In Ken Blake, MVP typed on Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:32:33 -0700:
I don't know anything about your hibernation problem, and I don't use
hibernation myself. But if you are running with the page file turned
off, it's a bad mistake.
Here's my standard post on this subject:
1. If you don't have a page file, you can't use all the RAM you have.
That's because Windows preallocates virtual memory in anticipation of
a possible need for it, even though that allocated virtual memory may
never be used. Without a page file, that allocation has to be made in
real memory, thus tying up that memory and preventing it from being
used for any purpose.
2. There is never a benefit in not having a page file. If it isn't
needed, it won't be used. Don't confuse allocated memory with used
memory.
If you have more memory than you need, some of the above may not be
completely pertinent to you, but I still think turning off the page
file shouldn't be done, since there is always a possibility that it
may hurt you.
Hi Ken! Yes I understand your concern if you don't have enough RAM, turning
off the pagefile will only makes things worse. And I would have virtually no
experience with turning off pagefiles, except I own five Asus EeePCs
nowadays and having a pagefile on SSD (solid state drive) is a really *big*
disaster!
So virtually everybody with SSDs and running Windows XP turns off the
pagefile. Although you *must* have enough RAM to do so. Otherwise Windows
will stop and pop up error messages. The reason why you would want to turn
off the pagefile with SSDs are:
1) SSD are very slow to write compared to hard drives. Thus performance goes
downhill very fast. Although they can be faster than hard drives when
reading. One trick is to use MS EWF, which routes all writes to the SSD to
the RAM instead. Thus you can save it all just before shutting down or
ignore all writes together and just dump them.
2) SSD writes reduces their life. The number that gets thrown around a lot
is 100,000 times. So having anything written to a SSD over and over again
unnecessary will just shorten their existence.
Okay fine I know all of this. But I have later expanded this to my other
computers as well. And watching your memory usage, if you never run out... I
never saw one single problem (and the performance is great). And since the
most RAM I ever I had in use was still less than 1GB, that is all I ever
needed for a Windows XP machine so far. If you run something like Firefox
with all of its memory leaks, you will probably run out of memory very
quickly. But I rarely use FF for anything (or other memory leakers), so it
isn't important to me.
The reason for a pagefile is to give your OS and applications more RAM then
you actually have installed in your system. This was a very good idea back
in its day, since RAM prices were high and motherboards couldn't accept
enough RAM to run everything anyway. Although things are changing and the
need for pagefiles and virtual memory days are numbered. We don't have such
limitations anymore. And more and more people are realizing that they don't
need one. Plus it only slows down your system when you don't need it anyway.
