

 

I have 2GB RAM, about 50% of which is in use at any given time. I tried no page file and my memory usage went up to 55% most of the time. So I have plenty of RAM, but even so, when I use a page file my system performance seems better (Vista).

I can't offer any objective facts (which is probably what you want), that's just my subjective observation. Can't be of any help as far as leaks.

 

When you say memory usage went up to 55%, what do you mean, where did you see this?

I'm not sure how the pagefile works in Vista if like XP, but my understanding is Vista and Win7 have better memory allocation and you can see that working better I know in Win7.

For me in XP without the page file the system seems to run faster with more applications running then with it. But I'll keep playing with it to see if it's just my imagination or it's helping, so far it does seem snappier with more windows running.

Your comments are appreciated it, every bit helps.

THANKS

 

In Vista, there's a summary at the bottom of the Task Manager window frame. It tells the number of processes running, % CPU usage, and % memory usage. I'm not sure if XP has this.

 

Much info here: http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

For example:

 

Pagefile - Windows XP