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Glorious wrote:

]In all seriousness though, I haven't even looked at this on Windows in over a decade, but can't you set it to a certain size if you are religiously compelled to mess with it against all reason? That's still got to be much better than just outright disabling it.

Win 8.1 allows you to set the size. No idea about Win10.

Glorious wrote:

In all seriousness though, I haven't even looked at this on Windows in over a decade, but can't you set it to a certain size if you are religiously compelled to mess with it against all reason? That's still got to be much better than just outright disabling it.

Default for many Linux distros is to create a fixed-size swap partition during installation. So effectively the same thing (but harder to change after the fact since you need to resize partitions). Made some sense back when HDDs were the norm for system drives, since it kept your swap space from being fragmented. Nowadays, not so much.

Glorious wrote:

In all seriousness though, I haven't even looked at this on Windows in over a decade, but can't you set it to a certain size if you are religiously compelled to mess with it against all reason? That's still got to be much better than just outright disabling it.

Yes, you can still manually set the size in Windows.

That belies a cool technical detail. As of Windows 8 the swap is automagically adjusted in size based upon your commit usage.

So my system has 32GB of RAM, but it's uncommon for me to exceed that. So based upon those metrics Windows has set my swap to 2GB in size.

The kernel has some room for basic data management and worst case scenarios. It also retains the ability to dynamically expand the swap if the stuff hits the fan (an ancient feature).

All this occurred after Mark Russinovich posted a giant series of blog posts about the swap, how to properly adjust it, and the problem with many of the urban legends. Apparently he kicked the kernel team to create a sane system in Windows 8 forward.

Linux apparently has a package that will do that too, called "swapspace". It's in the Debian/Ubuntu repos, but is not well-known; I'd never heard of it before I Googled for ways to manage dynamic swap on Linux.

SSD's r cheap now. Why is this an issue?

Every time the "pagefile is evil" thing comes up it makes me want to stuff them in an fMRI machine and scan their brain. I have a feeling the patterns of a pagefile evangelist and a conspiracy theorist would have a lot of overlap.

Ryu Connor wrote:

So my system has 32GB of RAM, but it's uncommon for me to exceed that. So based upon those metrics Windows has set my swap to 2GB in size.

That's cool. Did not know that. Score one for Russinovich.

Glorious wrote:

Vhalidictes wrote:

Hey, that's a decent chunk of hard drive space! On a modern Windows system, the pagefile could grow to something like 16GB, which isn't small change if your system drive is a tiny SSD.

In all seriousness though, I haven't even looked at this on Windows in over a decade, but can't you set it to a certain size if you are religiously compelled to mess with it against all reason? That's still got to be much better than just outright disabling it.

You can. You can also move it to another drive without much effort, which is why people complaining about the pagefile taking up space on their system drive is silly.

Well, assuming that they are power-users and know how to control the pagefile manually.

Redocbew wrote:

Every time the "pagefile is evil" thing comes up it makes me want to stuff them in an fMRI machine and scan their brain. I have a feeling the patterns of a pagefile evangelist and a conspiracy theorist would have a lot of overlap.

I prefer to think of it as Gnerd Gnositicism. You know -- special knowledge that only the chosen enlightened can find and control.

ludi wrote:

Redocbew wrote:

Every time the "pagefile is evil" thing comes up it makes me want to stuff them in an fMRI machine and scan their brain. I have a feeling the patterns of a pagefile evangelist and a conspiracy theorist would have a lot of overlap.

I prefer to think of it as Gnerd Gnositicism. You know -- special knowledge that only the chosen enlightened can find and control.

Seriously, I'm amazed this conversation still comes up. I'm at least entertained until I realize this "knowledge" keeps getting passed on to new users who then wonder why their system is unstable or slow.