was listening to live radio app and at same time was doing gfx on paint.net when I received an alert that memory is low. as you can see here, the paging file...does it look ok? or can I increase it? and which part can I tweak ?
Hi, the default is system managed. I suggest you try using that, assuming your reference to low memory is to being short of RAM.
Let the system manage the Page File and see how it performs, tick "Automatically Manage Paging File size".
You might also want to check which programs are running and disable any that you are not using such as the java updater. This would free up more memory.
Do you have some reason in particular that makes you believe it was the page file?
It's my understanding that the page file in more recent versions of Windows serves mainly to catch crash dump data.
I logged my memory usage for a bit while I was first setting up my SSD and I could never get my page file usage greater than a few percentage points. Here's an example of page file VS physical memory while I attempt to stress RAM by opening a few high-res images in GIMP and editing them.
(% load)
(physical memory is on left axis (blue line), page file on right (orange line))
This was with user managed page file on my C Drive (the SSD) of 1 Gig (1024 Mb I believe). So ~2% of that is ?.. very roughly ~20 Mb.
And that's about as high as I can get it to go because as you can see, by that point my physical memory is exceeding 80%.
My point is, I would bet you were maxing out physical memory, not your page file. I should point out that running the test that you see in the attached graph, I got repeated "low memory" warnings from Windows.
The easiest way to figure out what's happening is to simply log your RAM usage. Either through Windows performance monitor or through a third party program (new to forum, not sure about posting links...)
Hope this helps.
Edit: spelling & my system has 8 GB of RAM
What is the Page File for anyway? | Ask the Performance Team Blog
Is it a good idea to change my Microsoft Windows page file size?
Sorry, no. Ever seen a .dmp file? Memory management is non-trivial.It's my understanding that the page file in more recent versions of Windows serves mainly to catch crash dump data.
Not at all.It's my understanding that the page file in more recent versions of Windows serves mainly to catch crash dump data.
The pagefile has 2 major functions and catching crash dumps is not one of them. That is only a minor function.
1. It optimizes RAM usage by providing a place where infrequently used data can be offloaded from RAM leaving more of it for more important purposes. At any given time there is likely going to be data that hasn't been accessed for a long period of time. This could be hours, days, or longer. Using high speed RAM to hold such static data is a crime against performance. Having a pagefile means that won't happen, thus improving performance. Windows knows about such memory and copies it to the pagefile. This is very complex.
Most articles I have seen describing the pagefile get it wrong.
2. It increases the commit limit. The commit charge is a difficult thing to explain and I will not try to do so at this time. What is important is that it can never exceed the commit limit. The commit limit is RAM size plus pagefile size minus a few MB. When the commit limit approaches the commit limit you will receive a low memory warning. These warnings have NOTHING to do with how much RAM is available. If the commit limit is reached and the pagefile cannot expand the results are unpredictable but tend to be unpleasant. A system crash is possible.
These have been basic principles of the NT platform from the very beginning and have never changed. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
@Pathfinder
An important factor here is how much RAM you have. Your specs show only disk size which is entirely different. Also is this a 32 or 64 bit OS? These should be added to your system specs.
But if you are having low memory warnings there is a high probability that the pagefile is too small. This can happen even with low memory usage.
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