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  • pagefile mystery

    From august abolins@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jan 14 20:39:00 2023
    I recently upgraded my T60 XP laptop from a 250GB HDD to a 1TB
    SSD. Reading that that pagefile activity can be a problem for
    SSD drives, I set the page file to "No paging file" and
    rebooted. The report in ControlPanel/ System/ Advanced/
    Settings/ Advanced/ and then VirtualMemory/ Change ..reports
    "No Paging File" "Currently allocated 0"

    NEXT, I deleted pagefile.sys on both of my C and H partitions,
    and rebooted again.

    BUT.. the WTM (Windows Task Manager), Performance tab, still
    shows a live PF Usage graph/activity!

    What gives? Why is there still pagefile activity?

    --
    ../|ug

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From JJ@21:1/5 to august abolins on Sun Jan 15 14:58:52 2023
    On Sat, 14 Jan 2023 20:39:00 -0500, august abolins wrote:
    I recently upgraded my T60 XP laptop from a 250GB HDD to a 1TB
    SSD. Reading that that pagefile activity can be a problem for
    SSD drives, I set the page file to "No paging file" and
    rebooted. The report in ControlPanel/ System/ Advanced/
    Settings/ Advanced/ and then VirtualMemory/ Change ..reports
    "No Paging File" "Currently allocated 0"

    NEXT, I deleted pagefile.sys on both of my C and H partitions,
    and rebooted again.

    BUT.. the WTM (Windows Task Manager), Performance tab, still
    shows a live PF Usage graph/activity!

    What gives? Why is there still pagefile activity?

    The page file provides additional memory type called paged memory. Paged
    memory is designed to be the representation for the page file. Paged memory
    is handled differently than RAM, because it uses disk to emulate memory.

    When the page file is disabled, it doesn't actually disable paged memory handler. It simply changes the emulation of the paged memory to use RAM
    instead of disk.

    Paged memory is needed for the system crash handler (BSOD). BSOD
    preallocates some memory for itself and is hardcoded to use paged memory.
    For software debugging purpose, it needs to be able to keep the contents of
    the memory intact, so that it can dump the state of the memory when the
    crash occurs.

    The BSOD can not and should not dynamically allocate memory as needed
    because that will change the state of the virtual memory handler - which
    will pollute the data since it can be possible evidence or supporting
    evidence for the cause of system crash.

    So, what's shown in Windows Task Manager is inaccurate, since it mentions
    "page file" rather than "paged memory" or anything else other than "page
    file".

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From august abolins@21:1/5 to All on Mon Jan 16 14:29:00 2023
    Hello jj4public!

    ** On Sunday 15.01.23 - 02:58, jj4public wrote to :

    On Sat, 14 Jan 2023 20:39:00 -0500, august abolins wrote:

    What gives? Why is there still pagefile activity?

    [...]

    So, what's shown in Windows Task Manager is inaccurate, since it mentions "page file" rather than "paged memory" or anything else other than "page file".

    Thank you for the explanation. Makes sense. SSDs didn't exist
    when XP was around, so it is no wonder that pagefiling would be
    a coded feature to take advantage of HDD space and enhance the
    perceived expansion of ram.

    It has been 4 days since my successful port of XP to SSD and
    the disabling of the pagefile function.

    Everything has been running quite smoothly. The fan hardly ever
    kicks in now. Ram usage can creep towards my maximum 3GB, but
    sofar nothing really above 2.5GB for any extended period of
    time.

    It feels like my little T60 production machine has a few less
    struggles to bear.

    --
    ../|ug

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)