Do i really need a page file?

test_tube_tonytest_tube_tony Dallas TX Member
edited September 2009 in Science & Tech
not sure if this has been covered yet, but ive ben doing some research on various forums trying to figure out if its safe to disable my pagefile in vista x64 with 8 gigs of ram. the system managed size is set to a little over 8 gigs, and ill be darned if i let windows eat another 8 gigs of my hard drive space. some people say leave it on but turn it down, others say turn it off, and others yet say dont even screw with it. so which is it? any thoughts?

Comments

  • fatcatfatcat Mizzou Icrontian
    edited September 2009
    if you use anything adobe, good luck without a pagefile.

    and seriously, is your hard drive that small that you need those 8 gigs of space?
  • test_tube_tonytest_tube_tony Dallas TX Member
    edited September 2009
    its not that the drive is small. i've just got that much crap. strewn across 5 various decent sized drives. i have used ableton live 8 with fxpansion bfd2. those two apps alone ive seen use 3.6 gigs of ram. still no where near 8.

    what is it about adobe that makes it want a pagefile? is it that much of a memory hog?
  • AlexDeGruvenAlexDeGruven Wut? Meechigan Icrontian
    edited September 2009
    Just because you have a lot of RAM doesn't mean you'll never touch your page file. 64-bit apps are no longer restricted to just using 2GB of RAM per process. If you have some stuff in memory that hasn't been used for a while, Windows will page it out so that you've got more RAM free to use when you start a big app. Otherwise, it will have to page that RAM out when you start it, greatly slowing the process.

    That's one reason to leave it alone. Also, if you're running more than 160GB, 8GB is barely a blip. If you're running into the edge of your system drive, you've got too much crap and need to move some off, delete it, or get a bigger system drive.
    test_tube_tony wrote:
    what is it about adobe that makes it want a pagefile? is it that much of a memory hog?

    It's not so much that the app itself is a memory hog, but the act of editing photos and maintaining history on uncompressed image data (A jpg is only compressed when it's sitting on the drive, in memory, it's converted back to uncompressed image data, which is roughly equivalent to (total number of pixels x rgb bit depth) + history of changes). If you have more than a few files open, or do a lot of changes, you can see how memory can get eaten up quickly. Photoshop pages the less-frequently used image data more aggressively even than Windows would in an effort to keep things moving smoothly.
  • test_tube_tonytest_tube_tony Dallas TX Member
    edited September 2009
    i know my storage situation is less than ideal. ive got plans to get 4x 1tb drives and set up raid 5 with a hot spare but thats about $320 and several months off lol
  • SnarkasmSnarkasm Madison, WI Icrontian
    edited September 2009
    Don't mess with the page file. It's still useful.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited September 2009
    Technically Vista itself only requires the pagefile for system dumps if you have enough ram for what your running (and you have enough). However some programs have their own limits on what RAM they can address and they rely on the pagefile for their own archaic reasons.

    So I would suggest you leave the pagefile on and personally I'd let windows manage it. However if you want to conserve space then turning it down to 2gb shouldn't see any adverse effects.
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