Resolved Optimizing a SSD for Win10Pro

Your choice. I personally feel if you need to change it later because you are running so low on disk space you need those few extra gigabytes of space, you have greater problems than the PF taking up space on your drive.

And if this "overflow" is to a hard drive, you are actually hindering performance, not helping it.

 

Oh? Is there any documented evidence to support this? How does expanding space when needed degrade performance, but bumping into a wall because the PF is out of space not degrade performance?

First, as a reminder, this thread is about SSDs with modern Windows 10. Not slow hard drives on Windows 7, a 7 year old operating system. Also as a reminder, the slowest SSD can run circles and circles around the fastest hard drives - even 10K hybrid drives.

But W7 knows how to manage the PF effectively too. So regardless your OS, the data in a page file is already "open" and ready to use. No additional writing to the file tables on the drive is needed to access this data. And there is lots of documented evidence to show forcing Windows to stuff everything it needs into RAM does not "improve" performance - even with gobs of RAM. This is because even with gobs of RAM, Windows effectively uses the page file for lower priority data. Forcing that data into RAM mean less space for Windows to operate in with its higher priority data and/or it forces Windows to save back to the drive (and update the files tables) that data.

As you noted, your examples are with hard drives. SSDs do not suffer from degraded performance due to fragmentation because the data is accessed in a totally different way.

For HDs, a R/W head has to be mechanically moved to the next data cluster. When fragmented, the data is scattered about the disk causing the R/W to consume time physically jumping back and forth.

Accessing SSD data involves no time consuming jumping about at all! It takes the same amount of time to access the next chunk of data on a SSD, no mater where it is located in SSD memory.

Accessing data on a hard drive is like grabbing pieces of paper scattered, in no particular order, through a filing cabinet drawer with 100 folders. And you can only grab each piece of paper one at a time and only from the front. It takes a lot of time rifling through the drawer, front to back, front to back, to pick up the pieces of paper in the right order.

Accessing data on a SSD is like standing in a mail room in front of a sorting bin wall consisting of 100 holding cells, 10 across and 10 down (like a spreadsheet). You just reach up and grab the next sheet and it takes the same amount of time if the next sheet is in cell 1:4 as it does when in 7:3.

I have never seen or even heard any excuse or reasoning to limit or disable the PF that makes sense to me.

There is no documented evidence (white paper, tech article, lab report, etc.) of any real scientific study to show it improves performance. So if it does not improve performance, why limit or disable it?

Since Microsoft has a clear incentive to keep Windows performance optimized, and since Windows is fully capable of managing PFs, why doesn't Windows disable it when it detects gobs of RAM installed if that would improve performance?

The excuses that really baffle me, and I hear them often when folks try to justify disabling the PF when they have lots of RAM is, "I didn't see any difference when I disabled it." Or there is no need to take up all that disk space. What disk space? I mean, really? I have 16GB of RAM installed on this computer. Windows "recommends" 2953MB (2.9GB) for a PF size for "all" my drives. Windows currently has allocated 2432MB.

If 2.4GB of disk space (or even 10GB) set the available free disk space in such a critical state, is limiting or disabling the PF really the right solution? NO! The solution is to clean out the clutter, move user files and programs to a different drive, uninstall unused program, or buy more space.

Finally, and this must be stressed, there is a reason a Windows managed PF is a dynamic PF - its size is adjusted as needed because the virtual memory (system RAM + PF) requirements change. So even if you know how to properly assess your virtual memory requirements, it is not a set and forget setting. EVERY TIME you make significant changes to your system (major updates, new or removed programs, change in use patterns and user tasks, etc.) you need to reassess and adjust settings a necessary.

The How-To Geek: Understanding the Windows Pagefile and Why You Shouldn't Disable It.