- HOW TO REDUCE PAGE SIZE IN WINDOWS HOW TO
- HOW TO REDUCE PAGE SIZE IN WINDOWS WINDOWS 10
- HOW TO REDUCE PAGE SIZE IN WINDOWS WINDOWS
The way in which virtual memory is tweaked and managed on older versions of Windows is virtually identical to how it works on Windows 10.
HOW TO REDUCE PAGE SIZE IN WINDOWS HOW TO
How To Optimize Your Paging File In Older Versions Of Windows Once you have set a particular drive the way you like it, remember to click Set to lock those choices in. We don’t recommend you choose a minimum size below this. The default automatic behavior is to have a minimum size 1.5 times the amount of actual RAM.Select No Paging File if you don’t want a particular drive to have one at all. Select custom size to specify your own minimum and maximum paging file size.Logical partitions will also show up as independent drives. Click on the desired drive in the window above to change its specific settings. Each drive’s settings can be managed independently.Look for Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows under the settings category as you can see in the screenshot below.First, open the start menu and then type performance into the search bar.It’s up to you to decide what specific settings to use based on your specific configuration. Now that you have a good understanding of the context and rules to optimize the paging file, it’s time to actually dig into the settings themselves.
HOW TO REDUCE PAGE SIZE IN WINDOWS WINDOWS 10
How To Optimize Your Paging File In Windows 10 By putting the page file on a defragmented partition, you’ll ensure all the data is physically in the same location. If you are using a mechanical drive, creating a dedicated partition after first defragmenting the drive in question can be a good way around this. On solid state drives, this is a non-issue. If your page file is physically scattered all over the disk platter, it takes longer for the drive heads to put it all together. This means that over time as files are written and deleted, a specific file might exist in bits and pieces all over the drive. Files are not stored continuously, but written into any available gaps left by deleted files. On mechanical hard drives, fragmentation can also be an issue. If you have a main drive that uses the NVMe over PCIe interface however, you gain nothing by moving the page file That’s because NVMe over PCIe is parallel, which means read and write requests are handled simultaneously. So if you have two SATA SSDs in your computer, then it still makes sense to put your page file on the secondary drive. If you put your page file on a separate hard drive, then this problem goes away. So if Windows is trying to swap information from your page file and also trying to use the disk for other purposes it will all slow down to a crawl. The read/write heads have to physically travel to different parts of the disk platter where data is stored. The logic behind this makes sense, since hard drives have to queue requests for reads and writes. While SSDs using the SATA interface still have to queue read and write requests sequentially, they are orders of magnitude faster than mechanical drives with spinning platters. The thing is, most new computers have a solid state drive (SSD) as their primary disk these days. One of the most common pieces of advice is to set your page file to a different drive than your operating system drive. General Tips To Improve Paging PerformanceĪpart from tweaking Windows’ own management settings, there are a few things you can do to improve the performance of RAM paging when it happens. At which time you’ll be thankful you had the presence of mind to make sure paging takes no longer than necessary. Given that your computer has the right amount of RAM, there may still come a day when something makes RAM paging necessary. Like most computer components in modern times, RAM is relatively cheap! If you’re always running out of RAM because of your daily user case, a far better strategy to solve the issue is adding more RAM to your system. These days most mainstream computers have way more RAM than the user is likely to need unless they routinely run memory-hungry applications. It still made sense when 640KB of memory was “ enough for anyone”. Mainframe computers from the 1960s were already using it! It made a lot of sense when RAM was measured in dozens of kilobytes. RAM paging is one of the oldest memory management methods in existence. Having a bit of slowdown to handle peak RAM demands is better than having the system go down as a whole. So if the page file is so slow, why even have it? Without a page file, your applications will crash or seriously malfunction, as any additional information that needs to be stored in RAM will simply be lost. The only difference is that reading information from a hard drive is much, much slower than RAM.
From the application’s point of view, it’s just more RAM. When your apps need more RAM than your computer physically has, it needs to use “virtual memory” which is exactly what the page file is.