64 BG RAM, Win 7 & Pagefile size

NO no comment on this ? uummmm well for anyone that has a 128 ssd drive for your OS make sure you have a backup or clone of your drive before you try this as i could potentially be a major PITA as ive just found out and a system restore will not cure the problem

There is no way I would ever let Windows decide the size of my pagefile, that’s far too generic! If MS really new best how to configure this they would not have provided an option to change it. Set it to 1GB and that will be more than enough, in fact Windows will hardly be using it with the amount of Ram you have installed.

you have not turned it off correctly or something… i do this daily its one of the last “tweaks” we do and i watch the size shrink. do you have UAC off?

for yrs i wold have agreed with you and we did manually set it
for audio there is absolutely no reason to NOT let windows 7 manage it choses the right max to begin with…

of course what do i know…

if it aint broke…

however 32-bit OS the recommendation was 1.5 X RAM min and max

yes im running as admin , i just thought id try your advise as my drive had rather a large windows 7 install . Your right if “it aint broke” . i did follow your instructions to the letter in cmd type :powercfg.exe /hibernate off and click enter .Ive sorted it out now ,put the drive back to the original state but lowered the pagefile as for my 16 gig of ram it was a 16gig page file .

anyway all sorted now :wink: believe me i wouldn’t of tried something like that if i didn’t have a clone :smiley:

cheers
john

why not ive got to get them somehow , lifes for experimenting ,hence i didn’t mind mucking up a perfectly good daw to try something new :wink:

OK, got my computer back. I see a 50 gig hiberfil.sys file and a 66 gig pagefile.sys even after turning off hibernation and rebooting.

  1. Can I delete these files?

  2. What is a hiberfil.sys file?

I feel that 66 gigs for a pageile is too large. I will not have room to install all my other software.

UPDATE: When I disabled Hibernation in Windows power management, it did not turn it off and the hiberfil.sys was still there. Once I did it through the command prompt (run as admin) it disabled it and deleted the hiberfil.sys file.

The pagefile is still there but at least I have more free space ( 88 gigs free out of 167)

It seems no mater what I change the virual memory min/max to, it stays the same (around 66 gigs). Even when I disable it, the file is still there and I am not able to delete it.

Sunshy

See if this will work. I haven’t tried it yet as I am at work but found it googling around. According to what I am reading the file should delete on its own if hibernation is turned off correctly. Open a command prompt as administrator (runs as…) and type: powercfg.exe /hibernate off

Let us know!

Sorry didnt see that you had already done that! On the pagefile you can move it to a different drive if you have one to get it off C:.

I may try that. My N6 should be here this week and we’ll see how much additional space it takes up. Can wait to take this baby for a test drive!

I’ve been running Win7 with no page file and hibernation off for the past couple of years and have had no performance issues with Cubase or any other program.

Given some of the comments, maybe I should turn it back on and see if I start to see a performance hit or not.

I’d be interested in:

  1. How you turned it off. I’m not able to in my system. The large page file always remains.
  2. How you would measure performance. Objective tests or subjective observations?

Also, if I move my pagefile to another drive will it slow down my system since my other drive is a sata and not ssd?

If you want to turn off the pagefile see attachment. From control panel open system. With the amount of ram you have I doubt your system is using the pagefile so if you move it to another drive it should not make any difference in your performance.

Thanks for posting the picture. It worked.

As I understand it, a pagefile is only used to write out the contents of least recently used memory pages (blocks) when memory is getting full so that the current program can be fully in memory. You do not need a pagefile if your memory is nowhere near getting fully used because there will be nothing to write out.

Have you checked how much memory is actually being used? Open Resource Monitor and then open a heavy Cubase project and see what is being used.

64GB is a huge amount and is only likely to get anywhere being fully used if you are running samplers in memory resident mode rather than streaming from disk.

I would think that if a 20+GB pagefile is actually required, there might be so much distracting disk activity that DAW performance might be affected.


Note that if you want to upgrade Windows at some time, there will need to be at lease 20GB spare on the OS drive. Also, the \Windows\WinSxS folder ‘fills up’ over time as drivers and devices are installed but not reduced when they are uninstalled. Unfortunately, the size it shows is not real but because it is full of symbolic links to the locations of the real drivers, it only thinks that the folder contains so much. Basically, it can get the the point where the OS thinks that there is not enough room to run an update, even though there really is.

Therefore, with Windows, I would run an OS drive large enough to always have much more than 20GB spare.


FYI: There has been a lot of hype over the years about avoiding using SSDs for pagefiles because all the small writes would prematurely use up an SSD’s write count limits. In actuality, MS’s telemetry has shown that while there a lots of small reads from the pagefile, writes consist of a relately few 1MB blocks. In other words, the writes are saved up in a reserved-memory cache and written out as a large block. MS therefore recommends that SSDs make the perfect pagefile drives.

With 64 gb of ram set your pagefile to 4gb. Leave hibernate off.