A lot of theory in there, none of which I have seen true in practice and I have several machines all with very different purposes
But...Lifehacker is a site for quick hacks that "worked for me!".... at the end they guy claims to have a 6GB machine and his programs open quickly. Cool story bro! Grandma likes her programs to open quickly. I like mine to have performance once they're open.
Be that as it may, I would recommend the detailed article on the paging file to know more about it. But, in my experience Windows has not been keen on deciding when and when not to use it, so I've kept it disabled.
You are derailing your own thread in the hardware forum. Don't just make a single thread and ask hardware questions, software questions, composition questions, and other miscellaneous questions -- It makes it impossible to find anything when you bundle several subjects together into one single thread in a random sub-forum.
That's a fantastic story. It's also the equivalent of telling someone they can speed down a certain road because you say "I've never been caught speeding on this road because the cops don't patrol here", and then when they get pulled over by the police a week later for speeding... Whose fault is it?
Shrinking the Page File hurts absolutely nothing, eliminating it altogether can end up hurting something.
Worst. Analogy. Ever.
I tried shrinking it and windows still pegs it like crazy. As far as the hurt from eliminating it, I either never experienced it or never noticed it. Don't know what to tell you.
Anyway, argument ends here. You can choose to close this or delete my posts, but either way I'm out. Just trying to give the guy a couple tips.
I hate to chime in on the whole pagefile thing but it is worth noting that no pagefile will probably work GREAT! Right up to the point where it doesn't. If you end up with weird crashes or bluescreens, you might end up having a hard time debugging what's going on. "Out Of Memory" (OOM) errors tend to be extremely erratic/intermittent. You'll notice that pretty much everyone in this thread commenting on this is saying there are caveats to running without a pagefile. There's a reason for that.
Running without a pagefile is somewhat similar to overclocking your 3.6GHz CPU to 3.8GHz -- 99% of the time it won't be an issue but 1% of the time you're basically screwed. If you're willing to accept potential problems, go for it! I'd definitely recommend keeping your backups up-to-date, though, if for no other reason that it is Just Good Policy(tm).
Now playing: WoW (Garona)
The only thing I've ever gotten (when overdoing it with VMware) was a dialog in Windows warning I was running out of RAM - and you have plenty of time to fix the issue, it's nowhere near a crash. No blue screens, crashes, or anything like that. It's hard to believe I just got lucky and never experienced the 1% on so many different machines running different software over many years. You still have control of what's running and when you're overextending your machine.
A server, on the other hand, is a different story. Unexpected server load and the like, on machines that aren't run as desktops, now that could go south very quickly. I'd never run without a page file.
Your sample size is small enough to make it purely anecdotal (not that you ever asserted anything else), plus I would suspect you're kinda like a bunch of us here in that you're aware and savvy enough to work through any edge cases you run into.I tested various pagefile setups for and with the top two PC OEMs for about 10 years. You wouldn't believe how many oddball edge cases we ran into when the pagefile was either missing or too small. Granted, we're talking about machines that were always running an optimal memory size (read "least amount of memory we can get away with") for the configurations (I was working with small & medium business units) whereas you and most of the rest of us these days are running WAY more RAM than just about anything we do will use.
Now playing: WoW (Garona)
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