Disable virtual memory in Windows 8 is good?

Question

I have an ultrabook hybrid with a SSD (mSata) and HDD working with intel rapid storage and my PC has 6 GB of ram. So I want to know if I can disable virtual memory and what other things should I do to improve the performance of my system?

I´m using Windows 8 with a core i3 u3217.

Answer 1

It's not a good idea to disable virtual memory. The virtual management is a complex process but simplistically Windows only use the virtual memory if there is no "real" memory to allocate, then windows will swap the less used items in the memory to the virtual memory.

So if you have enough memory windows will not use the virtual memory, and will use it only if it need to be used. (This doesn't mean that it will not write anything in the virtual memory, but it won't cause a performance hit.)

But when you disable virtual memory and there is not enough memory for the apps, then you will get app crashes because of the not enough memory.

Answer 2

You can't disable virtual memory. Windows and your applications are always running in virtual memory. The addresses presented to the CPU by programs and by the OS are virtual addresses, not physical. Always.

Deleting the pagefile does not disable virtual memory. (The terminology in the Windows dialog is misleading.) What it does is disable paging to disk for a particular type of virtual memory called "private committed" memory. This will likely cause the other major type, mapped memory, to be paged more than otherwise. This will not improve performance.

Here's a more complete analysis: http://azius.com/blog/why-do-i-still-need-a-pagefile-or-how-can-i-be-out-of-memory/

Answer 3

I am not a Windows expert, and I am telling this purely as a longtime user-of-Windows' perspective.

If you enable virtual memory:

1. A large file (usually 1.5 times of physical memory size) is created at the root directory of the system (usually, c) drive. This file cannot be moved to another drive. If your system drive is a small SSD, and say you have a 16GB memory, this will really bother you.
2. If you minimise a program and restore it after a long time (like several hours later), Windows will read the drive a lot, and the program becomes unresponsive for a while. Possibly, Windows had put all the memory of the program into the virtual memory and tries to restore the memory when activated.
3. Real memory saved from 1 and 2 above may be utilised for file caching. File that was once read can be read super fast from the next time. Notice that, Windows does this whether virtual memory is used or not. It is just there would be more real RAM for this, if virtual memory is enabled. You may or may not notice the effect anyway.

If you disable virtual memory:

1. You will not experience the first two annoyances in the "enable" section.
2. If your RAM usage nears the size of the physical memory, yes "nears" not equals, Windows will constantly show a pop up message saying the system is running out of memory. For example, if you have 1GB of physical RAM and the Task Manager shows about 0.5GB of RAM is used, but Windows may keep showing the warning pop up.
3. If your RAM usage really really nears the physical memory size, the entire system may become really really slow and unresponsive. Applications may crash without apparent reasons.

Other than that, I have not experienced any downside of disabling virtual memory. I think virtual memory technology was invented long time ago when PCs have 8MB or 16MB of RAM (MB not GB). When I was a college student I took an Operating Systems class, and learnt how virtual memory worked. It was a general mechanism, not Windows-specific, though. It may have been useful when PCs had really small amount of RAM, but now anyone can easily afford 16GB on one's desktop. I think virtual memory is not so useful anymore, unless you are using a laptop which has unexpandable 4GB RAM. I personally have disabled it on my PC which has 16GB of RAM.

In your case, if you are 100% sure that your RAM usage will never exceed 5GB (since you have 6GB), go ahead and disable it.