Windows 10: Mutant pagefile (it jumped to a different partition all by itself)

Hello guys.

I am running w10 x84 10586.63

Two days ago I have found out that pagefile.sys has automagically moved from c drive to d drive and it is 8GB in size now (amount of physical ram).

Anyway, what I want to know is why the pagefile was moved to a different partition.

My hard disk just has got two partitions (MBR style)

C: System drive, 50 GB -> 23,2 GB free
D: Data drive 425 GB -> 223 GB free

I have double checked and pagefile is still set to "auto-manage by Windows".

Any ideas?

:)

 

Windows created temporary paging file...

Create a fixed page file of 2 gb on your C partition and a fixed 14 gb page file on any other internal drive. You could put the larger pagefile at the beginning of the drive in a dedicated pagefile partition to eliminate defragmentation if it is a conventional
(not SSD) drive.

 

Windows 10 pagefile.sys

Hello!

About all I can say is, if this were XP, I would do the following if I had multiple hard drives (at least one more besides the one that has the Windows OS partition on it):

1) I would move my entire pagefile onto a secondary hard drive and off the C:

2) Defrag C:

3) Move the pagefile off the secondary drive and put it back on C:, this should resolve the specific issue you are trying to correct.

Here are the potential issues:

1) The secondary hard drive goes out in the process of doing this and your system will not work

2) Theoretically, a pagefile that is one contiguous file on the hard drive should reduce the seek time when the system needs to swap something in RAM with something stored in the pagefile. But, you may lose any speed gains to the fact that the pagefile
is now further away from the beginning of the disk than it was. However, I'm not sure if that is true.

3) If you don't mind flying loose and fancy free with your data, you can always just move the pagefile to some other disk and leave it there. The above procedure was suggested as a means of speeding up the computer for gaming by sharing the seek/writes
between multiple disks. But if you are going to do that, you might as well set up a RAID.

One option I have considered is partitioning the hard drive in a similar manner that I've seen Linux does in that you'd create a separate partition on the hard drive just for the pagefile, and nothing else. Preferably, in the case of an MBR formatted drive,
between the reserved system partition and the Windows OS partition (C. I haven't actually done this, just considered. Main thing would be to create a disk partition that is large enough to hold the entire pagefile with a little extra space as buffer.

That said, I really don't know how much you will actually gain versus what could go wrong. Anyone else have a suggestion?

 

General advice is it is better to have pagefile on another drive to system drive if possible.

You are probably set up to have a pagefile on each drive. Windows will normally try to use the pagefile on the least used partition which is normally NOT the one on the c drive.

Sounds to me as if it is working as it should.

Optimize the Paging File in Windows 7/8/8.1

 

For best performance the pagefile should be on the most active partition (because that is where the heads will be most of the time) of the least active physical disk (to minimize competition with other disk access). With only one drive it should be on the same partition as the OS. But with only a 50 GB system partition that could be a problem.

Post a screenshot of the pagefile configuration dialog.

 

What kind of "why" is this? Why is it allowed? Or why did Windows decide to do that?

As for "why it is allowed"... By default all your drives are set up for "System managed" page file. Which means that there's nothing unusual in additional pagefiles appearing on any of your drives or one pagefile jumping from drive to drive. If you want to prevent this from happening you have to go to advanced system settings and manually configure your drives for pagefile.

As for "why Windows decided to do that"... Apparently Windows came to conclusion that relocating the file will improve paging performance. There's no way to say anything specific without knowing more of your setup. Is C: and D: the same physical drive or not?

 

Here:

 

This is only partly true if you have multiple drives on one physical drive and if an hdd, and even then not always true depending on how congested drive is as pagefile could get badly fragmented.

If drives are physically separate it is better to have multiple pagefiles.

Either way, it is best to let windows choose.

For SSDs it does not matter if in same or separate partition, although it is considered by some pagefile should not even be on ssd to minimise number of write cycles.

 

At the same time, it is considered by some that the primary purpose of SSD is to host the page file and thus improve swapping performance. For which reason a good system setup would marry these two viewpoints by relying on two physically separate SSDs: one for system, programs and other non-changing data and another one for page files, search indexes and various volatile caches.

 

I disabled "let Windows manage all drives automatically" and forced the pagefile on C (fastest partitition). Flushed prefetch folder and the pagefile returned to its normal recommended size (1,8 GB). Now it's 8GB again. This is driving me crazy. Maybe I have a memory leak somewhere. According to task manager everything seems fine though.





I think I am not bothering anymore. I have enough free space to accomodate an 8GB pagefile.

 

Agreed - easy enough on a pc, but less easy on a laptop, but frankly I have had an ssd for several years with pagefiles on it and according to my health checks ssd still has 98% space useable (and not sure if that 2% was made unuseable by excessive writes). On this basis, I will expire before drive does.

I will just replace ssd if it ever decays to a point it is an issue.

 

My advice for people with modern hardware and 8gb of ram or over is to simply turn pagefile off. I have done this and have had no issues so far.