Windows Pagefile Done Right

Over the years there has been a lot of information on configuring the pagefile, paging has gone through the evolution on what size and configuration it should be. With virtual machine RAM allocation going higher and higher and a lot of guidance from the likes of Citrix and VMware to potentially build VMs with 64GB+ RAM. Paging is a very interesting topic as setting the pagefile size too high, wastes disk space; removing the page file entirely is bad as well as Windows needs to have a pagefile even though we do not want the system to page. Not having a pagefile equates Windows complaining about not having enough virtual memory if the actual memory is fully allocated. While no one wants to page and systems should be built to minimize paging aka allocating enough memory to let folks operate their applications without paging but systems should be configured to allow some sort of paging as a "use in case" measure. Lastly the out of box configuration of a system managed pagefile is also a bad idea.

Setting the pagefile to system managed in an enterprise type of environment is a bad practice. The reason why? If there are any monitoring tools a lot of monitoring tools track pagefile utilization and it is typically tracked as a percentage. If the pagefile is set to system managed and the minimum/maximum are not set, it can result in monitoring tools reporting excessive pagefile utilization.

Setting the pagefile with the old school approach of setting the pagefile 1.5x the size of the memory results in this configuration. We will hear a lot of complaints about wanting to capture some sort of dump for Microsoft to "analyze". When was the last time Microsoft successfully analyzed a dump with meaningful results? For me it has never happened.

Here is what the drives would look like if we for instance allocated 64GB of RAM to a VM and are using the old school approach of 1.5x RAM for the pagefile:

Here is the error in the eventlog when the pagefile is completely eliminated as virtual memory is low:

What is the happy medium? Setting the pagefile to either 4096MB/4GB for both the minimum and maximum on single user operating systems and 8192MB/8GB for both the minimum maximum on multi-user operating systems.

Why is this the happy medium? I checks all of the boxes as it allows for Windows to have a pagefile if needed, it allows for a minidump to be configured/captured/analyzed in Windows if needed and it is not too large that we feel like we are wasting space.

What about memory dumps? Well if there is a need for some sort of memory dump to be captured and analyzed, Windows can be configured to generate a minidump. There are plenty or articles/blog posts out on the internet on how to configure Windows to produce a minidump.

If you have any thoughts, we would like to hear from you in the comments.

Johnny @mrjohnnyma