Page file usage more than what I allow!

[Carl Mercier]

Hi,

I'm running XP and I recently added another gig of ram (I now have 2) in
order to reduce the page file usage to a strict minimum. I always have a
ton of application opened at the same time (2-3 VS.NET, Illustrator,
Photoshop, Firefox and so on).

I changed my page file settings to allow a minimum and a maximum of
512MB only. However, Task Manager says that my current page file usage
is 731MB!

Of course, there's plenty of free physical memory (1.2 gigs available).

Am I missing something?

Thanks!

 

[WTC]

Hi,

I'm running XP and I recently added another gig of ram (I now have 2) in
order to reduce the page file usage to a strict minimum. I always have a
ton of application opened at the same time (2-3 VS.NET, Illustrator,
Photoshop, Firefox and so on).

I changed my page file settings to allow a minimum and a maximum of 512MB
only. However, Task Manager says that my current page file usage is 731MB!

Of course, there's plenty of free physical memory (1.2 gigs available).

Am I missing something?

Thanks!

When you change the pagefile did you Click on "Set" after.

 

[Carl Mercier]

When you change the pagefile did you Click on "Set" after.

Of course I did! And I rebooted my computer. WinXP even says in the
"Performance" pane that my max page file is 512mb. However, in Task
Manager, more than that is used.

Any other ideas?

 

[R. McCarty]

That counter is not a pure "PageFile" usage meter. Windows XP
combines both physical memory and virtual memory into a single
unit.

To see a true Pagefile usage, you need to use Perfmon.Msc and
enable the counter for Pagefile. It will be displayed as a % of the
total Pagefile size. On my system, (w/ 1.0 Gig Physical) the counter
averages around 12% of a 128 Minimum size Pagefile, or 15 Megs.

 

[R. McCarty]

Thanks for the follow-up - Never encountered an XP topic yet
that I couldn't learn something off the NG.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I'm running XP and I recently added another gig of ram (I now have 2) in
order to reduce the page file usage to a strict minimum. I always have a
ton of application opened at the same time (2-3 VS.NET, Illustrator,
Photoshop, Firefox and so on).

I changed my page file settings to allow a minimum and a maximum of
512MB only. However, Task Manager says that my current page file usage
is 731MB!

Task managers figure is misleading. That is *potential* use of the
file, and does not represent any data actually written there. Keep the
max size of file up - higher than that, for contingencies, but you could
probably cut the initial more if you like. See
www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm