You can easily disable the page file. Jeff Atwood blogged about disabling it and the consequences. In any case, moving it to a RAMdisk is the worst thing you could do with it, since the page file is for storing stuff that already doesn't fit in memory. Reserving memory for a RAMDisk is going to only make more data get paged out, which will in turn require a larger paging file and RAMDisk, which will in turn leave less memory available, which will in turn page out more mem-- You can see where this is going.
Windows may not have deleted the old pagefile.sys. Try to :
- set to "No paging file"
- reboot
- delete C:\pagefile.sys (hidden file, and permissions may need to be managed)
- reset to "Custom size"
- reboot
If the setting for the page-file is reset by some program, you could try
using Process Monitor to do Boot time logging of all registry changes
in order to identify the program that changes it.
Just remember that this slows the boot process a lot.
The page-file settings are found in the registry at
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\
.
The value involved might be PagingFiles
, but you can easily check which one
by changing the Virtual Memory settings between System managed and Custom and
refreshing the display in regedit to see what changed.
With this information you can set up a filter in Process Monitor and identify
the process that changes that value in the registry.
The page file is used chiefly for swapping-out programs when the RAM is full.
Its use for the dump is only incidental - a convenient place for Windows to put crash data.
Its size therefore should be at least as large as your RAM.
You should verify if Windows does not allocate a larger file when the specified allocation
is too small, which seems to me a reasonable built-in safeguard for Windows to employ.
Remark: If you have another drive in addition to the SSD, you could move the page file there so as not to reduce it too much.
Another remark: Modern SSDs are rated for many gigabytes per day for up to a decade,
so you really should have no fear of some 32 MB reducing the life-time of your disk.
SSD longevity is no longer an issue unless the SSD is old or of low quality.
For example, a test by AnandTech came up with the following results :
If for example the daily usage is only 5 GB written, the above lifespan should be multiplied by a factor of two. A modern SSD should last for the lifetime of the computer.
Best Answer
It depends on the scenario. By default, page file is the slightly larger than size of your ram, since when crash , the contents of the ram is saved to the pagefile and 1.5x times ram is the default size of the pagefile, but your system adjusts the size as needed - i think yours is 1x cause it hardly pages at all. You can set a fixed size, or turn it off, by by default, the size of the pagefile is dynamic