why is my computer using swap?

[Koharski]

I have a notebook computer with 24gb of ram. The only applications I am using are spotify, qbittorrent, rainmeter and a couple chrome tabs. Rainmeter is telling me that I am using 9% of my swap file and I can't figure out why. I only have 4gb of ram in use so there is plenty left over.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Because it's always using a little bit? Some programs purposefully use swap for data they need to be in "ram" but don't need fast access to. (I'd bet the torrent client is doing this.)

The OS may also be intentionally swapping unused or infrequently used pages preemptively, since it doesn't know when you will suddenly open up After Effects and need 20GB of RAM in a hurry.

You can disable you swap file, but that can be dangerous.

Anyway, check your Resource Monitor's RAM tab and look for hard faults. If it's zero or close to zero, then you're not really hitting your disk for anything and it's just Windows being fat and stupid. If you have the disk space, don't sweat it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

In the general case, using a pagefile (not a swapfile), is a performance IMPROVEMENT, overall.

 

[KingFatty]

uh oh maybe you need more ram? just kidding.

 

[hhhd1]

in linux, you can change the 'swappiness' to modify how aggressive the system use the swap

you can set it to only use swap when the ram is completely full.

 

[Techhog]

Windows will always use the swap file for certain things if you have it enabled. Even if you had 128GB of RAM the swapfile would not go unused if it exists.

 

[zir_blazer]

Windows will always use the swap file for certain things if you have it enabled. Even if you had 128GB of RAM the swapfile would not go unused if it exists.

Reason why I consider Windows totally retarded and prefer to disable the Pagefile. Regardless of how noticeable it is, having Windows using the Pagefile when it has no need to, means high-latency read and writes to HD/SSD that are injustificable.

 

[Deders]

Reason why I consider Windows totally retarded and prefer to disable the Pagefile. Regardless of how noticeable it is, having Windows using the Pagefile when it has no need to, means high-latency read and writes to HD/SSD that are injustificable.

The problem there is if you have page faults, and instead of finding the data it needs handily in a page file on an SSD, it has to go to a HDD for that data, you will incur much more latency.

You will get hard page faults whether you enable or disable the page file.

 

[Cerb]

It's Windows. If you have the page file turned on, it will be used. if you don't need it, it wills till pre-emptively load data into it, in case it does need to use it. It does not treat the page file as a last-ditch emergency tool, but a way to help keep more RAM free all of the time, on systems regularly using a moderate amount of their memory.

 

[sm625]

Do you really expect a company with a $400 billion market cap to be smart enough to write software that actually looks at your % of free RAM before deciding to waste time swapping data to the pagefile?

 

[Cerb]

Do you really expect a company with a $400 billion market cap to be smart enough to write software that actually looks at your % of free RAM before deciding to waste time swapping data to the pagefile?

No. I expect them to get into the phone market, make a half-assed tabletized version of their desktop OS, screw up programs they have a market lock with, like Outlook, and mine everyone's data. Who cares about making PCs perform sensibly? ()🙂