Stan Brown <
someone@example.com> wrote:
This article
https://www.howtogeek.com/these-windows-background-processes-are-slowly-shortening-your-ssds-lifespan/
suggests eliminating the page file, but I wonder if that's good
advice. I have a 1 TB SSD (broken into six partitions) and 16 GB of
RAM, and my pagefile is 16,384 MB. The system set that, I didn't.
In an admin command prompt, sysdm.cplÿ¯ Advancedÿ¯ Perormanceÿ¯
Advancedÿ¯ Virtual memoryÿ¯ Change says
Minimum allowed 16 MB
Recommended 2904 MB
Currently allocated 16384 MB
I don't do video editing or any other massive jobs that I can think
of.
Any ideas --
1. where Windows came up with that recommendation?
2. Why it's currently got a page file the size of 100% of my RAM?
3. Should I reduce the page file to 2904 MB (or some other value),
eliminate it, or leave it as it is now?
For speed in loading objects and textures, like in video games, some
will store that data in memory, but use the pagefile for storage since
not all objects and textures are needed at once or at the same time. If
there is no pagefile space, they cannot preload their data which means
there are hesitations during gameplay to load that data from files on
the drive (whether SSD or HDD). Some games will fail to start if they
cannot allocate pagefile space to store (prefetch) their data.
Windows will also use pagefile space. If the drives are equal in
performance, like you have 2 HDDs or 2 SSDs, it is best to configure
paging settings to first use pagefile space on the drive other than the
one for the OS partition. For example, use D: for primary pagefile
space when C: is where Windows resides (and those partitions are on
different but equal drives). This allows overlap of page read and
writes across the separate paging files.
I have an SSD with the recommended pagefile space. That does NOT mean
all that storage space is immediately allocated to the pagefile. It
means how much you choose to reserve as a maximum. There is the
recommended size (maximum), and the currently allocation size.
In Task Manager, how much physical RAM is installed, and how much of it
is currently free (unused)? There may be times when you have so many
processes running that you use up the physical RAM, and need to borrow
from pagefile space; else, you'll get warnings about low memory, or even
worse, like extremely slow response of the OS or programs, or crashes.
You won't extend your SSD's lifetime by eliminating pagefile space.
Windows and programs will still use drive storage while they run. A far superior means to extend the lifespan of your SSD is to increase the
amount of unallocated space on an SSD. That gets used for what is
called overprovisioning.
https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-performance/overprovisioning https://www.seagate.com/blog/ssd-over-provisioning-and-benefits/ https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/definition/overprovisioning-SSD-overprovisioning
Many SSD drives come with their own tool to alter overprovisioning, like Samsung's Magician. All they do is facilitate (dumbify) the process of changing the unallocated space on an SSD. You can use any partition
manager to change partition size(s) to create a larger unallocation
portion of an SSD. Overprovisioning uses the unallocated space on an
SSD to reduce write amplification.
Since I have lots of unused space on my SSD even after years of use, I
upped the typical 7% of factory overprovisioning to 20%. Note that overprovisioning is already built into the SSD. It's part of the
storage space that you can never access. It's internal. Unallocated
space on an SSD just lets you add more overprovisioning space. You have
less total space within the partition(s), but your SSD lasts longer.
Consumer SSDs with their internal overprovisioning are designed to last
10 years with the typical write load encountered on end-user hosts.
However, some users incur a lot more writes. Server SSDs are typically configured with 10% internal overprovisioning, but many admins will up
the unallocated space to twice, or more. Depends on how sensitive you
are to reducing the size of your partition(s) to have more unallocated
space to use for overprovisioning that will extend the life of your SSD.
Focus first on increasing overprovisioning space (unallocated) on your
SSD before deciding if you really need the partition space consumed by pagefile, or you can get by with less paging space. Also, instead of specifying a dynamic size for the pagefile, you can specify a fixed
maximum size. Make minimum and maximum the same value. For example,
make both something like 16,384, or 4,096 if you never encounter the OS reporting low memory or none of your games, drawing programs, and
anything memory intensive complaining about lack of pagefile size.
Personally I never use hibernation which writes a hiberfil.sys file onto
your drive. I either shutdown, or leave the computer running 24x7. I
still use power saving options, but not with hibernation or hybrid mode
(which also uses hibernation). With an SSD, the time to resume from hibernation versus powering up afresh is about 7 seconds for my setup,
so I don't need to incur all those writes to the SSD for a very small
decrease in bootup time. Also, you might look into the size of your
dump file (written on a crash if the crash isn't so severe as to
preclude any disk writes). Very few users know how to diagnose the dump
files although there are tools to help interrogate them. Turn off dump logging, or configure to use a mini-dump file (which can still help on
those hard crashes due to, say, video driver issues).
The article mentions SuperPrefetch. I leave it enabled. It is just a
cache of pointers to programs. Lots of folks focus on this cache while completely ignorant of all the other caches used in Windows, or any OS,
like all the MRU (Most Recently Used) caches in the registry (which is
copied from disk files into memory to speed up access to the registry
via the registry API - a database in memory is far faster than opening
and reading disk files).
If you want to see the current size of your SuperFetch files, see:
https://forensics.wiki/windows_superfetch_format/
Also remember that Windows comes with its Indexing Service that is
enabled by default. Maybe you like that feature. Maybe you use
voidtools' [Search]Everything, and don't see the point of the Windows
Index service. I had it disabled until I discovered searching in MS
Outlook (standalone local client) were unusable with Indexing disabled.
By default, the %temp% folder (and other temp folders) are in the same partition on your SSD as is Windows. You might decide to move %temp% to
a different drive, like over to an HDD, but that could impact programs
that make lots of use of repeated writes to temp files. You would
create, say, D:\TEMP, and change the environment variable to point over
there. That other drive could also be an SSD, but could be a smaller
and cheaper one. Similarly, you could move the default Documents,
Pictures, and other user profile folders to another drive; however,
unless you are creating, deleting, and creating again lots of user
files, you don't gain much if anything regarding reduction in SSD write degradation on your SSD drive with the OS partition. Since you should
be saving or moving copies of your documents to other drives, anyway,
either as backups or alternate storage locations, you wouldn't have many
doc files on the OS partition, anyway. It's the writes that degrade
SSDs, not reading, copying, or deleting.
As for the writer of the article you referenced, having a long
experience in documentation does not equate to high knowledge of what
they write. I've worked in several software publisher companies that
had a Documentation department solely dedicated to producing the docs
for the enterprise software (costing many thousand to hundreds of
thousands of dollars). Their job was to accurately and completely
document the software to the customers, but they did not have the
expertise of the Development group in the intracies of the software.
Far too often with articles like this, the authors are regurgitating "information" they found elsewhere, and professing as their own
expertise. They didn't learn, test, or experience the effects (short
and long range) of their suggestions. They collect what others said.
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