Windows paging file best practice

In Server there is Active Memory Dump feature that allows for the host OS to be installed on a storage device that is smaller than the amount of physical RAM available. To date we have been turning off system management of the swap file and hard coding the file size to MB in smaller settings and MB in larger settings.

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I was wondering what you guys and gals use as a best practice for configuring page files on VMs? Popular Topics in Windows Server. Which of the following retains the information it's storing when the system power is turned off?

Submit ». SW-Desperado This person is a verified professional. Verify your account to enable IT peers to see that you are a professional. Ghost Chili. It has run like this for years without ever presenting an issue. Thai Pepper. Now, if a different set of spindles were available that would be a different story, even then, there might be a better use for that different set of spindles. Pure Capsaicin. Jimmy This person is a verified professional.

It really varies but here are a few scenarios for you to consider when sizing a page file on a Windows client system, like Windows 7, 8. Note 1 : the numbers used here are NOT Microsoft official recommendation but based on my own study and experience. Note 2 : these are the recommendations for Windows client operating system, not for the servers. There are more factors to consider when sizing a page file in a server environment.

Theoretically, you would only benefit having a page file when your system is running in low memory, in which case Windows will start moving low usage memory pages to the pagefile. Go to Advanced tab, click Settings button in the Performance section. The Performance Options window pops up. Go to Advanced tab and click Change… button in Virtual memory area. Now we are finally at the place where we can tweak things around. Once unchecked, pick a drive from the list on which you want to put on the page file.

Yes, you can actually set different page files on different drives but most of the time, setting up one on one drive is good enough. It can potentially save you tons of disk space as a result. To avoid the potential risk of exposing the data stored in the page file, there is a Group Policy setting that you can enable to automatically wipe out the page file when the system is shut down. Hit OK to save the change. This means that -depending on the need of free memory- the swapfile will continously resize.

Files that grow shrink all the time tend to fragment, but what's worse is that these are big files and they quite often cause other larger files on your disk to fragment more quickly. You can put your swap file disk on faster disks, remember even when you have lots of memory in your VM, windows still tends to create a pagefile about the same size as your internal memory.

So with 4GB your swapfile is around that size too.