I used to back in the days of spinning drives. I would put the page file on another drive and set a manual size 1.5 times the installed RAM. Setting it up manually would allocate that size on the drive and keeps it from getting fragmented. But I agree that it's pretty much not needed messing around with this. Better to buy more ram if possible.
i have in the past on another laptop, did the recommended virtual ram with 8gb ram installed, looked to be slightly faster to load apps and loading the browser and online videos, i think with 2 weeks, there was blue screen and frozen screen issues, went back to virtual ram, selected windows to manage the page file, restarted, everything back to normal, i have said this on a couple of other youtube videos, don't touch virtual ram, windows will manage the page file on its own, if you need more ram, purchase more ram for whatever system you have.
My AMD 5950X system has 128GB of RAM. When I tried to run Windows 10 with 128GB of RAM but without any paging, some applications complained by crashing. Since I have a 2TB Hynix P41 nvme sys drive, I only have 128GB of swap with 128GB of swap, not the 1.5x size your recommended for average situations.
I had to adjust my paging file due to recieving "Out of Memory" errors while playing Vermintide. My PC has 16Gb (DDR4) of physical ram, and 1Gb of vram on an integrated GPU but was encountering out of memory and other errors while playing graphically intensive/ memory demanding games. I increased my page file exactly as he described doing so in this video (according to Microsoft's reccomendation) prior to this video coming out, and have not received any errors since while playing "demanding" games. Good video, as it was informative and helped verify that I did things correctly.
i think the main pro from setting this up manually is that windows works with way to small lows, and we fix this by making a good mini such as the one u recommend using. making the transitions smother and less reactive, causing less stutters.
Letting the system take care of that by itself is optimal, you can also create a second paging file in the D or data drive as well as download and play most games from the D drive.
I find leaving the page file at its default and monitoring its actual size through the day. If it grows then that should be the new start size. Moving the file to another disk might help (a little) on non SSD drives but removing the page file from the C drive will mean you won’t get a crashdump file in case of a crash.
I have my page file at 2 times the size. I have 24 GB so I have the page file at Initial 24000 and Maximum 48000 on my 1 TB SSD boot drive. when I first set this up I was amazed with initialization speeds with all apps and access speed to my 5 other HDD on my system. No Lag it's just instant! Even web pages load faster. This system works for me.
You do get a boost, but you need to find the right sweep spot and hope it don't cause instability. Plus I am on 32GB DDR5 6500HHz speed and NVMe drive for main windows drive and storage, so no point for me.
@@Britec09 I am also using 32GB, but Tarkov has a memory leak so I still need a custom page file because the system managed isnt working well for me for some reason.
Great video to the point clearing the air on this subject Was wondering if you have a video or can do a video on Ms config using all cores and threads or let Windows manage them
I usually have it set to - Windows Management, although I sometimes set it to off as in zero. I always have more than enough RAM free. I find that there are no performance differences that I can perceive with any settings
I'd like your opinion on this idea. My system is rather old with PCIe v2.0 with RAM fully filled up to it's maximum of 32 GB. I do plan on moving to a new PCIe 5.0 motherboard some time in the next year, so my plan is to use a PCIe Card to mount a NVMe strip as a separate drive and move the Page File to this drive and make the Page File the size of the drive. I plan on using a SATA 3.0 based SSD for the O/S drive leaving my three(3) Spindles just for File storage. Is soon as I get a new motherboard, CPU & RAM I will then turn this current system in to a file server. My plan is also to get a Rpi 'Pi-Hole' system as soon as the Rpi 4 prices get back to normal and use a NVMe M.2 for it's storage. Without loading all of those ads in the background, my Browser & eMail should speed up.
64GB here. I allow Windows to fully manage the pagefile, although I doubt if Windows even bothers to even think about using it. What I do however find interesting is that since moving from 32GB to 64GB, my video editing software (PowerDirector and Davinci) certainly seems faster and yet to date, I've never seen Task Manager report that I'm using any more than 27GB. Is this my imagination or is Windows actually using my extra memory in some way whilst not reporting that it is?
Windows NT (Windows 10 and 11 are Windows NT 10) memory management evolved from the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX/VMS (Virtual Memory System) concept. All memory addresses are virtual and some combination of physical and paged (disk) memory. Another key concept of this system is the notion of "page faults" that we still see today in Task Manager. The app may ask the OS for more memory, generating a page fault, then the OS needs to think about it and possibly move lower priority processes to the paged memory. In practice, the system is very versatile and was a key factor in the success of the VAX/VMS machines, and Windows NT. There are obvious inefficiencies however, with all the page faulting going on. So, if Windows sees sufficient physical memory, it will allocate larger amounts to apps as a buffer without being asked. Usually, adding RAM to the PC without changing the workload will yield higher memory utilization. In the 1990's, this behavior would frustrate people familiar with Unix or Win 3.x, or Win 9x, or Mac, but it is a good sign that the extra memory is being put to use. With your change to 64GB, it's possible that Windows feels that you already had enough RAM to buffer the apps. If so, then your RAM size is optimal. Don't go for 128.
hi. i use after effect and i want to use this for better performance. my ram is 32gb ddr5 4633mhz cl46 crucial. my win ssd nvme is 500gb 980pro samsung. my cache ssd is 970pro plus samsung nvme. i have also 2tb wd blue hdd for archive. i set initial to 65536 mb and max to 102400mb. can this hurt my pc? because i have multiple internal storage as you said. thanks if you can confirm this setting for me.
Good video Brian mate something I have never really understood or taken much notice of and like you say these days why fix the system when it's not broken??
Ive found matching the page file maximum with the installed ram does increase the efficiency. Bumping the initial size at 60% to create a target index. All together, Offloading hefty tasks in the background should help considerably. Bumping virtual ram is very much like adding racing fuel to a car that isnt made for racing-- its doAble but a stretch. Useful? Yes; To make ends meet with budget limitations. Example. 8gb installed ram: Match with approx 8000mb of vRam, with the initial size of 5200mb. For an exact calculation; in task manager look at Available Memory* this number shows up as less than installed ram as the cache bank and other system needs' take up space at boot. 8gb would be approx 7gb of usable memory. Goodluck
Just let windows manage the pagefile size, commonly with 8GB or RAM windows will create about 3GB page filw which is less than the min. start if we try to create it manually. I tried different options on different versions of windows with not so good results, some ended of slowing down the OS and other caused BSD.
Thanks for confirming something I've always thought. You get so many 'experts' quoting these magic pill solutions, using weird formulas and buzzwords to make it sound like they know what they're on about, when clearly they don't. One thing I constantly hear people bang on about is 'memory leaks', are these real, or just another 'expert' buzzword!? Whenever a game causes an issue, out they come "There's a memory leak!". Can they prove it!? Well, they like to think they can!
Back on Windows 95 and XP when using a slow mechanical hard disk with older processors. Setting the swap file to a fixed size of 1.5 times the installed memory did speed things up at the expense of permanently losing that disk space. It would also help prevent fragmentation of the file on the hard drive. With SSDs and today's faster processors, playing with these settings is useless. Windows 10 and up also employs memory compression which makes storage of the swapped-out memory even more efficient. So leaving it alone is my current advice to anyone. Today hardware can handle it. This is much like the older advice of low-level formatting hard drives and adjusting their interleave settings became obsolete when faster more capable hardware became available.
I have a 7" screen set up to monitor my system and among other things it shows me how much memory is being used and also how large the Page File is. I allow Windows to manage the page file size because that manual setting nonsense hasn't been relevant since Windows XP because Microsoft changed the memory and page file management model with Vista. Even 1.5 times RAM might not be enough in some Open World games . For instance I have 32 GB system RAM and with modded Skyrim (930 mods) I've seen the Page File grow to over 52 GB and nearly all Open World games with grow the Page File to over 30 GB. (I suspect it has something to do with consoles needing Virtual Memory on PS4/Xbox One and older systems) Also if you let Windows manage the page file it will also automatically defrag it when it shrinks it after closing a memory intensive game or application because before it shrinks it it moves the parts it wants to keep to the front of the file which in turn defrags the Page File. Back during Windows XP when you set a manual Page File which was a necessity because memory management was so poor with XP and earlier Windows you often had to use a special Page File Defragger (Sysinternals used to have one but they dropped it after VIsta) for optimum performance because Windows wouldn't defrag it on it's own which really caused stutter and problems when it hit the Page File.
my friend has his laptop with 12gb ddr4 ram and has virtual memory turned off and also has 1tb ssd installed so far no bsod or crashes at all i have mine turned on
Increase your Memory/RAM, usually Win will use RAM first before using VRAM. Tho if that is not an option, better to make the VRAM MIN and MAX the SAME. Usually will help HDD Users as this block of file/storage would be constant and will not fragment your drive. Tho with SSD, this isn't an issue.
For me things got fixed with battlefield 2042. I have 16gigs of ram(single channel) i7 12650h and 3070ti . The game used to run in slow mo for some reason, as soon as I increases the v memory size, it almost gor fixed
This is what I was looking for. I have a similar set up with 16 gb ram 3060 t. I , i7 11th Gen. I set it up to 1.5 like he recommended. Let me know if I made a mistake and how your experience has played out. Id really appreciate it.
@@SmoothSportsGaming So...I did play bf2042 on 16gb DUAL CHANNEL RAM on my older laptop and it ran fine. But on my new one which has single channel 16gb+it has a native 1440p screen, the game lagged like crazy. I recently upgraded to 32gb and game are literally flying. Yes it seems like you did it right, however if you have a dual channel ram, I believe its not required.
@@aakashkapoor8933 ive been optimizing my PC for years now. So even before my games ran well without much problems. I'm just always trying to push my PC the furthest it can go. And let me tell you.... It worked! I have dual ram I think but check this out I was playing Journey to the Savage Planet (1440 p + DSR 4K 60fps) and there was this part that would slow down a bit unless I dropped my effects setting a notch down. I was running everything else at maxed and everything was consistent. So I put my effects all the way up and try that area again and..... No slowdown anymore! I also noticed that when the game saves during gameplay it used to jitter a bit sometimes... Not anymore!
Probably, but the idea that with drives it'll cause degradation over time is extremely silly imo. Games and other apps are constantly going to be using the drives as well, especially with SSDs they are fast enough to do lots of things quickly like a higher-end multicore CPU. NVME SSDs I'd like to think wouldn't have any noticeable effect over 10-20 years. Put it this way, you likely won't be keeping the drive for long enough for YOU to see a difference.
Its not worth changing the swap file for modern hardware, and disabling it can cause trouble because of the way some applications work, as some actually make use of the page file, not only that your setting a hard limit which will guarantee a blue screen when it exceeds it. In days of w9x running a fixed size page file of between 1.5 to 3.5 was beneficial, as having a small start size and a larger max size lead to fragmentation of the swap file owing to it growng and shrinking on demand slowing it down the spinning disk.. - best thing to do is leave it well alone as windows expects to find it... and it only uses as much as it needs
no one mentioned... better leave C drive or map to other physical fast nvme drive... i have 2 x 990Pro fast drives and one pcx4 5000mb/s drive, one for system other for games.. i think map virtual memory for less used drive not C drive is better idea..ofc if its fast drive... what you think ??
There is one reason why I would you use this is when playing games using UE4 and getting the low ram memory error, this is a known issue when playing games using UE4. I have 32gb ddr4 cl16 3600M/ts memory with a 5900X and an RTX 4090, and I was getting this error whilst playing Hogwarts Legacy, I edited the page file using the x 1.5 method and its stopped the game crashing with low ram error. As I say it is a known issue with some games using the UE4 gam engine.
I still have trouble understanding the difference between virtual memory and page file (or is it the same?) and the memory used on a disc and cache. I’ve read a bit but still confused, any good resources for a non IT person like me?
Hello Sir, I have to work on adobe illustrator and my GB ram is 4G.i3 7th generation.Can I use the same method to increase 4gb to 8gb.Kindly reply as I'm totally a non IT person
Classic man. I was bought up on VMS (Virtual Memory System - DEC) and Windows NT 3.5. Paging is part of the architecture of the OS, It's almost like trying to turn off the Kernel on Linux lol. Paging is meant to happen be it a hard fault or a soft fault. My advice has always been, if you concerned about paging affecting your performance then buy more memory you will still page but you can reduce your hard paging to disk although it will increase your soft paging to memory, which is fine.
hi. i use after effect and i want to use this for better performance. my ram is 32gb ddr5 4633mhz cl46 crucial. my win ssd nvme is 500gb 980pro samsung. my cache ssd is 970pro plus samsung nvme. i have also 2tb wd blue hdd for archive. i set initial to 65536 mb and max to 102400mb. can this hurt my pc? because i have multiple internal storage as you said. thanks if you can confirm this setting for me.
Mine is set at 1024MB (Let windows decide blah blah blah, box checked) on programs and background services (I have 16Gb Ram/ 2 sticks). I did have these set at custom levels (I recently changed it back to let windows decide) because I was getting all sorts of problems while gaming (GTA Online) with stuff like this, ERR_MEM_EMBEDDEDALLOC_GUARD_1 and other ERR_MEM problems, so if these problems still happen after I change it back to 'let windows decide' the I obviously need some help.
Lotta folks are messing around with this right now due to long load times of halo infinite being related to these settings regardless of up to date hardware.
I have a 4gb ram tablet pc and since a few years ago when I came across this tweak I used the 1.5 times method in the first box and the 3 times method in the second box and it jumped to 9.9 gb in the task manager. I never had a blue screen because of that
64GB of ram is a lot and pagefile will hardly be used. So like Microsoft suggest, its possible you could turn it off. But I would leave a little, but that's just me
@@Britec09 I understand where you coming from, and i agree in terms of stability. But the problem is windows is wired and uses the pagefile even if it doesn't need to, you can have 128gb and it still will use it, simply its the way windows is design.
alright that's it, i am only watching englishmen for these istructional videos. clear, concise, and easy to follow. seriously, why are computer people so terrible at communicating these things... cheers 🍻
Best option is lower it when people have +24gb ram memmory, but when have 16gb ram in 2025 gaming its not enaugh so I needed 5gb Virtual Memory Size, I lower it to 512mb from 5gb since I upgraded from 16 to 24gb for free, I run on 0 issues and run RAMMap in background to lower cache ram from 9gb to 2gb when gaming and I have a loot of free space left and studdering gone for me. For me its stable in any new games and run discord youtube in background and msi afterburner riva turner etc paired with 5800x3d. higher I goes on Virtual Memory Size less fps and studdering I get and huge fps drops, lower it fix my issue.
Unlimited size. Or at least something big that you can deal with (hard drive space). I have some software (deduplication stuff) that can eat ram and goes into virtual memory rapidly. 16Go got 'nomed, with 55Go of virtual space. SSD didn't liked that, but the software didn't crash (i have to restart the system to "clear" the pagefile after that tho.) That's an exemple but yeah, just put Ram x1 as minimum (and truly, you can put something like 400meg, it's fine too if you set a maximum that is way bigger than that) and how many gb you can spare on your drive for max. If your hard drive is always on the brink of the red zone, don't bother with min/max. Just use a fixed one or system managed, just know that if one software crash one day, it's probably because of that. Really other than that, there isn't an optimal virtual memory size, it's just not how it works. If you have stable softwares and no crash, it's probably fine how it is already !
@@longjohn526 That's basically why letting this default is the true optimal thing to do with modern stuff x). For me, it's just because i prefer being in control, by habit and it seems that the limit is 3xRAM size. So it's not "unlimited" per se. (But it should be enough for more that 99% of users anyways !)
OK so I been doing this my whole afternoon, got me curious I placed, in both boxes, ram times 1024 times 2 In my old pc (Intel 4gb of ram) was: 4x1024x2 Equals 8 with something Placed in both boxes, accept and restart Gave me more disk space, I had 20gb free now 30gb and made my games run faster NO I'm not kidding, Intel 4gb On my laptop of 8gb I chose the option that says "system managed size" also made things go faster, even made my crashing rdr2 finally run Made RDR2 work, Intel 8gb of ram The automatic option, the first one, made everything go slower
Me da flogera traducir, segun tutoriales habian dicho que no habia ventajas mas alla de 8gb pero yo tengo una laptop antigua asi que hice esto y funciono mejor que con la distribucion de Windows tengo 16 gb ddr3l gracias ❤
Don't know why people have to test the heat of the oven by baking their head. For whatever the reason to second guess VM by messing with it is just asking for failure. Automatic is the way to go.
Hello again, forgot to tell you my system config. Intel Core I3 4170. RAM 8 Gb. DDR 3. SSD Kingston SV 300 120 Gb. Yes it's a dinosaur. Working since 2015. Happens that in this ridiculous country it is impossible to buy anything. Thanks Again.
I came here in hope of a solution to a software that's using 90 to 100 percentage of my physical memory but this is probably not a great fix for it. Maybe time to double my 16GB RAM in November or December when prices crash.
I have 32gb of RAM and pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys were about 25GB. Since I use Windows + Linux in a 128gb SSD I was running out of space. I put the max size to 1GB and until now it's all good.
8GB is pretty standard for the day to day user primarily due to cost. Most people who are watching this video are not the day to day user and running at minimum 16GB.
Do you use virtual memory? let me know in comments below.
Yes I Use Nested Virtualizaton
I used to back in the days of spinning drives. I would put the page file on another drive and set a manual size 1.5 times the installed RAM. Setting it up manually would allocate that size on the drive and keeps it from getting fragmented. But I agree that it's pretty much not needed messing around with this. Better to buy more ram if possible.
I have 4gb ram I'm using virtual memory
i have in the past on another laptop, did the recommended virtual ram with 8gb ram installed, looked to be slightly faster to load apps and loading the browser and online videos, i think with 2 weeks, there was blue screen and frozen screen issues, went back to virtual ram, selected windows to manage the page file, restarted, everything back to normal, i have said this on a couple of other youtube videos, don't touch virtual ram, windows will manage the page file on its own, if you need more ram, purchase more ram for whatever system you have.
My AMD 5950X system has 128GB of RAM.
When I tried to run Windows 10 with 128GB of RAM but without any paging, some applications complained by crashing.
Since I have a 2TB Hynix P41 nvme sys drive, I only have 128GB of swap with 128GB of swap, not the 1.5x size your recommended for average situations.
I had to adjust my paging file due to recieving "Out of Memory" errors while playing Vermintide. My PC has 16Gb (DDR4) of physical ram, and 1Gb of vram on an integrated GPU but was encountering out of memory and other errors while playing graphically intensive/ memory demanding games. I increased my page file exactly as he described doing so in this video (according to Microsoft's reccomendation) prior to this video coming out, and have not received any errors since while playing "demanding" games. Good video, as it was informative and helped verify that I did things correctly.
vermintide is a real shitfest in terms of optimization when you are playing on legend+
You need the same amout of memory space free as the amount of ram your using as your maximum page file or you'll get that error
Thank you so much for clarifying this concept!
i think the main pro from setting this up manually is that windows works with way to small lows, and we fix this by making a good mini such as the one u recommend using. making the transitions smother and less reactive, causing less stutters.
I agree, this stopped Warzone 2.0 stutters for me
Letting the system take care of that by itself is optimal, you can also create a second paging file in the D or data drive as well as download and play most games from the D drive.
Guys this way is the option "system managed size"
Love your work - thanks for looking after us all !
Thanks Brian.
I usually take a glance at these setting, but then simply let Windows handle the page file.
Better off in my opinion
Thank you Mr. Britec09. As always - you get to the SPOT! Excellent 👍.
For HDD, this is very useful as it helps to mitigate fragmentation.
I find leaving the page file at its default and monitoring its actual size through the day. If it grows then that should be the new start size.
Moving the file to another disk might help (a little) on non SSD drives but removing the page file from the C drive will mean you won’t get a crashdump file in case of a crash.
Great video. Finaly someone adressed this topic.
You're welcome
I love your videos, from Bri 😂🙏
I have my page file at 2 times the size. I have 24 GB so I have the page file at Initial 24000 and Maximum 48000 on my 1 TB SSD boot drive. when I first set this up I was amazed with initialization speeds with all apps and access speed to my 5 other HDD on my system. No Lag it's just instant! Even web pages load faster. This system works for me.
You do get a boost, but you need to find the right sweep spot and hope it don't cause instability. Plus I am on 32GB DDR5 6500HHz speed and NVMe drive for main windows drive and storage, so no point for me.
@@Britec09 I am also using 32GB, but Tarkov has a memory leak so I still need a custom page file because the system managed isnt working well for me for some reason.
Great video to the point clearing the air on this subject
Was wondering if you have a video or can do a video on Ms config using all cores and threads or let Windows manage them
finally someone debunks this nonsense every optimization channel keeps posting. you sound like michael caine. brilliant!
Very nice video thanks for making it
You're welcome
I usually have it set to - Windows Management, although I sometimes set it to off as in zero. I always have more than enough RAM free. I find that there are no performance differences that I can perceive with any settings
Thanks for watching
Thank you for this!!
Thank you for sharing
🤗🙏🏆🇺🇲
You're welcome
I'd like your opinion on this idea.
My system is rather old with PCIe v2.0 with RAM fully filled up to it's maximum of 32 GB. I do plan on moving to a new PCIe 5.0 motherboard some time in the next year, so my plan is to use a PCIe Card to mount a NVMe strip as a separate drive and move the Page File to this drive and make the Page File the size of the drive.
I plan on using a SATA 3.0 based SSD for the O/S drive leaving my three(3) Spindles just for File storage.
Is soon as I get a new motherboard, CPU & RAM I will then turn this current system in to a file server.
My plan is also to get a Rpi 'Pi-Hole' system as soon as the Rpi 4 prices get back to normal and use a NVMe M.2 for it's storage. Without loading all of those ads in the background, my Browser & eMail should speed up.
64GB here. I allow Windows to fully manage the pagefile, although I doubt if Windows even bothers to even think about using it.
What I do however find interesting is that since moving from 32GB to 64GB, my video editing software (PowerDirector and Davinci) certainly seems faster and yet to date, I've never seen Task Manager report that I'm using any more than 27GB. Is this my imagination or is Windows actually using my extra memory in some way whilst not reporting that it is?
Windows NT (Windows 10 and 11 are Windows NT 10) memory management evolved from the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX/VMS (Virtual Memory System) concept. All memory addresses are virtual and some combination of physical and paged (disk) memory. Another key concept of this system is the notion of "page faults" that we still see today in Task Manager. The app may ask the OS for more memory, generating a page fault, then the OS needs to think about it and possibly move lower priority processes to the paged memory. In practice, the system is very versatile and was a key factor in the success of the VAX/VMS machines, and Windows NT.
There are obvious inefficiencies however, with all the page faulting going on. So, if Windows sees sufficient physical memory, it will allocate larger amounts to apps as a buffer without being asked. Usually, adding RAM to the PC without changing the workload will yield higher memory utilization. In the 1990's, this behavior would frustrate people familiar with Unix or Win 3.x, or Win 9x, or Mac, but it is a good sign that the extra memory is being put to use.
With your change to 64GB, it's possible that Windows feels that you already had enough RAM to buffer the apps. If so, then your RAM size is optimal. Don't go for 128.
hi. i use after effect and i want to use this for better performance.
my ram is 32gb ddr5 4633mhz cl46 crucial.
my win ssd nvme is 500gb 980pro samsung.
my cache ssd is 970pro plus samsung nvme.
i have also 2tb wd blue hdd for archive.
i set initial to 65536 mb and max to 102400mb.
can this hurt my pc?
because i have multiple internal storage as you said.
thanks if you can confirm this setting for me.
one reason I've found you have to, is with stable diffusion, with low VRAM.
It is people like younthat actually makes the world turn. !God bless you, Sir!🍎
It would be nice someone to actually prove via benchmarks that manually setting page file makes any difference in performance.
The instability this causes vs performance gain is not worth the headache
@@Britec09 I'm not convinced there is even a performance gain.
Good video Brian mate something I have never really understood or taken much notice of and like you say these days why fix the system when it's not broken??
exactly
Ive found matching the page file maximum with the installed ram does increase the efficiency. Bumping the initial size at 60% to create a target index. All together, Offloading hefty tasks in the background should help considerably. Bumping virtual ram is very much like adding racing fuel to a car that isnt made for racing-- its doAble but a stretch. Useful? Yes; To make ends meet with budget limitations. Example. 8gb installed ram: Match with approx 8000mb of vRam, with the initial size of 5200mb. For an exact calculation; in task manager look at Available Memory* this number shows up as less than installed ram as the cache bank and other system needs' take up space at boot. 8gb would be approx 7gb of usable memory. Goodluck
what happens if you turn it off virtual memory
Watch all of the vid
BSOD
Just let windows manage the pagefile size, commonly with 8GB or RAM windows will create about 3GB page filw which is less than the min. start if we try to create it manually.
I tried different options on different versions of windows with not so good results, some ended of slowing down the OS and other caused BSD.
Hello Brian. I ask you: using virtual memory doesn't shorten my SSD life cause more writes ???
Thanks in advance. Greetings from Argentina.
SSD will last many years and you should worry about shortening SSD life.
Thanks for confirming something I've always thought. You get so many 'experts' quoting these magic pill solutions, using weird formulas and buzzwords to make it sound like they know what they're on about, when clearly they don't. One thing I constantly hear people bang on about is 'memory leaks', are these real, or just another 'expert' buzzword!? Whenever a game causes an issue, out they come "There's a memory leak!". Can they prove it!? Well, they like to think they can!
Back on Windows 95 and XP when using a slow mechanical hard disk with older processors. Setting the swap file to a fixed size of 1.5 times the installed memory did speed things up at the expense of permanently losing that disk space. It would also help prevent fragmentation of the file on the hard drive.
With SSDs and today's faster processors, playing with these settings is useless. Windows 10 and up also employs memory compression which makes storage of the swapped-out memory even more efficient.
So leaving it alone is my current advice to anyone. Today hardware can handle it.
This is much like the older advice of low-level formatting hard drives and adjusting their interleave settings became obsolete when faster more capable hardware became available.
The risk to reward is not worth it with todays hardware.
I have a 7" screen set up to monitor my system and among other things it shows me how much memory is being used and also how large the Page File is. I allow Windows to manage the page file size because that manual setting nonsense hasn't been relevant since Windows XP because Microsoft changed the memory and page file management model with Vista. Even 1.5 times RAM might not be enough in some Open World games . For instance I have 32 GB system RAM and with modded Skyrim (930 mods) I've seen the Page File grow to over 52 GB and nearly all Open World games with grow the Page File to over 30 GB. (I suspect it has something to do with consoles needing Virtual Memory on PS4/Xbox One and older systems) Also if you let Windows manage the page file it will also automatically defrag it when it shrinks it after closing a memory intensive game or application because before it shrinks it it moves the parts it wants to keep to the front of the file which in turn defrags the Page File. Back during Windows XP when you set a manual Page File which was a necessity because memory management was so poor with XP and earlier Windows you often had to use a special Page File Defragger (Sysinternals used to have one but they dropped it after VIsta) for optimum performance because Windows wouldn't defrag it on it's own which really caused stutter and problems when it hit the Page File.
my friend has his laptop with 12gb ddr4 ram and has virtual memory turned off and also has 1tb ssd installed so far no bsod or crashes at all i have mine turned on
Thank you for all your videos! Quick question, is there a way to reduce system VRAM usage that doesn't cause instability?
Increase your Memory/RAM, usually Win will use RAM first before using VRAM. Tho if that is not an option, better to make the VRAM MIN and MAX the SAME. Usually will help HDD Users as this block of file/storage would be constant and will not fragment your drive. Tho with SSD, this isn't an issue.
For me things got fixed with battlefield 2042. I have 16gigs of ram(single channel) i7 12650h and 3070ti . The game used to run in slow mo for some reason, as soon as I increases the v memory size, it almost gor fixed
This is what I was looking for. I have a similar set up with 16 gb ram 3060 t. I , i7 11th Gen.
I set it up to 1.5 like he recommended. Let me know if I made a mistake and how your experience has played out. Id really appreciate it.
@@SmoothSportsGaming So...I did play bf2042 on 16gb DUAL CHANNEL RAM on my older laptop and it ran fine. But on my new one which has single channel 16gb+it has a native 1440p screen, the game lagged like crazy.
I recently upgraded to 32gb and game are literally flying.
Yes it seems like you did it right, however if you have a dual channel ram, I believe its not required.
@@aakashkapoor8933 ive been optimizing my PC for years now. So even before my games ran well without much problems. I'm just always trying to push my PC the furthest it can go. And let me tell you.... It worked!
I have dual ram I think but check this out
I was playing Journey to the Savage Planet (1440 p + DSR 4K 60fps) and there was this part that would slow down a bit unless I dropped my effects setting a notch down. I was running everything else at maxed and everything was consistent.
So I put my effects all the way up and try that area again and..... No slowdown anymore! I also noticed that when the game saves during gameplay it used to jitter a bit sometimes... Not anymore!
@@SmoothSportsGaming Wonderful. 💪💪
Muchas gracias 😊
What about ssds and virtual memory? Does it cause more writes?
Probably, but the idea that with drives it'll cause degradation over time is extremely silly imo. Games and other apps are constantly going to be using the drives as well, especially with SSDs they are fast enough to do lots of things quickly like a higher-end multicore CPU. NVME SSDs I'd like to think wouldn't have any noticeable effect over 10-20 years. Put it this way, you likely won't be keeping the drive for long enough for YOU to see a difference.
Its not worth changing the swap file for modern hardware, and disabling it can cause trouble because of the way some applications work, as some actually make use of the page file, not only that your setting a hard limit which will guarantee a blue screen when it exceeds it.
In days of w9x running a fixed size page file of between 1.5 to 3.5 was beneficial, as having a small start size and a larger max size lead to fragmentation of the swap file owing to it growng and shrinking on demand slowing it down the spinning disk.. - best thing to do is leave it well alone as windows expects to find it... and it only uses as much as it needs
What is the pro and con of maxmize the virtual ram? Thank you.
no one mentioned... better leave C drive or map to other physical fast nvme drive... i have 2 x 990Pro fast drives and one pcx4 5000mb/s drive, one for system other for games.. i think map virtual memory for less used drive not C drive is better idea..ofc if its fast drive... what you think ??
There is one reason why I would you use this is when playing games using UE4 and getting the low ram memory error, this is a known issue when playing games using UE4. I have 32gb ddr4 cl16 3600M/ts memory with a 5900X and an RTX 4090, and I was getting this error whilst playing Hogwarts Legacy, I edited the page file using the x 1.5 method and its stopped the game crashing with low ram error. As I say it is a known issue with some games using the UE4 gam engine.
I still have trouble understanding the difference between virtual memory and page file (or is it the same?) and the memory used on a disc and cache. I’ve read a bit but still confused, any good resources for a non IT person like me?
I've been wondering about this a lot and never got convincing answers.
Hello Sir,
I have to work on adobe illustrator and my GB ram is 4G.i3 7th generation.Can I use the same method to increase 4gb to 8gb.Kindly reply as I'm totally a non IT person
Agreed, to let Windows manage it on its own, Brian.
Best way
Spectacular video, exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!
Classic man. I was bought up on VMS (Virtual Memory System - DEC) and Windows NT 3.5. Paging is part of the architecture of the OS, It's almost like trying to turn off the Kernel on Linux lol. Paging is meant to happen be it a hard fault or a soft fault. My advice has always been, if you concerned about paging affecting your performance then buy more memory you will still page but you can reduce your hard paging to disk although it will increase your soft paging to memory, which is fine.
hi. i use after effect and i want to use this for better performance.
my ram is 32gb ddr5 4633mhz cl46 crucial.
my win ssd nvme is 500gb 980pro samsung.
my cache ssd is 970pro plus samsung nvme.
i have also 2tb wd blue hdd for archive.
i set initial to 65536 mb and max to 102400mb.
can this hurt my pc?
because i have multiple internal storage as you said.
thanks if you can confirm this setting for me.
Mine is set at 1024MB (Let windows decide blah blah blah, box checked) on programs and background services (I have 16Gb Ram/ 2 sticks).
I did have these set at custom levels (I recently changed it back to let windows decide) because I was getting all sorts of problems while gaming (GTA Online) with stuff like this, ERR_MEM_EMBEDDEDALLOC_GUARD_1 and other ERR_MEM problems, so if these problems still happen after I change it back to 'let windows decide' the I obviously need some help.
Lotta folks are messing around with this right now due to long load times of halo infinite being related to these settings regardless of up to date hardware.
I have a 4gb ram tablet pc and since a few years ago when I came across this tweak I used the 1.5 times method in the first box and the 3 times method in the second box and it jumped to 9.9 gb in the task manager. I never had a blue screen because of that
One year later. Thank you.
Some people just like to mess around with settings without knowing the consequences. thank you.
This sort of stuff always causes more trouble than its worth
For my workloads and personal usage, 64GB and above ram, i do turn off page file.
64GB of ram is a lot and pagefile will hardly be used. So like Microsoft suggest, its possible you could turn it off. But I would leave a little, but that's just me
@@Britec09 I understand where you coming from, and i agree in terms of stability. But the problem is windows is wired and uses the pagefile even if it doesn't need to, you can have 128gb and it still will use it, simply its the way windows is design.
@@Pabula I agree, hence why I say don't turn it off
alright that's it, i am only watching englishmen for these istructional videos. clear, concise, and easy to follow. seriously, why are computer people so terrible at communicating these things...
cheers 🍻
Best option is lower it when people have +24gb ram memmory, but when have 16gb ram in 2025 gaming its not enaugh so I needed 5gb Virtual Memory Size, I lower it to 512mb from 5gb since I upgraded from 16 to 24gb for free, I run on 0 issues and run RAMMap in background to lower cache ram from 9gb to 2gb when gaming and I have a loot of free space left and studdering gone for me.
For me its stable in any new games and run discord youtube in background and msi afterburner riva turner etc paired with 5800x3d.
higher I goes on Virtual Memory Size less fps and studdering I get and huge fps drops, lower it fix my issue.
Unlimited size.
Or at least something big that you can deal with (hard drive space). I have some software (deduplication stuff) that can eat ram and goes into virtual memory rapidly. 16Go got 'nomed, with 55Go of virtual space. SSD didn't liked that, but the software didn't crash (i have to restart the system to "clear" the pagefile after that tho.) That's an exemple but yeah, just put Ram x1 as minimum (and truly, you can put something like 400meg, it's fine too if you set a maximum that is way bigger than that) and how many gb you can spare on your drive for max.
If your hard drive is always on the brink of the red zone, don't bother with min/max. Just use a fixed one or system managed, just know that if one software crash one day, it's probably because of that. Really other than that, there isn't an optimal virtual memory size, it's just not how it works. If you have stable softwares and no crash, it's probably fine how it is already !
If you just let Windows manage the Page File you won't have to reboot to get it to shrink, it will do it on it's own in the background
@@longjohn526 That's basically why letting this default is the true optimal thing to do with modern stuff x). For me, it's just because i prefer being in control, by habit and it seems that the limit is 3xRAM size. So it's not "unlimited" per se. (But it should be enough for more that 99% of users anyways !)
great video I just leave as default
Me too
I just leave it on Automatic. On both laptops at the moment, it's 512 MB upon boot.
Better off mate
I trust on windows because the auto mode works best laptop user btw
I use rendering and creation apps that commonly exceed 64gb :P
OK so I been doing this my whole afternoon, got me curious
I placed, in both boxes, ram times 1024 times 2
In my old pc (Intel 4gb of ram) was:
4x1024x2
Equals 8 with something
Placed in both boxes, accept and restart
Gave me more disk space, I had 20gb free now 30gb and made my games run faster
NO I'm not kidding, Intel 4gb
On my laptop of 8gb I chose the option that says "system managed size" also made things go faster, even made my crashing rdr2 finally run
Made RDR2 work, Intel 8gb of ram
The automatic option, the first one, made everything go slower
So mining with 6x cards with 6Gb mem would be 6 x 6 = 36 x 1024 = 36,864 x 1.5 = 55.296Gb.
This is for system memory RAM, not GPU memory
@@Britec09 That's what is needed to run some algorithms.
i havent used this yet and already getting bluescreens because of ram
Me da flogera traducir, segun tutoriales habian dicho que no habia ventajas mas alla de 8gb pero yo tengo una laptop antigua asi que hice esto y funciono mejor que con la distribucion de Windows tengo 16 gb ddr3l gracias ❤
LOL. Yes, I've decided to leave this to the designer's expertise.
The would know more than anyone
Don't know why people have to test the heat of the oven by baking their head. For whatever the reason to second guess VM by messing with it is just asking for failure. Automatic is the way to go.
totally agree
Hello again, forgot to tell you my system config. Intel Core I3 4170. RAM 8 Gb. DDR 3. SSD Kingston SV 300 120 Gb. Yes it's a dinosaur. Working since 2015. Happens that in this ridiculous country it is impossible to buy anything.
Thanks Again.
You're welcome mate, at least you have a computer.
ty
I came here in hope of a solution to a software that's using 90 to 100 percentage of my physical memory but this is probably not a great fix for it.
Maybe time to double my 16GB RAM in November or December when prices crash.
I have 32gb of RAM and pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys were about 25GB. Since I use Windows + Linux in a 128gb SSD I was running out of space. I put the max size to 1GB and until now it's all good.
Ya crashes with cyberpunk badly.i got 32 gb and it got worse so ya leave it alone.😅
"8 gb is a pretty normal size for everyone"
I had to pause the video and check which year this was posted, it was not 2010 sadly...
8GB is pretty standard for the day to day user primarily due to cost. Most people who are watching this video are not the day to day user and running at minimum 16GB.
👍👍
Thanks 👍