what would happen if your increased your paging file to a huge figure? say 200gb? would it be of any benifit?

Question

im not sure how virtual memory works. its really inefficient isnt it? but what if you went crazy and set it to a huge number? would it make a difference? i dont really intend on doing it. maybe just to see what happens. i have enough ram as it is. should i give it a try for the hell of it?

Answer 1

Well you would waste a ton of hard drive space (in this case probably 199gb worth).

Here is a great article on page file size.
http://www.theeldergeek.com/sizing_the_page_file.htm

Basically its only used when you run out of physical ram! So if you have 1 or 2 gigs of ram the "automatic" size is already too big in the first place!

It will not improve performance if you have "plenty" of RAM.

Answer 2

Virtual memory is an area of hard disk which is used by an operating system in place of RAM.

RAM is a precious resource which is required by every software including the Operating System. Operating Systems are capable of running more then one program at one time not to mention that OS itself resides in RAM. However, all the code and data loaded in to RAM is not required at all the times. So to increase performance and free up RAM of unnecessary information, the OS temporarily creates a Virtual memory area on hard disk and transfers all the non essential information to hard disk. This is called (very simply) a page file.
Now, you can increase the amount of Page file to create more RAM on your hard drive, but it wont do you any good if you are seriously short on RAM, as disk transfers take more time then RAM transfers.
If you have enough RAM already, it would be of no practical use as OS will not require all the allocated space.

So, increasing page file size will not dramatically increase performance even if you are running short of RAM, but it will help. In case you have a good amount of RAM there will be no effect on performance at all, just a waste of disk space.

Answer 3

If you increase your paging file to larger than your actual ram, then your ram couldn't help processing your data -- call that computer lockup! U say U have plenty of RAM, but let's say U didn't. Then, the thing to do is set your paging file to maximize the efficiency for processing data & information so your processor can work smoothly with no hangups or hiccups. Try the standard setting & then if sluggish, hanging occurs, increase your paging file to the next level (using a pull-down menu choice or double the range if U have to fill in the amount).