For the vast majority of users, disabling the page file is a very bad idea unless you have at least 2-3x perhaps the amount of RAM you normally use. The ill effects are described all over the place. For example, some apps allocate a significant amount of memory without ever using it (or take a very long time to use it). If you have a page file, this memory won’t be allocated to RAM until it’s used. If you don’t have a page file, you have a big chunk of RAM doing nothing. Perhaps about 0.0001% of people out there will actually gain from disabling the page file, the rest will lose out significantly. The trouble is there is a lot of FUD out there about the page file and cache. The vast majority of people are too stupid to bother to read properly to understand what on earth they’re talking about. For example, a lot of people call it a swap file. It’s not, it’s a page file. This isn’t just a difference in name, it’s an important conceptial difference. I currently have 2gb which is enough for me at the moment. But I would never ever consider disabling the page file. Perhaps if I had 6gb or so I guess, but that’s way too expensive.
Forgot to mention. While there are probably some users (very few) who benefit from disabling the page file, as I mentioned, you also need to bear in mind that another reason why disabling the page file is a bad idea is because Windows simply wasn’t designed to not have a page file. You may not agree with this design philosophy but it was Microsoft’s decision and you choose Windows so you have to live with it. You should at least be aware, if you plan to disable the page file, that MS basically creates the page file in RAM because as I mentioned by design it isn’t capable of operating without a page file. While obviously it’s all still in RAM, so you’ve fulfilled your primary purpose of preventing it ever going out to disk, this should at least tell you about the Windows design philsophy and why disabling the page file is nearly always a bad idea.
Unless you’ve actually seen a properly conducted benchmark you should be skeptical of anyone’s claims for improvements. People have a tendency to see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. Double blind tests for example have shown how BS Monster cables are but a lot of people still claim they are super wonderful. Similarly I’ve seen people make bizzare claims about how much faster their computer is thanks to something when this is obviously not going to provide them a speed improvement or if it did, not to the level they are ascribing.
A lot of people say OMFG why is my page file in use when I have however much RAM. Or why is my disk thrashing every so often? Who gives a fick if it isn’t affecting performance (it may cause added wear and tear, but it’s unlikely to be that significant unless you need a major RAM upgrade). My point is, don’t care if you disk thrases or if your page file has heavy use. Just care about performance (and when I say performance, I mean properly measured not my disk is thrasing so it must be slow). I wonder too how many people are so happy that an unused program can load up a bit faster but ignore the fact that they are degrading overall performance in many other areas. You need to consider overall performance, not single issue performance. Sure disabling the page file may improve the situation when you open up unused background programs, but what about the thousand performance hits you also suffer as a result? Humans aren’t goo at measuring overall performance, so again, don’t assume it’s better, measure it properly. Perhaps it’s because I’m a scientist but for me, the most important thing is repeatable, measured performance, not well I think it’s faster…
Why would you want Windoze to use ANY memory on a slow, spinning hard drive if you have plenty of way faster RAM memory available?
Suppose you have a PC with 1G of memory and a 1G swap file. Now, suppose you add another 1G of memory so you have a total of 2G of RAM. If everything was running fine before, you won’t need ANY swap file because you now have the same amount of total memory as before, except that now it’s all in speedy RAM.
What does Windoze do? It now recommends a 2G or so swap file, as if mysteriously now need a total of 4G of memory. Why? Windoze does not do any analysis whatsoever. It just multiplies the amount of installed RAM by a constant and then ‘recommends’ the result. Stupid!
Here is another thing. Windoze does not make much if any distinction between fast RAM memory and way slow virtual memory on your HD. This is true for Windoze XP Pro, and I would be really surprised if they changed anything in Vista.
You would think that the OS would use up all available RAM and then swap to disk. Not so. The only way to stop swapping is to configure the swap file size to zero. If Windoze really needs some room on the HD, it will just take it, and politely notify you, regardless of your settings.
Case in point. I was running QUAKE 4 some time ago, and did not realize that my system was using the “Let Windoze Manage Virtual Memory” setting.
When I exited the game, I found myself waiting, and waiting, and waiting- for 20 seconds or more. I glanced at the HD light and saw it was on solidly. Aha- Windoze is using the HD for virtual memory.
I have 2G of fast RAM in my system, and no way does Quake 4 need 2G of ram (yet). So, why the h*ll was Windoze using the HD?
I reset the swap file setting to zero, like I have always had it, and tried running Quake 4 again. When I exited the game, it was instantaneous. Your mileage may vary, but if you want way faster response from your apps (especially video editing and such), and absolutely no problems running anything at all, buy more RAM and disable the swap file!
BTW, you regain 2G (or who knows how much) on your HD as a bonus.
If you want to know what’s using up the rest of your HD space, I recommend Sequoia View, from the computer science department of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. It uses an amazing visualization technique called cushion treemaps to provide you with a single picture of the entire contents of your hard drive. It can be downloaded for free from
http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/
As NE said, this is Microsoft’s “choice” (btw their privilege to choose). Because Quake, and practically any “windows game” let the question of memory management to be solved by the OS. So the creators of the game have to live with the OS. But the Win OS IS a multitasking system, and so it must optimize globally, and not just making favor for a particular program, or a particular class of programs. (that’s one of the reasons why the hell was NT born) So why not blame Id Software for letting the OS manage their program’s memory??? With all the fact that (I suppose) they knew the consequences. OS offers services. If you use them, you take the risks.
There is no viable multi-purpose solution for caching problems. If you want gaming performance, then go and buy a gaming platform, which was designed for gaming, and which can be blamed if the gaming performance is not enough, but this is another situation.
It just multiplies the amount of installed RAM by a constant and then ‘recommends’ the result. Stupid!
Do you know the underlying algorithm? Do you know the factors which resulted to that “constant” ??
A few answers to a few question a while back. First, yes on a high memory machine (1gb) Vista uses around 700mb of mem in idle. Second, i currently have 3gigs of RAM so my view may be biased, but my I find that with superfetch turned off my pc performs FAR more sluggishly, (i.e. average app startup time up too 2secs slower). Starting up a more memory intensive application (such as Dark Messijah) seems to take no extra time than if super fetch was enabled, and seems to “free” the needed memory from the superfetch cache with no apparent problem - I.E. no performance decrease or stutters with it enabled. This might be attributed to my 3GB of Mem, but this still leads me to believe that microsoft might actually have thought about the odd sod gamer who suddenly needs to free up 1.5gb of his “cached” memory for a game. Also as far as i can see the superfetch thread is totaly inactive during some high memory, full screen 3d applications (maybe another indication that microsoft thought about it carefully).
Also slightly more off topic, yes vista does use a larger page file. I’m not sure if it is sized in proportion to avalible disk space or installed memory, but my current (automatically configured) page file is just over 6GB in size.
Hmmmm. Seems to me personal preference also matters. I do NOT want some cache eating all of my free RAM, as I would like to know how much of it I actually have at any one time. Turning off superfetch helps a lot, as it reveals the standard windows memory leak, and allows me to tell when to reboot.
Even with superfetch off, it still shows me it’s using several hundred megabytes for caching purposes. I won’t mind a bit if an app takes a couple seconds longer to load the first time I use it, if I get a good idea of my actual free RAM in return.
Thanks to all who contributed to this discussion, but my mind’s made up. Superfetch is OFF on my vista PC.
Dang! Spoke too soon. Yeah, it helps to turn off superfetch, but all memory still (eventually) winds up in the cache. It just takes longer. If anyone has any idea how to prevent that, please post it! I’ll be searching elsewhere on the net, but this is by far the most helpful discussion I’ve yet found, so I’ll be checking back here frequently.
Hello 
Nice Article
http://www.stone1978.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=9730#9730 = here anotherone Test…
Greetings Stone
cushion treemaps… UGG That is such a stupid looking app that it’s not useful at all… what a joke… I use Drivescan from Stardock and man it rocks… it shows me how much HD space is used by each folder… expand that folder and it shows by each subfolder… sort by size or alphabet. I immediately find out what app is taking up so much HD room… A true app that saves me tons of time since it’s just a few files in a folder I put it on a USB device and working on a clients system to free up room… it saves me tons of time.
Now on Superfetch I don’t know if I like it at all so far. Only time will tell but if I had 2 Gigs of ram I would set my swap file to it’s bare mininum 2 megs max… and not have it using HD at all barely. I like that memory to be used in the app I am using like a game or that… not some app I am not using at the time.
Vista is waaaaay faster when superfecth is disabled…
I have a new gaming PC and Vista is quite slow with superfetch enabled.
My apolgises I’m no expert on these things, and it nice to have an explaination on why my new laptop is struggling so much. I only have 1gb of RAM and the only thing i was running was chess that comes with windows vista (nothing fancy) and after an hour my system started to struggle and I eventually had to shut it down. It was using 96% of available ram and was continually flaging up that is was low on memory.
As explained here it’s running 20+ applications in the background. Now I sorry but I don’t need them all to be there to save me 2 seconds when I actually want to use one.
JP, RAM is not the only thing to make your system fast. It’s not like you can have a 2.0 GHz celeron processor, 2 gigs of RAM and expect it to be blazing fast just because you have 2 gigs of RAM. There is more to the “speed” of your computer than just RAM. You say you would like an explanation of why your laptop is sluggish? We need more information to help. What kind of laptop? What kind of processor? etc…
ps… this thread is nice 
Great post, i just built a new system with 2 gigs of ram and vista, let me tell you, best desktop experiance i have ever had.
Checked this out from Digg. I dugg it…
Thanks to EVERYONE for the very constructive and informative comments!
– Maxximus
Wow things Linux doing for ages. Welcome to the new millenium.
What I found better than SequoiaView and Drivescan is something called SpaceMonger. Think of SequoiaView (Picture Boxes) mixed with Drivescan’s flexibility. It lists the folders and subfolders inside the boxes, whichever one is taking up more space.
Check it out, I’ve been using it for quite a while and it’s been saving quite a lot of disk space.
If you don’t want to pay for it download the old 2.1 version, it works just as well.
I’m glad someone is finally explaining people how Windows works. Many of my friends have seen that “Vista eats up all their memory” and switched back to XP because of this false perception. Thank you for the excellent article!
WTF? If you’re so concerned about gaming, do yourself a favour. Upgrade your RAM for starters. 4GB if you’re dead set serious about gaming (and not the cheap stuff either, I’m running Corsair TwinX C2 Pro Dual 3200. That stuff is synchronised as a pair which is you-beaut for dual-cores).
If you’re so concerned about the OS chewing up Page Files while it tries to recover its original status before you played that all-encompassing game for 6 hours straight, just buy yourself another HDD and move the Page Files via a ‘Virtual RAID’ to the 2nd HDD. Want more Page Files for Vista to play with? No worries, just set values for the 2nd HDD (as well as the original values for the 1st HDD) and you can double your Page File capacity.
If you’re so concerned about the life expectancy of your hardware, then don’t be. Any sane PC enthusiast will have long since upgraded to superior technology before that old HDD becomes unstable and collapses in on itself causing a black hole which starts growing larger as it twists and absorbs our dimension into the nether-regions of time and space. In other words, don’t be a miser - thrash it while you have it. Push it to the extreme and beyond. If you have a decent enough system ie. built it yourself using QUALITY parts, she’ll love you for it.
Remember, there is no substitute for quality. You pay for what you get - just make sure you do your homework first.
I agree with Western Infidels about speed and responsiveness. A program and being sluggish because SuperFetch is caching a whole bunch of stuff into my RAM is more than enough reason for me to put off considering Vista for another year or two until it gets ironed out. Either that or just switching to Ubuntu and ‘Wine’-ing all my favorite older programs.