Heavy Page file activity during game

[turn_pike]

I play the game League of Legends almost daily and try to do so competitively. However I've been plagued by a constant problem:
In team fights where players use all of their abilities at the same time my hard drive will thrash like no one's business resulting in slideshow fps during the most deciding time of the game.
The hard drive doing the thrashing will be whichever hard drive holds windows paging file.

I know a lot of people who play this game using much worse computer and not have this problem. I even ditched Windows 7 and upgraded to 8.1 as I thought it might be an OS related problem.

The symptom occurs after I use the computer for some time (eg for browsing) and then start playing the game. I also made sure that I close most programs and have lots (70+%) of free physical memory which alleviates the problem somewhat. The symptom does -not- occur if I start playing the game after a new reboot without doing anything else. It also never happens when I'm playing other games, even heavy ones like Shadow of Mordor or Watch Dogs.

Specs
Phenom II 955 BE
8 GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600
Sapphire Radeon 7870 Ghz
3 hard drives
Windows 8.1

 

[inachu]

Even if your system meets or exceeds performance specs does not mean no swap file usage or less.

There are way to control insane swap file trashing and the best tips and practices for that would be to do the following:
Find a program like disk keeper or perfect disk and modify it so that it defrag also at boot time so that defrag of the swap file takes space.

Now if you are truly livid/angry/insane over your swap file then the only cure is to do the following.

Buy a second internal hard drive for your pc. It does not need to be a large hard drive but it needs to be 7k faster or better. That second drive will need to be dedicated to be used only for your swap file.

Next edit under advanced options to make your c:\ a fixed swap file and just make it 124 megs in size in both the min and max settings.

By making min and max the same then no more computing will be done and all work will be done on the secondary drive.

Also do not partition your c:\ drive. Some have done this and it will work but the idea is to remove the swap to the second drive so you give speed back to windows on c:\

So the easy temp fix is to defrag your swap file.
The complex and best method is to buy a secondary dedicated swapfile drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Get 16GB of RAM and a decent-sized SSD?

 

[Ketchup]

Get 16GB of RAM and a decent-sized SSD?

If it is truly a page file issue, this is your best bet. If you had to pick one over the other, I would go with the SSD personally.

Edit: you mentioned 'much worse' computers not having the issue. They are probably having to retrieve much less graphics data from the hard drive than you are with your 7870, which I would guess is set at fairly pretty settings.

 

[inachu]

Fragmented swap files really suck. My co worker bought 32 gigs of ram and just totally disabled the swap file but he does not play any games so for that he is safe.


I will be buying one of these for christmas to solve my room mates swap file issue:

 

[turn_pike]

Now if you are truly livid/angry/insane over your swap file then the only cure is to do the following.

Buy a second internal hard drive for your pc.

Oh I'm livid alright.
There have been many times where I felt I was very much ahead of my opponents and things fell apart as I cannot do anything during team fights.

I do use three hard drives atm. A Samsung Spinpoint F3 (a rather fast hard drive at the time of purchase) is the one holding the paging file.

Get 16GB of RAM and a decent-sized SSD?

Sandisk Extreme Pro has been ordered and will arrive by the end of this month.

-That- said. I'm still both perplexed and annoyed as to the behavior of this game / of the OS. I would have thought the sound effect + voice + graphic fx would be exactly what the game is putting into RAM during its very lengthy loading before every match. As mentioned, heavily modded Skyrim, Witcher 2, Watch Dogs or Shadow of Mordor do not exhibit this kinda of behaviour during gameplay.
So I suspected this to be League of Legends problem but then again millions of player can play it without problem with their toaster computers.

 

[inachu]

Well since you offloaded the swap to another drive then the only other thing to speed up the reading of the swap file is to create many smaller ones. If you have USB 3.0 then you can buy cheap 4gig 3.0 thumb drive just need 3 of them and multiple speed boosted thumb drives will increase swap file speed by another 5 to 20%.

 

[Ketchup]

I do use three hard drives atm. A Samsung Spinpoint F3 (a rather fast hard drive at the time of purchase) is the one holding the paging file....

So, are you actually seeing any performance benefit to doing this?

 

[Cerb]

Fragmented swap files really suck.

Redundant statements are redundant. A used page file will be heavily fragmented. 'Tis its nature.

Have you identified hard page faults occurring, or identified the process(es) actually working with the page file? Also, how's your commit during play?

 

[inachu]

Redundant statements are redundant. A used page file will be heavily fragmented. 'Tis its nature.

Have you identified hard page faults occurring, or identified the process(es) actually working with the page file? Also, how's your commit during play?

Not sure if he want to commit so much time into that but that is a good point.

page faults (having a lot of them) could mean that memory is going bad.

If he bought new memory and he gets less page faults then that would confirm on bad memory. Many times BIOS self diagnosis would pass with no issues and still have massive paging faults. Best time to check for paging faults is after pc has been on for more than 45 minutes.