pagefile.sys writes with plenty of RAM

[Ross Comer]

I am seeing tons of writes to pagefile.sys (60MB/min in Resource Monitor)
even though I think I have memory available. I would expect there to be
minimal or no writes unless I ran out of RAM. Why are there writes? I'm
trying to optimize my system and lots of pagefile.sys writes seems bad.

I have 4GB on a 32-bit Vista system so 3GB is visible. TaskManager shows
2.18GB in use in the meter and graph. However under "Physical Memory (MB)"
it shows 3323 total, 1528 Cached, and 0 Free.

I'm running a Render on Sony Vegas Studio (ie. making a movie) so I'm
definitely doing lots of reads and writes to my movie files. I've tried
source files on both a HD and Intel SSD. While my ultimate goal is to
increase my rendering speed, the pagefile.sys writes are my current
investigation point (already tried 4GB RAM, faster video card, Intel SSD,
etc).

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Regardless of the amount of installed ram, many programs allot and use pages
of memory. One reason why virtual memory should never be disabled. I suspect
that you'll find that the majority of the paging is due directly to the
software that you're using.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Ross Comer]

Thanks for the reply. But wouldn't all RAM be used before paging occurs?
Why does it only show 2.18GB in use and the total memory used by individual
processes be under 3GB?

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

It's in the way the software is written. It will page out data that is not
currently in use, reserving ram for active use. Vista will strive to use all
physical memory first, but it's not unusual for multimedia editing programs
to behave this way.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Steve Thackery]

It's in the way the software is written. It will page out data that is not

currently in use, reserving ram for active use. Vista will strive to use
all physical memory first, but it's not unusual for multimedia editing
programs to behave this way.

Is this right? I didn't think an individual application has any control
over the memory management - i.e. what gets paged out to disk, what stays in
RAM. I thought all that was in the control of the OS.

I thought an application just tries to read or write to memory, and - it
it's not already loaded into RAM - the OS gets it from the pagefile. If
that area of RAM has not been accessed for a while, and another application
needs some RAM, the OS writes it out to the pagefile.

In other words, the application itself can't decide what goes to the
pagefile and what doesn't.

I'm no expert at all in this area, so if you could elucidate that would be
great!

SteveT