# Excessive Paging (pagefile.sys)



## vincentw94 (Mar 10, 2012)

Hi,

Recently, I noticed that my computer had heavy disk activity so that the disk light was solid when I was not doing anything particularly demanding. Originally, I thought my anivirus was performing scans, but when disk activity continued for a few hours in a row, I checked the resource monitor in Computer Management and found that the culprit was pagefile.sys (often over 5 MB/sec, sometimes over 10 MB/sec).

I'm not bothered by the disk light, but my hard drive makes loud clicking noises that really annoy me when I'm trying to concentrate. Further, although I have 3GB of RAM installed, my memory usage is almost never above 50%, yet paging activity is quite high. 

I understand how virtual memory works and why it's essential, but I'm confused as to why my computer insists on using virtual memory when I have over 1GB of free RAM, especially since accessing the hard disk is so much slower. Is this typical of a Vista build, or is there something wrong with my system configuration? Any advice would be appreciated.

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System information:
Dell XPS M1530
Windows Vista x32 Service Build 2
3GB RAM


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## LMiller7 (Jun 21, 2010)

I highly doubt you have 1 GB of free RAM. I suspect you are looking at the memory gauge and see 2 GB of memory usage leaving 1 GB. But the majority of this 1 GB is not free but is considered "available", something very different from free. This memory is a kind of cache and s also used by superfetch. Only memory labeled as "Free" is in fact unused.

The pagefile is not used instead of RAM. The way the pagefile is used is really quite sophisticated, far removed from the way it is usually described. The pagefile is used a place to offload rarely used data, leaving the valuable RAM for more important purposes. And when data is first copied to the pagefile it also remains in RAM. If the data is later needed it can be quickly accessed, or, if necessary, it can be reassigned for more important purposes. Using the pagefile actually enhances performance.

Your system may have issues, or it may not. From the description provided it is impossible to tell.


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## jenae (Jun 17, 2008)

Hi, and welcome to the forums. Millers's post is correct, this subject is actually quite complex and a basic understanding can lead you to wrong conclusions.

Try a little detective work open Taskmanager "processes" and click on "view" select "columns" put a check in CPU useage, Memory working set, Memory Private working set,Memory Paged pool, Base Priority.

Click on the header for any of these columns to cascade the view. Use google to discover what they mean.. see if you can find the cause.

Post back if you need more help.


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## shawnpb (May 30, 2010)

Vista is known for moderate disk activity. Worked on Vista machines before all of them did the same.


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