I read conflicting reports about whether it is safe or a good idea or a bad idea to delete/turn off the pagefile.sys file. Some have claimed that if you have enough RAM (I have 4 GB in a Vista system) to go ahead and get rid of it, others say it will cause instability and lockups.

What is the consensus here? My pagefile.sys file is 3.29 GB on an 80 GB drive.

tanstaafl.

Do not turn it off. Some apps will just not deal well with it, and others may allocate enough memory to want a bit of swap even with 4GB. The imaginary boost in performance just isn't worth potential hassles it may bring by being off.

Looks like Windows 7 set mine to 2GB, or possibly I set it manually, can't remember. This is on a system with 14GB of total RAM.

On the OS X side, the system has allocated 128MB to swap space on it's own, even though I still have 6.91 GB of completely idle RAM.

Hun? How/why do you have a desktop with 14GB of RAM? My mind boggles at that!

Short answer: Mac Pro systems have 8 memory slots. I filled them up with cheep low capacity DIMMs. System shipped with 2 1GB sticks, and 2GB sticks fill the rest of the slots.

Long Answer: Bought this Mac Pro in 2008 when they came out, with dual quad core processors. It's been my first desktop since 2002, as I went laptop only for a while. I wanted something crazy fast to see how long I can make it last before feeling the urge to upgrade. With more things going multicore enabled now, the timing seemed right to do it. Sure, I spent a decent chunk of change up front (though not that much more compared to getting some crazy prebuilt gaming box), but overall I think my total cost of ownership of a computer is going to come in lower then cutting corners and having to upgrade sooner. The system is 2.5 years old now, and still exceeding my demands by far. I have to admit, it's really nice to be playing a demanding game, and still have enough idle CPU power left over to transcode videos in the background to sync to my iPad.

As for the RAM, I had initially gone to 6GB. Then a coworker who sold his 2008 quad core Mac Pro to get a 2009 dual quad sold me 8GB of ram for cheep. It's been nice to have, as the OS just caches so much of the files I deal with in RAM, so the hard disks don't get a chance to slow down the computer much. When I'm not using the system, it goes into sleep mode, preserving the cache. Wake on Demand in OS X 10.6 also means the system can be woken by my iPad when I want to transcode a video by simply opening the AirVideo program I use. That works if I'm at home on the local network, or out and about on 3G.

Oh, and if 14GB boggles the mind, what about 2TB? I noticed HP is preparing to ship a DL980 server, with 8 processor sockets capable of 8 core Xeons, so up to 64 processing cores. 128 DIMM slots with 16GB DIMMs = 2 TB of RAM.

At work, we have moved all the programming staff to 12GB systems, and the increase in their productivity is pretty impressive. Between that and an SSD, they've gone from staring at link progress while browsing the web on a secondary machine, to having a single machine stay usable while they compile. Compile times in general were cut down to 1/5th of where they used to be under Windows XP 32 bit and 3.something GB of RAM.

We're on 12GB of RAM, but I might steal your anecdote to justify SSDs. We use Raptors at the moment.

The other key piece I should mention is Incredibuild. We had it on the old systems, and it was ok, but didn't show a huge improvement. Now that the systems have quick random access I/O, they can keep the remote machines busy, along with local compile tasks running well. Standalone builds did also show decent improvements moving from hard drives to SSD. We went with the Intel X25-M series. While not the fastest raw read or write on the market, they are still one of the best in the 4k read and write benchmarks. The X25-E series were also tried, but we didn't see much of a noticeable boost with them compared to the M series to justify the cost increase.

Right. Further investigation supports your assertion. However, there is another option which I took: move pagefile.sys off of the system drive as described here and onto a data drive. (There are a lot of interesting performance-enhancing ideas on that website). I went one step further and split it into two files, one on my D: drive and one on my E: drive. This gave the [theoretical] advantage of speeding up swapfile activity and freeing up space on my small system drive. In addition, I moved the Windows search index off of the C: drive and onto the D: drive. I now have a quite happy 30+ GB of free space on my system drive and supposedly a better performing computer as well. Once the defragging w/reorganization finishes, I'll see if I can tell any difference.

tanstaafl.

Unless it's a physically different disk, as opposed to a different partition on the same disk, that won't make any difference. That said, I know that you do have multiple drives, so it's likely that you did do that, as opposed to most people who just have one drive.

Also, the primary reason that you don't want to disable the page file is:

The OS uses RAM to cache files on disk for speedy access. The page file is used to write idle memory out to disk to provide for more available RAM. The idle memory is from things you're not using. The files it caches are files that you are using. If you disable the page file, you're preventing that idle memory from being written to disk, which means that you're preventing data that you are using from being cached (as much).

This is not true if you never need more memory than your have RAM. In that case, it could speed up switching to an idle application, as it might have aggressively paged that application's memory out to make more room for file caching. But that's likely to be an odd scenario.

I have a new desktop system after 10 years of owning only laptops, and more or less for the same reasons as Drakino I decided to build a powerful one. I have 12 GB and an Intel X25-M SSD. Just as a test, as I myself could not decide whether the disabling pagefile.sys ideas out there would actually make sense, I decided to get rid of it and see what happened. So far, after three months of usage, I had no lockups or issue with any software I am using (Mostly PS CD5, Office 2010, Starcraft II, other shareware, some MP3 encoding, internet browsing etc.).

As a side note, I have to say that the SSD brings in mind-blowing performance boosts. I still find them too expensive, but I am really impressed at what difference it makes in everyday usage. That, and 12 GB ram, make my last PC the most impressive new PC, in terms of perceived speed, I have ever assembled (which I've been doing periodically for friends, over the years).

So, to sum up, so far the absence of pagefile.sys from my system has been flawless, but I would not know if beneficial at all, in the first place.

I should read some at the site you linked, but it just occurred to me that putting swap onto a thumb drive might be useful... Of course, you couldn't ever remove it.

Thats called ReadyBoost and not actually that useful if you have a decent amount of RAM. I found it made QuickTime buggy as well for some unknown reason.

Don't these kind of questions stem from the old macOS. Where, if one disabled VM, there was a definite speed boost?

You just had to live withing your available ram.

Back in the Windows 3.1 days the trick was to get a system with a lot of RAM and make a RAMdisk to put the swap file on. It made Windows 3.1 boot laughably fast. That trick doesn't apply anymore though.

Thanks, tman!
I dropped a spare 1GB SD card into the slot on my tablet (limited to 2GB RAM max) and configured it for ReadyBoost. I think it helped a little bit.
I have an SSD waiting to go into this little beast, but for the meantime the ReadyBoost will be fun to play with.