Hi Dojo,
I believe we cannot delete pagefile.sys file and we can only move it to a different drive or compress its size. Will compressing its size affect a DMA's performance in any way ?
I am asking as I recently observed a scenario where the pagefile.sys has eaten 36G of the disk space and I want to compress it to say 12G. Thanks in advance.
Hi Arunkrishna,
There is a nice article from Microsoft where they describe how the pagefile is handled. As a rule of thumb, the size of the pagefile should be 1.5 times the installed RAM in the server.
However, depending of the load on your system, this value could be higher.
We normally leave the option set to default (page file managed by the OS).
Regarding your question, it is possible but highly not recommended deleting the pagefile.
Instead of moving the pagefile to another partition, as Wim mentioned, it is a good idea to start by checking first what processes are consuming your RAM memory. We could potentially recommend an increment of the RAM memory.
P.S. As described by Michiel in this post, you can monitor the page file size using the Microsoft Platform driver.
When the applications running on your server use more memory than there is physically available, then Windows will use the pagefile.sys file as virtual memory (swap), so that there is enough memory available (physical + virtual) for your applications to keep on running. As this memory is stored on disk, note that this swap memory is a lot slower already than when it can use physical memory (RAM), if the pagefile.sys would be compressed then this will even slow down the performance further. It's recommended to let Windows manage the pagefile.sys.
Instead of changing pagefile settings, investigate the memory usage of the processes running on your server, and consider adding more physical memory (RAM) to your server, so that Windows does not have to store so much memory in the pagefile.sys.
Thank you Wim.
Thank you Miguel.