Submission details
Paging file/swap/virtual memory forced to be too high
Page file (swap) is still way too large in Windows 7.
According to their own blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/03/13/a-f...s-from-beta-to-rc.aspx ; "26. Pagefile reduction") page file is 100% larger than available RAM installed in computer.
Which means that a 12GB RAM will trigger 24GB swap file (?!). Worst of all, Windows always used swap even if it had a lot of free RAM available, so giving it more space to play is just WRONG!
In the same blog I've suggested following:
Windows should be monitoring user expirience all the time since the first boot, and set page file to the peak value of that Windows install (ever). So if I have 4GB RAM, and I never used more than 3GB it should stay zero (and force RAM-only). Or if I constantly use 3GB, and once upon a time I've peaked to 5GB, swap should be 1GB.. ok, maybe +100MB to make things safer (remember, I have 4GB installed). And for those trying to run Win7 on 512MB RAM machine, make a minimum swap of 1GB. Even this is overly generous IMHO, but much better than having office computer with 2GB RAM that never gets over 1GB, and yet still having 2GB swap for nothing. Not to forget that somehow Windows uses swap even when there is still free RAM, instead never using swap untill RAM is filled completely. Dooh!
You want a scheme? OK, here:
<1GB RAM - swap has to be 1GB minimum
>1GB RAM #1 - Windows monitors peak memory usage and does calculation "peak_memory_used - available_RAM + 100MB = page_file_size"
>1GB RAM #2 - when peak memory is never over RAM available - use RAM only and make page file ZERO
OK, now this solves the problem, doesn't it? Much nicer than having the "one rule to fit them all", specialy since those people with 512MB RAM will have no use of having just 512MB page file anyway. And I trully believe that people with 4GB RAM rarely need 8GB total for runing their applications.
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