The page file controversy on an SSD!?

[G73S]

I have read numerous articles by searching on google.....

some say that even if you have enough RAM and will probably never use a page file, it is best to set it to 1024 min / max or 2048 min / max just incase any ancient program keeps looking for a page file. I have never run across this situation but I used to keep my pagefile to 1024 min / max

now that I have upgraded to an SSD, I read that putting a pagefile on an SSD is bad as it may degrade the life of the SSD due to constant reads/writes

I am very confused now.......what shall I do?

Disable the SSD since I have 16 GB of DDR3 RAM? Or set it to 1 GB on the SDD? or set it to 1 GB on my secondary 7200 RPM Seagate Momentus XT? or what do you think?

There isn't one thread I read that has the same answer,,everyone keeps saying something different.

And for the life of me I can't figure out why does Microsoft by default set the pagefile to the same size as your RAM...I mean it's pretty dumb to have 4 or 8 or even 16 GB of RAM + a 16 GB pagefile......like holy crap who would ever use that? Doesn't the RAM flush itself anyway when it's out of space?

PS: I don't play any games, all I do is surf the net on firefox, period

My system specs:
ASUS G73Sw
• Intel Core i7 2630QM @ 2.0/2.9 GHz.
• 16 GB DDR3 1333 MHz. SDRAM
• nVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M 1.5GB GDDR5 VRAM
• 17.3" 16:9 HD+ (1600x900) Screen
• Kingston KC100 120GB SSD + Seagate 500GB 7200RPM SSH
• Windows 7 Home Premium (x64)

[lxskllr]

I'd put the page file on a platter drive if you have one in the system. If not, maybe you could put it on a thumb drive, or SDcard. I don't remember if you can do that in Windows or not. I think the damage due to SSD writes is overstated. It does wear it out, but by the time it does, you'll be ready for a new drive anyway. That said, there's no point in causing needless wear, and it seems like Windows will always use a pagefile, no matter how much ram you have.

[Nothinman]

Windows may proactively throw some data into the pagefile to save I/O later on, but it won't use it for no reason at all and if you've got "constant reads/writes" your workload is too much for the memory in your system.

It's a good idea to put it on a secondary drive to save space on the SSD, but that's about it.

[sm625]

I just put my pagefile on the SSD. I have 3 machines set up that way. Even if it reduces the life of the SSD, we're talking about going from 30 years to 10 years at worst. Any modern SSD is going to handle the wear very intelligently. And with many SSDs you can even find out how worn it is. If after a couple years you see that 20% of the NAND is no longer any good, you might want to start worrying. So far I have not seen any real reason to bother. Chances are you wont be happy with the drive's performance after a few years and will upgrade anyway, so its kind of a moot point.

Here is a screen shot from the ssdlife utility:

[boochi]

Set your page file to the smallest windows recommended setting which should be 800MB if you are running 16GB.

[Bubbaleone]

From MSDN:

Virtual Address Space and Physical Storage


The maximum amount of physical memory supported by Microsoft Windows ranges from 2 GB to 2 TB, depending on the version of Windows. For more information, see Memory Limits for Windows Releases. The virtual address space of each process can be smaller or larger than the total physical memory available on the computer. The subset of the virtual address space of a process that resides in physical memory is known as the working set. If the threads of a process attempt to use more physical memory than is currently available, the system pages some the memory contents to disk. The total amount of virtual address space available to a process is limited by physical memory and the free space on disk available for the paging file.

Physical storage and the virtual address space of each process are organized into pages, units of memory, whose size depends on the host computer. For example, on x86 computers the host page size is 4 kilobytes.

To maximize its flexibility in managing memory, the system can move pages of physical memory to and from a paging file on disk. When a page is moved in physical memory, the system updates the page maps of the affected processes. When the system needs space in physical memory, it moves the least recently used pages of physical memory to the paging file. Manipulation of physical memory by the system is completely transparent to applications, which operate only in their virtual address spaces.

Microsoft minimum paging file recommendation: Installed memory capacity x 1.5 = paging file size.

Microsoft maximum paging file recommendation: Installed memory capacity x 2.0 = paging file size.

16GB x 1.5 = 24,576 MB

16GB x 2.0 = 32,768 MB


I never put the paging file on the system drive, whether SSD or HDD. Put it on your HDD.

[Nothinman]

Originally Posted by Bubbaleone

From MSDN:

Microsoft minimum paging file recommendation: Installed memory capacity x 1.5 = paging file size.

Microsoft maximum paging file recommendation: Installed memory capacity x 2.0 = paging file size.

16GB x 1.5 = 24,576 MB

16GB x 2.0 = 32,768 MB


I never put the paging file on the system drive, whether SSD or HDD. Put it on the HDD.

And experience and common sense say that with those memory sizes, if you're using the pagefile enough to require it to be 1.5x the size of your virtual memory that the system will be unusable because it will constantly paging instead of doing real work.

The only time you need the pagefile to be at least the same size as your physical memory is if you want a full memory dump on STOP. Otherwise, set it to something more reasonable like 1G or 2G and set the max to something higher to allow for expansion in case something does go nuts. But in practice you're still probably better off letting the process eating all of that memory get killed than making the system unusable and effectively DoSing yourself.

[Bubbaleone]

Originally Posted by Nothinman

The only time you need the pagefile to be at least the same size as your physical memory is if you want a full memory dump on STOP. Otherwise, set it to something more reasonable like 1G or 2G and set the max to something higher to allow for expansion in case something does go nuts.

This ^........ Just wanted the documentation out there for consideration.

[sm625]

Here is the ssdlife report on the drive I been using for 5 months:



edit: It had a 2GB pagefile from day 1.

[Bubbaleone]

This topic has really caught my interest. I want to know more...and why! So I went looking for the most up-to-date info on the hows and whys about paging files, and I found this very recent and concise article that throws out all the out-of-date garbage, gets down to practical up-to-date facts, and directly answers the OP's questions:

How To Size Page Files on Windows Systems

About the Author

Clint Huffman is a Microsoft Senior Premier Field Engineer who regularly teaches and troubleshoots Windows performance issues using Windows Internals knowledge and tools. He is an active author/contributor to many TechNet articles, books and wikis on testing and performance and is probably best known for the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool, which automates the analysis of performance counter logs. He blogs regularly at http://blogs.technet.com/b/clinth/.

[Phynaz]

Put the page file on your SSD. You bought the SSD to go fast, right?

[SimMike2]

I refuse to baby my SSD. I put virtually everything except large video files and my download directory on the drive. Anything less would be like people putting that ugly uncomfortable plastic on their couches.

[G73S]

After reading a myriad of articles on various sites/forums

I ended up setting the Pagefile to 1024 min/max on the SSD C: Partition as my pagefile will rarely if ever be used

A quote from Microsoft/Technet forums;

Pagefile is exactly the kind of thing you want on your SSD. Taking it off negates one of the biggest advantages of owning one, since most of the stuff in the pagefile is small reads/writes at which SSD's excel. If you wanna limit its size, fine, but dont disable it or move it to another drive.

Windows 7 is very good when it comes to SSD, and knows what to do. One thing I would do though is adjust the size of the pagefile. But as far as the rest of it, I would let W7 deal with that. As mentioned earlier it is well optimized for SSDs unlike Vista. Moving things around may very well hurt the speed rather than improve it.

[entfy]

For the amount of memory you virtually have access to, the necessity for a pagefile is moot. You might as well allow the maximum allowable amount on your ram as you will never be able to use such a massive amount. Also with the new SSD caching that is what I'm getting ready to do. I have taking my 120gb ocz ssd partitioned in in half installing the base necessities on the ssd partition and then have the other half combined with my 1tb hdd for the 56gb maximum allowable cache. What ever you use most often will be stored on the ssd and the page file will never be touch as it would most likely save the page file on the SSD to begin with as it is the most commonly used file.