Win11: Pagefile/RAM issue Need help optimizing your system or understanding performance settings?
Win11: Pagefile/RAM issue Need help optimizing your system or understanding performance settings?
Hello, I recently built a new PC about a year ago and have been using MSI Afterburner for benchmarking during gaming sessions. I observed that the pagefile size tends to grow mainly with RAM usage, but it seems unusual since it shouldn't behave this way. In games like Dying Light 2, the pagefile size can spike by as much as 10GB, even when using low or medium settings at 1080p resolution. I've tried everything without success.
Hello, welcome to the forum! It seems there might be some confusion about the pagefile usage. From what I understand, Afterburner could be providing inaccurate data. You might want to check the Task Manager and compare it with the pagefile stats in the Memory section.
In the image, the paged pool size is approximately 400MB. This means the information stored on the page file is around that amount.
Afterburner offers limited insight into pagefile usage and isn't the best tool for this purpose. It aggregates all components into a single figure, treating them as if they were stored in the pagefile alone. This explains why your pagefile appears at 20GB while RAM shows 12GB. In truth, you're likely using only about 500MB of the pagefile. The total values shown in Task Manager are just an approximation, showing the middle row. Pagefile is a dedicated hardware file used by software to keep frequently accessed data, not constantly stored on disk. It depends on the software's requirements—some need more, others less. You generally can't change it, but you should manually set the pagefile size yourself. By default, it matches your RAM, but most systems only require 4–8GB.
With enough storage available, it’s usually better to let Windows handle it, in my view.