Interesting memory usage in Windows 10 x64 Pro

[devnulllore]

I have 16G of hard memory in my Windows box and have been playing around with the swap file. When I had it off I was using an average of 29% of the physical memory. Once I turned it back on the use of the physical memory almost doubles to 58%. Any ideas why? I have an SSD for my OS and was wondering the long term benefits of turning off the swap file permanently.

[devnulllore]

I turned off the swap file and memory usage is down to 30%, system boots, and shuts down faster as well.

[Guest]

Some apps won't work correctly if the swap file is switched off, although you should be safe reducing the size, the long term effects are minimal.

[adrynalyne]

1 hour ago, devnulllore said:

I turned off the swap file and memory usage is down to 30%, system boots, and shuts down faster as well.

 Could it be instead certain things are no longer starting because you disabled it? MS has a lot of caching schemes in place to speed up performance for often used applications, that likely cannot function with no swap file and a measly 16GB of ram. That’s could be where your decreased usage comes from. Of

course that extra memory it uses isn’t really in use—it’s released as it’s not needed and more pressing matters need it. 

 

The reason it shuts down and boost faster is because you likely still have the “fast boot” settings enabled, which actually uses a hybrid sort of shutdown method; starting up, some things start fresh and some are resumed from hibernation. That probably doesn’t work with your page file disabled, and is only really beneficial to spindle drive machines. Also, you disabled system restore point generation and the ability to write memory dumps which I’m sure had some sort of minimal impact. 

 

My advice is to leave it on, especially with 16GB of ram. If you had 64+, that might be different. I myself use 64GB on any given day—so if I disabled my swap file, things would crash. 

[devnulllore]

I tried turning on the swap file again and ran several memory hogs and my hard memory usage went up to 59% while the swap file remained unused. Sounds crazy but those are the facts. Since I am using an SSD I am going to try turning off the swap for a while and see how things work. I will report back.

[PGHammer]

Because I have only half the hard RAM you do (8 GB) I've left the swapfile alone (I also am using one of the slowest traditional HDDs as my boot drive, a WD EcoGreen - and this one came out of a WD MyBook).  If anything, performance has increased along the way - for example, I'm posting this from an Ubuntu VM in WSL 2 via Xming X Server for Windows,  while running Facebook in three tabs in the background and installing BlueStacks 4 atop that..  Hence my referring to the whole thing as "torture" in my own post.

[binaryzero]

Modifying the page file....is this 1999?

 

Leave it alone, you have memory there to be used. You're using a little over 50%, you've got plenty to spare... 

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

Are you actually having troubles or noticeable performance issues from having the swap file enabled?  From my perspective, unused RAM is wasted RAM.

 

I can see how there might be an issue for a system where it has to start swapping the contents of RAM memory to virtual memory paging file,  If you are just being arbitrarily told that X% of physical RAM is in use and everything you normally use the computer for is working normally as expected, then I would suggest just continuing to use the computer with the swap file enabled.  If it turns out there are performance problems later as a result, investigate them, but otherwise it seems one would be falling down the rabbit hole of diminishing returns trying to optimize memory usage on a desktop.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky