4 ms·
> You either have some seriously rose-colored glasses on, or you need to put an SSD in your current computer because a lot of the slowness of modern machines li
by iopq 10y ago
> You either have some seriously rose-colored glasses on, or you need to put an SSD in your current computer because a lot of the slowness of modern machines lies in the increasingly-obsolete hard drive.
I have Windows installed on an SSD. I have 16 GB of RAM.
Yet Windows still wants to use a page file, or programs run out of RAM. It's crazy. Programs don't actually USE this much, they just request more than they use.
A page file slows things down compared to doing everything in RAM. Even on an SSD, it's way slower.
- icebraining 10y agoWhile a page file is definitively slower than RAM, it's not a given that simply using one will make the whole system slower. As long as the kernel only sends rarely used pages to the file, the slowdown in writing/reading them can be made up by having more RAM available for the filesystem cache.
- dom0 10y agoI don't know if this was improved in W8 or W10, but in W7 and before the paging algorithm in the NT kernel was definitely subpar, having a pagefile always reduced performance, because applications in the background would be swapped out even if plenty of RAM was available, so going back to an application meant that it was unresponsive until the kernel swapped it back in.
- iopq 10y agoWindows 7 actually pages once you use HALF of your RAM. That's crazy. It's starting to page after I use only 8 GB! 8 GB is free and it's paging!
- mavhc 10y agoI ran windows xp without a pagefile for a while, no major issues, programs crashed if they ran out of ram. Windows 10 has ram compression, but as I have an ssd now, I turned my pagefile back on
- stuaxo 10y agoWhen I used windows, I would have a partition just for the page file, at a fixed size to avoid fragmentation. No idea if this helped.