Windows 10: The size of pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys

Hello,


I run my C: drive on a relatively small 110 GB SSD so space is limited on this drive. A few months ago I upgraded my RAM from 8 to 16 GB. Ever since then, I saw that the space on my C: drive was slowly shrinking. Curious about what was taking all the space, I installed a third party file indexing app and saw that 2 files were taking more space up than any other file that I had known. These files are: pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys. Their sizes were as of writing this 13.6 GB and 6.6 GB respectively. These two are taking so much storage and my computer tends to slow down a lot when my SSD's free space goes under 20 GB or so. These files are quickly getting larger and I am afraid that they are going to fill up my C: drive. I know the files are for storing excess memory but is there any way that I can limit their size?



Thanks.

:)

 

Limit Size of Hiberfil.sys?

It's a real shame Microsoft hasn't redesigned their implementation of hibernation to be modern and less restrictive.

Being forced to have hibernate file on the same drive as the kernel executable really sucks. Linux has been well beyond that limitation for over a decade now.

The best part is, Linux uses it's swapspace as it's hibernate file as well, which would be roughly equivalent to Windows using the same file for hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys, while being able to locate it anywhere, even over the network *Huh.

 

Limit Size of Hiberfil.sys?

While you can reduce the size of the hiberfil.sys, doing so increases the odds that hibernation will fail and you will lose your complete session when your laptop hibernates. If you want to take that chance, then follow DavidE's advice.

 

Limit Size of Hiberfil.sys?

When a computer goes into hibernation it saves the contents of all non free memory (typically that would be most of it) to hiberfil.sys. Recovering from hibernation reverses the process. Memory contents is compressed but there is no way of knowing ahead of time how successful that will be. Some types of data compress very well while others hardly at all. A hiberfil.sys file 40% of RAM size is usually sufficient but there can be unusual situations where it is not. Unfortunately, by the time this is discovered it is too late to back out of the hibernation process and it must fail.

For fast startup only the system portion of RAM is saved but applications are terminated as in a normal shutdown. This saves quite a bit of time over hibernation and requires a smaller hiberfil.sys.