Windows – How I tell Windows 7/8/10 to be less aggressive in making copies of RAM to pagefile

memorypagefileperformancewindows 7windows 8.1

Many people ask how to disable pagefile, because they feel the effects of the issue I will ask about. Instead I want to fix the issue, without disabling pagefile.

Windows has the capability of storing on the pagefile RAM that it thinks it might need to page out, although theoretically this help avoid trashing in an emergency, it is deeply annoying to people with systems that have slow HDDs, for example cheap laptops.

For example my current computer: Right now it has 4.8gb of RAM in use, but has about 8gb of current "commit charge"

Using sysinternal tools, I find out that most of the content of page files, are preemptive copies of things in the RAM, that DO look it is low (I have 8gb of ram, thus it is 61% in use), but using RamMap I notice that most of the ram usage is "standby" memory, and most of that "standby" memory is windows cache (the one to make files load faster). with a huge chunk being a binary file that is the sound files of a game.

So, what currently happens: I play some game… windows load it on the RAM, and copy other things to pagefile (making game performance poor), then I stop playing, windows leave the game files cached on the RAM, since the RAM usage is high, it keeps putting more stuff on the pagefile, expecting me to run out of RAM, this make it slow, as it is constantly doing I/O in my extremely bad quality HDD.

But if I look only in the real RAM usage by apps, the commit charge of currently running apps, processes, kernel and shared things used, the real RAM usage should be 2.5gb, RAM and pagefile included.

So, I wanted to try instead of telling windows to not cache (the caching is kinda cool), or to disable pagefile, I wanted to tell it to NOT use the pagefile unless it really needs to (for example if physical ram usage – standby physical ram usage > 80% of physical ram).

Anyone know how I do that?

Best Answer

After lots of research, I learned that what I asked is literally impossible, you can't tweak Windows to behave better, the best that can be done, is literally disabling page file entirely.

Disabling page file mostly did the trick for me, fixing most of my performance problems (and causing a few other problems), but it was fully worth it.

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