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Huge page file for no reason in Win XP

  • Thread starter Thread starter pX
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pX

Golden Member
I just got my new laptop in. Installed a couple games and CodeWarrior, it's all good. Anyway, on to the problem.

Randomly it seems the page fule usage will jump to over 800mb, and explorer.exe will hover above 10% when I'm not even doing anything. This severely makes the computer come to a near standstill, which is strange for a 2.4ghz in my book...

Any ideas what could be causing this?!?
THANKS!
 
I thought I had fixed this problem, but I just got locked up and CTRL-ALT-DEL showed the PF usage at 845mb and explorer.exe at 100%, ahhhh this is making me so furious, I just bought this thing...
 
Weird...get all the updates for WinXP. Also, maybe setting a certain size pagefile would help instead of letting XP mess around with it all the time.
 
I would NOT disable the page file. Set the page file to have the same Min and Max ammounts. Many people suggest 1.5 the ammount of your memory. This is a link of an article that goes into great detail about how to determine the size.

Windows has always been bad about managing the page file size, it often creates more disk access than needed because it is constently increasing and lowering the file size. By setting the file size the same, it will limit the page file use to only what it needs.
 
Make sure you have SP1 installed.

Also, maybe setting a certain size pagefile would help instead of letting XP mess around with it all the time.
Click to expand...
If you have 512 or more RAM of memory, disable pagefile.
Click to expand...

No, no, no. Let Windows handle the pagefile size and leave it alone. Pagefile != Virtual Memory. Many apps need to use the pagefile in order to function. This has nothing to do with not using available RAM. Windows knows what it's doing with pagefile managment.
 

No, no, no. Let Windows handle the pagefile size and leave it alone.
Click to expand...

like I said before, I agree not to delete it, but there are MANY people saying that setting a static size for Windows will help performance. I have done it since Win 98 one several PC's and have always been pleased.

 
The reason to set it to a static size. This way Windows won't constantly resize it. This doesn't sound really bad, but when Windows has to resize the page file, woah, that sucks up CPU.

The reason some recommend disabling page file at 512MB Ram. Paging was created to suppliment low Ram. We laugh at this today but in yesteryears Ram was low & expensive. People would do with about 16MB of Ram.

Now with Ram being so cheap & so abundant, if you have 512MB or more of RAM, the need for pagefile has been reduced.

It used to be that the pagefile was the Ram carryover. In other words, a program would request 24MB of Ram and you only had 24, or less, the stuff that was previously in Ram, or worse yet, the program that's requesting 24MB of Ram would then move to the pagefile = on the HD = ultra slow.

Now, there's less need to do that.
 
Originally posted by: Sephiroth
The reason some recommend disabling page file at 512MB Ram. Paging was created to suppliment low Ram. We laugh at this today but in yesteryears Ram was low & expensive. People would do with about 16MB of Ram.

Now with Ram being so cheap & so abundant, if you have 512MB or more of RAM, the need for pagefile has been reduced.

It used to be that the pagefile was the Ram carryover. In other words, a program would request 24MB of Ram and you only had 24, or less, the stuff that was previously in Ram, or worse yet, the program that's requesting 24MB of Ram would then move to the pagefile = on the HD = ultra slow.

Now, there's less need to do that.
Click to expand...

This is incorrect. The pagefile is NOT the same as virtual memory. There are hundreds of threads about this in the Operating Systems forum. Nothinman and bsobel are much smarter than I am, so please read their responses in the O.S. forum on this topic.
 
Okay, technically, they are different. It is the Virtual Memory that gets placed in the paging file. However, for this topic, I would think it is safe to say that they are almost one in the same. An in-depth explanation for this question is a little too much man. In fact, Windows refers to it as "virtual memory paging file". So, try not to confuse people when there is no need to with uneeded information.
On to the orginal question now. If you have 512 MB of memory, I would set the paging file for 768 MB minimum and 768 maximum. And if at all possible, find an old drive, and put the paging file on that drive. Set it for the 768/768 size as stated above, and that will get you the best performance possible. If you have a disk defragger/utility that allows you to place the location of the the paging file at the beginning of the drive to improve performance, by all means, do it. But for Pete's sake, keep it off the drive/partition that the OS is on. That my friend will definetly make a difference. That is what I did for years until I moved up to 1 GB of memory. I never had any problems, no thrashing, and never ran out of memory. Whatever one does, try not to let windows manage it. It is just one more thing that you can keep the CPU from having to do. In my opinion, the less the CPU has to do for housework, the more perfromance you are going to get out of the system. Just think, if your wife (or husband depending on the family) didn't have to do the housework, or at least had it reduced a bit, how much more time (and energy) would they have at the end of the day for other "task intensive" duties... ;-)
 
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