hIOmon SSD Performance Monitor - Understanding desktop usage patterns.

[IanB]

The figures tell the story.

You have 8GB of memory, the biggest file you opened in Photoshop was around a quarter of that, yet despite all that spare RAM the system saw fit to dump a piddly 280Mb of data to pagefile - just in case? But this data clearly wasn't needed again, since it only read back in 90Mb tops.

The pagefile activity you showed was totally redundant. The system wastes time using it if it is there, so it's simpler and more efficient to monitor your maximum Commit Charge for your working set of apps and data over time, then make sure your RAM is more than enough to cover that and turn the pagefile off instead.

Plus, anyone who follows the archaic Microsoft dogma of sizing the pagefile as 1.5 x RAM (with large amounts of installed RAM) is a fool who's simply wasting disk space. Just turn off the system error dump since you'll never use it if you do ever bluescreen.


EDIT: I admit, I ran out of memory the other day. But that was a fault with Media Player Classic buffering a large, damaged video when I tried to skip through it. I watched the Virtual Memory Commit Charge spiral out of control in Process Explorer, so it was a bug in Media Player or one of its components, not a fault in my choice of turning off pagefile, since likely it would have continued on to use whatever pagefile I'd provided too and hit the limit of that.

There will always be exceptions, but this doesn't change the obvious best practise that Ao1's example proves.