How my virtual memory am I using?

[Berryracer]

Samsung Magician's OS Tweaks - Reliability has set my page file to a minimum of 200 MB and a maximum of 1024 MB

I have 32 GB RAM

How would I tell if any files are in the page file or how much memory out of the page file I am actually using?

This is my task manager:

 

[MTDEW]

I know the newest MSI Afterburner 3.0.1 now shows your system memory and pagefile usage in MB.

 

[MTDEW]

I just checked mine with AB and I'm not so sure it's accurate at all.

Right now at my desktop...
Afterburner reports
2850MB system ram usage
3212MB Pagefile usage

ALL CPU Meter reports
2850MB system ram usage
0% of 200MB pagefile usage

So it seems to me, the ALL CPU Meter gadget is more accurate.
Since Like you, I used the magician software and have my pagefile set to 200MB min - 1024MB -max

Link to the ALL CPU Meter 4.7.3 gadget I'm using.

 

[Berryracer]

I know the newest MSI Afterburner 3.0.1 now shows your system memory and pagefile usage in MB.

this doesn't sound right, my page file is min. 200 / max 1024 how come its showing 3 GB?

 

[Berryracer]

ok I tried CPU meter why is it showing me 90% usage of the page file when I have 32 GB RAM and so much free RAM?

 

[MTDEW]

Ram is blue
pagefile - yellow

Yours shows 180MB with 20MB free - which is where the 90% comes in.
So you have something using 180mb in pagefile.
Mine shows 0MB in use .

Try rebooting and see what happens.
I know sometimes when i run a program that uses my pagefile, it doesn't clear when I shut the program down, and I have to reboot to clear my pagefile.
Why? I have no clue

 

[MTDEW]

Oh...and to answer your question about why the pagefile is used when you have so much ram...
Some programs use the pagefile regardless of how much ram you have.
That is most likely why the Magician software suggests limiting the pagefile size rather than disabling it completely to ensure maximum compatibility.

 

[mikeymikec]

I can't think of any good reason why a piece of SSD software would have any opinion on the size of pagefile.sys, except that in a runaway memory usage situation (when some process malfunctions big time and starts chewing up all the available memory), having a limit on pagefile.sys's size would result in an error message once that facility has been used up.

On the default auto setting, I think it would theoretically carry on increasing the page file size, however in practice I think pretty much every user would have noticed that their system is running very slowly indeed and would probably opt for a reboot (unless they knew how to investigate the problem).

IMO, it's pointless changing the setting from auto.

A couple of points to clarify - "the pagefile" is often a reference to available memory (the sum of both virtual and physical).

Process Explorer claims to tell me the physical memory usage. Dxdiag concurs with the physical memory usage reading from PE despite labelling it "pagefile usage". I don't know where Task Manager gets its physical memory usage reading from.

 

[Berryracer]

Ram is blue
pagefile - yellow

Yours shows 180MB with 20MB free - which is where the 90% comes in.
So you have something using 180mb in pagefile.
Mine shows 0MB in use .

Try rebooting and see what happens.
I know sometimes when i run a program that uses my pagefile, it doesn't clear when I shut the program down, and I have to reboot to clear my pagefile.

you were absolutely right man, after reboot with only Pale Moon, IDM, and my AV open which is (Kaspersky Antivirus):

 

[Cerb]

Ideally, you should be using either almost nothing, or almost all of it. Doesn't really matter either way, though, and I have no idea what Magician is on about. Any settings for the page file are orthogonal to the SSD.

 

[MTDEW]

Just for clarity, this is listed under OS Optimization in the Samsung Magician software.
And when you choose Maximum reliability, its sets a min and max for the Virtual Memory.
But if you select Max Performance, its leaves it on auto.
(ignore what is in RED, that just shows my current setting I'm using)

MAX Performance settings

MAX Reliability settings

 

[Berryracer]

Any settings for the page file are orthogonal to the SSD.

How is that Mr. Cerb? I find it has everything to do with the SSD, the reliability OS optimizations are to ensure prolonging the life of your SSD, and thus, to minimize disk writes to the page file on your SSD, but Samsung didn't wanna disable it completely like some SSD Tweaking programs do, but instead set it to a min 200 / max1 GB to be on the safe side

I don't see how that doesn't have to do anything with the SSD

 

[Berryracer]

interesting article about the Page File:

http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

interesting part from the article:

If you've got plenty of RAM in your PC, and your workload really isn't that huge, you may never run into application crashing errors with the pagefile disabled, but you're also taking away from memory that Windows could be using for read and write caching for your actual documents and other files. If your drive is spending a lot of time thrashing, you might want to consider increasing the amount of memory Windows uses for the filesystem cache, rather than disabling the pagefile.

 

[mikeymikec]

I should have been more specific on my notes with regard to pagefile.sys and SSD software - in the highly unlikely situation I described, setting a maximum size would result in less SSD writes because the OS would simply say "hold everything!" until you've fixed the problem.

 

[mikeymikec]

One thing that worries me about SSD Magician disabling hibernation though is that the 'hybrid sleep' feature in Windows uses the hibernation file as a backup in case the power goes out during sleep mode.

 

[Cerb]

How is that Mr. Cerb? I find it has everything to do with the SSD, the reliability OS optimizations are to ensure prolonging the life of your SSD, and thus, to minimize disk writes to the page file on your SSD, but Samsung didn't wanna disable it completely like some SSD Tweaking programs do, but instead set it to a min 200 / max1 GB to be on the safe side

I don't see how that doesn't have to do anything with the SSD

If you're worried about too many writes because of the PF, you need more RAM. I doubt that's a problem for you.

The main reason to leave it on, with plenty of RAM (more than you will have committed), is the occasional broken program that wants a PF to be there. A secondary reason is for minidumps. The size limit allows programs that need to crash to crash, whereas, by default Windows tries to let them make your PC unusable, and crash everything else, instead.

Minimizing the PF size is about gaining capacity, more than limiting writes. If Windows needs to use the PF a lot, it will write to it a lot regardless of size. All the same rules for PF that apply for an SSD apply to an HDD, as well.

 

[Cerb]

interesting article about the Page File:

http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

interesting part from the article:

If you have a lot of disk thrashing, with a fast SSD, you need more RAM. If Windows isn't able to use many GBs for caching, you need more RAM. "Oh, you only need 2GBs for gaming," crap has been half the problem. Luckily, RAM prices are still low enough that everybody can get 8GB, but in any case, headroom is good.

For example, in your first pic, you have over 22GB that Windows has been unable to use. Page file or no, 12GB RAM, up to the point of taking that screen shot, would have performed just as well as your 32GB. Windows will have basically zero pressure to do anything related to conserving memory for another 15-20GBs committed.

 

[mikeymikec]

berryracer's last bit was about the large file system cache setting btw. I wonder what that does on >XP though, as newer versions of Windows cache files somewhat differently.

 

[Cerb]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785435.aspx

Looks like no different, since it applies to 8 and 2003. But...

http://www.tweakhound.com/2009/12/11/ntfsmemoryusage2-tweak/

Scroll all the way down.

 

[imagoon]

I have never really understood the obsession with SSDs and tweaking pagefiles / hibernation etc. Sure less writes make it last longer but in a lot of cases you are talking about pushing the drives life from 10+ years to maybe 12. At that point just buy a new one since the 512GB one you have now is in the local computer store bargain bin for $2.49

 

[mikeymikec]

I have never really understood the obsession with SSDs and tweaking pagefiles / hibernation etc. Sure less writes make it last longer but in a lot of cases you are talking about pushing the drives life from 10+ years to maybe 12. At that point just buy a new one since the 512GB one you have now is in the local computer store bargain bin for $2.49

That's true. While I use the other hardware quite a bit more, I've never had a storage device as my primary one for that length of time.

 

[mikeymikec]

That's true. While I use the other hardware quite a bit more, I've never had a storage device as my primary one for that length of time.

Having said that, disk I/O was a much more serious bottleneck due to HDDs, so I upgraded them more often (at least once every four years). Perhaps with SSDs at least I will be upgrading less often.

 

[code65536]

*sighs*

Beyond the obvious you-don't-need-to-worry-because-the-pagefile-usage-is-a-drop-in-the-proverbial-bucket, page file usage is hard to measure because not everything that gets paged out is paged out to the pagefile.

Say you run a program. It has a 100MB EXE file. When that program loads, that EXE file is loaded and mapped into memory. If a region of that EXE file is seldom used and the system decides to page it out, the obvious thing to do would be to simply evict it from physical memory because that data is already on the disk. It still counts as committed memory belonging to that process because any attempt to access that mapped region will page it back in from the disk.

There are other complications, too, like how Windows has memory de-duplication where two identical pages will initially share the same physical memory until one of them is written to and changed.

This, I suspect, is why such numbers are almost always bogus because most programs just naively measure the amount committed and the amount in in RAM and assume the difference is in the pagefile.

I really shouldn't be encouraging or enabling berryracer's usual obsessiveness, but you could try AIDA64--in my experience, their pagefile figures tend to be right more often than not.

 

[Dufus]

@berryracer, you could use Windows inbuilt performance monitor to show pagefile.sys usage and peak usage but IIRC it's a percentage so have to be aware if the pagefile.sys size is increased by Windows.

I also am running SSD's (RAID0) with 16GB of DRAM and have had pagefile.sys run aways of over 20GB without much slow down so do be aware of that if a limit is not set.

Pagefile.sys is for modified data while as code65536 says, non-modifiable data can be evicted even when no pagefile.sys exists as a copy of it already exists on the drive and then has to be read in again if needed.

The amount of page available is more or less the amount of addressable DRAM plus size of pagefile.sys. This can be quite important for those who use a lot of VRAM on their discrete graphics cards as with the later drivers the amount of page used can be double the amount of VRAM in use.

For instance a system with say 8GB of DRAM, no pagefile.sys and using 2.5GB of VRAM will leave only 3GB of DRAM addressable. IOW 5GB of DRAM usage would be inaccessible. However with 32GB of RAM I don't think you need to worry about that yourself so much.

 

[zir_blazer]

For instance a system with say 8GB of DRAM, no pagefile.sys and using 2.5GB of VRAM will leave only 3GB of DRAM addressable. IOW 5GB of DRAM usage would be inaccessible.

False. Pagefile and addressing are totally unrelated, at least not on the way you're saying. On 32 Bits era, you took a hit on the RAM memory than the OS would see because each Video Card would map 256-512 MB (Not even its entire VRAM) on the addressing space, that is also shared for mainly system RAM. Even on WXP, you can have beyond 4 GB loads because Pagefile seems to rely on address translations.

In a decade of not using Pagefile, all the issues I ever encountered was due the lack of RAM that caused applications to crash if I tried to go over my RAM limit. I don't recall having encountered any special snowflake that refused to run without it enabled.