Recently, I was scanning the C drive and I noticed pagefile.sys took up a whopping 32 GB of storage. Now I did some research and found out that pagefile is for virtual memory, which makes Windows 10 use your disk for memory storage. Many oddities arose from this however:
Why is the pagefile 32 GB, I have 32 GB of physical DDR4 RAM and currently not even 5 GB of RAM is used? Normally, the pagefile is around 3-4 GB which is understandable, but what causes it to become so big?
In task manager, it looks like the committed bytes of memory matches the physical + virtual memory. In my case I have 64 GB of ram committed (32 physical + 32 pagefile), does that mean given the right CPU, I can open the same amount of chrome tabs as a 64 GB machine, or is the pagefile sort of useless?
The processes tab on task manager display how much memory each program is using, and while I have researched "task manager memory not adding up", it appears it does add up in the "users" tab, given I am the only user. So how would I find the true amount of memory my PC is using? And, how to make task manager show the "true memory usage" of each program given admin rights? (i.e. processes tab displays 3 GB used, performance tab shows 8 GB, how to reveal that extra 5 gigs in the processes tab?)
What is compressed memory? Why is it so miniscule compared to the actual in use?
You can see, within task manager, the memory section is the most confusing out of all of them.