Compacting/resizing page file

[Martin Magnusson]

Is there any way to clear an excessively large page file?

My peak commit charge since Windows started 4 days ago is around 2 GB.
That was over a day ago, but the page file is still around 1.4 GB in
size, and the commit charge reading in Task Manager says "334M / 1909M".
(For the record, I have 512 MB of RAM.)

Is there a way to free up that extra gigabyte or so that shouldn't be
needed any more, without rebooting?

/ martin

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

Hey Martin,

Do you know why the peak commit went so high ?
You say a pagefile of the size you have shouldn't be needed any more, how
can you be sure ?
Did you have a virus tha t you have now removed?

If you run any memory intensive applications, spreadsheets, or database
perhaps, even if you set a min and max value for the pagefile, its only
going to grow again and then it'll start to complain about lack of virtual
memory when it gets near the max value.

Of course, if you know the reason why it grew, and that has now gone away,
then set a min value of at least 512MB, otherwise it can't take a memory
dump when it crashes, and max value to its present size, or perhaps just a
bit bigger, then it will only use what it needs above 512MB. This isn't
ideal for performance since xp has to allocate space and grow the pagefile
as required.

Once you become confident that you know what the max size will be, you could
set min and max values the same the pagefile will be coniguous on disk and
never need to be grown.

Unfortunately the windows xp built in disk defragmentation tool, can;t
defragment in situ, and doesn;t have an option to run at boot, so you have
to move the pagefile to another parttion temporarily, or set no page file,
then defragment to create contiguous free space, and recreate it.

Oh, and any changes you make to the current pagefile require a reboot, you
can add additional pagefiles on the fly.

Paul




Why did the peak commit go so high