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I have a Lenovo W500s Notebook with 16GB RAM, a 250GB SSD and Windows 10 Pro. Until recently it was performing really, really bad. I couldn't believe that this machine runs so bad so I was googling and googling and googling and tried all possible and popular system optimizations out like disabling services, removing unnecessasry software, tuning energy settings, setting the nVidia physX processor to the dedicated graphic card... nothing worked until I found an article on reddit suggesting reducing the system virtual memory to a fixed size recommended by the system itself.

fixed-paging-file

Since then I no longer recognize my notebook because everything works so smoothly. There are no lags when scrolling webpages, applications start immediately, windows checks for updates within seconds and not minutes, Visual Studio 2017 runs and starts so fast that I almost think it's not the same machine.

I wonder why is this so? Why does Windows work so much better now then before while having a 8GB self-managed paging file? Why does everyone keep the myth alive that it's better to let Windows manage this file itself and what wonders me most is why Windows uses a paging file much, much larger then the Recommended size even though it slows it down?

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  • Most likely? You ran into a weird bug or edge case in Windows. But there's nowhere near enough data in your question to guess why.
    – Bob
    Aug 12, 2017 at 11:07
  • @Bob what other data should I provide?
    – t3chb0t
    Aug 12, 2017 at 11:08
  • Mostly along the lines of actual memory usage (physical - RAMMap; virtual - Process Explorer or Task Manager, commit vs resident/private) while the issue occurs. And more description of the symptoms. Maybe the disk usage/free space, maybe a disk benchmark. But this kind of thing tends to be better suited to interactive troubleshooting (e.g. I'd go step by step based on relevance rather than requesting all of that info at once), and therefore not the best fit for Q&A in the first place.
    – Bob
    Aug 12, 2017 at 11:24
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    My best guess is that your previous page file was highly fragmented and the new one isn't. When Windows manages your page file, it is extended piecemeal each time the swap requirement reaches the current size, a recipe for fragmentation. Your page file is quite small, so from time to time you should check the amount of swap used when the system is busy. You definitely don't want to run out of swap space.
    – AFH
    Aug 12, 2017 at 11:39
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    A similar thing can happen in Linux (but can be tuned via vm.swappiness). It would seem that having a smaller paging space has forced optimizations of the swapping algorythm making it more conservative about what pages it swaps out - which means less memory cache is available, but what is available is faster.
    – davidgo
    Aug 12, 2017 at 20:11

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